Homesick

Today outside the weather is gloomy and gray.  Sometimes I welcome this weather with open arms.  Today is different.  In a while I will be attending a funeral of a very dear friend of our family and this weather on days such as today makes me sad. Two very beautiful girls are without their daddy and and their mother who is like a sister in my family is without the man that was everything to her.  It makes me so sad and breaks my heart for them.  The loss of anyone is so hard and it's difficult to go on with with your own life when someone is gone from yours. 

It took me a good year to get to the place where I accepted my dad being gone.  For so much of his last few years alive he would go on trips to Mazatlan with his friends and stay for a while.  The denial of him dying told myself to believe that he was just on a trip.  The truth is though that he was on a trip and it was to a destination that would be the most beautiful and I feel in my heart that my dad is in heaven.  He is an angel who watches over me and all of our loved ones.  I hope that one day I will see him again in heaven standing with all the ones we have lost.  Still I wish that he was here with us.  Some days I need him so much and I just want to go to where he is buried in Riverside and be there to be close to him.

But then I realize that the body that was once my Father was his shell and through it he showed us all love.  Once people are no longer with us they leave their bodies and their souls are what goes to another place.  I remember during the week after my dad dies, the funeral home called me at work one day.  They called to tell me that my father had been cremated.  Suddenly I felt sick and I started crying.  He really was gone.  I would never see him again.  That is when the reality really set in.  On the day my dad was buried I was the one who put that little box that carried his ashes into the ground.  Once very long ago the ashes in this box was a human body of someone who was my everything.  Someone who loved me through good times and bad and who would go to any length to protect me be it from nightmares as a child to a broken heart or anything else I endured.  How could that big wonderful man fit in this tiny cardboard box with a number and his name on it.  I have heard in life that the hardest thing is letting go and I knew that day that was true.  The hardest thing was letting go of that box and putting it in the ground forever.

My dad always said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes spread in the mountains.  This was big for him because he was afraid of heights and it was to be his final resting place, a sort of overcoming of his fears.  I feel guilty because as his daughter I did not honor that wish.  My way of thinking was that I too, am afraid of heights and throwing what was left of my daddy over the side of a mountain would have been like me throwing this man I loved off something he was so afraid of.  I also wanted to have a place where I and others who loved him could go to visit him,  I wanted somewhere to go to talk to my dad and find solace on days like today.  I hope the angel that is him will understand.

There's a song I listen to that goes like this...

"I close my eyes and I see your face, If home's where my heart is than I'm out of place
Lord won't you give me strength to make it through somehow, I've never been more homesick than now"

How true those words are.