My dad

Today, or perhaps yesterday, is the second anniversary of my father passing away. My uncertainty about has nothing to do with existential detachment. I got the news on the 16th and there's a time difference. The shock jangled my nerves too.

I've been thinking about how there's an element of cognitive dissonance to how we miss the dead. I miss my dad, but we weren't as close as either of us would have liked, I think. It's the weary trope of there always being enough time to put it right until suddenly there isn't. He was a kind, generous man, but stubborn and difficult too sometimes. I love him, but no one is perfect, and the people we care most about are also the most likely to frustrate and hurt us even inadvertently.

When considering a missed someone, you never go on to think of the times they annoyed you. I'm not sure if a fair and balanced memory of the dead is valuable or good, but as I'm forever interested in the difference between perceptions and the real world, I think about this.

Also in connection with Dad's death I think about narrative. I still haven't constructed a satisfactory one around that period two years ago. Narrative, I'm convinced, is the name we give to how our minds order and emphasize certain events of our lives so we can glean meaning from them and their relationships to each other. We may gain simple cause-and-effect truisms, complicated rules to live by, or subtly themed and constructed models of how the world works from which we can deduce yet more. Whatever you gain, events in my life - in particular painful ones (those we should most urgently learn from I suppose) feel oddly un-finished until such a time as I've successfully created a narrative to fit them in.

I'm still feeling a bit shell-shocked from the events of two years ago insofar at least as the events still form more of a litany than a narrative. Noel begat Daniel, but what am I to learn from how and why Noel died?

Well, I got a bit further abroad on this topic than I planned, and I'm really alright so don't all start calling unless it's something to do with the theoretical topics I'm nattering on about. Love to the people who know who they are.