It was about this time last year that the first news of my father’s illness came to me. I was in a workshop, semi-secluded, when the call came from my sister that Dad was in ER. We were days away from a certificate of occupancy on The Vicarage, coordinating a move from a storage unit and a house, three cats, two cars, and a mountain of little things to finish before we could hang a hanger. I raced frantically toward the hospital, 90 minutes from the workshop to find out that our lives would be completely altered henceforward.

From then onward, until he passed 11 weeks later, it was a steady stream of days on the road, staying at his house, taking care of cats, Dad, bills, finances, and a whirlwind of legal and ethical and financial questions that I wasn’t at all sure of. I don’t think that I’ve seen anyone, short of Doyle’s mother Anna Marie, go to that long home with affairs in any sort of order. I don’t think my father’s affairs were a mess – but still… finding his first divorce certificate (he was married to a woman ten years before mom?) buried in his enlistment and discharge military papers was a bit of a shock. I knew he was in the Navy but also the Air Force? And why he never signed up for Veteran’s Benefits, I may never know. Not really. I digress. The physical stuff is, for the most part, finished. A few loose ends.

But here we are, a year from the onset, and I struggle a lot more inwardly now, with my own mortality. You are flooded with offers of grief assistance and counseling when a loved one passes, especially if there was hospice care. Quite honestly, I don’t think you need it then. I think the day to day shouldering of dealing with the messy materialism consumes you. It’s easy to push everything aside until you’ve dotted the last I and crossed the last T. Push. Push. Push. Until, really, you slow down and start thinking about your own mortality. You start to think about how your body is failing you, not doing what it used to do, or that it’s maybe something wrong with you, you’d better check it out. You think about the pain and suffering you saw and start applying it to your own short remaining years on earth. It’s not that I dread death. It’s the dying part that is messy. I think the grief counseling is something you should do six months after a loved one dies, not right then. I don’t need to be pulled off a cliff and I’m not sure that most people do. I need to be saved from the quicksand of my own mind later on.

I recently attended that same workshop again, with people that I love and cherish. There’s a lot of talk about mortal existence and how we live our life. How we live our life. How we think about our day to day, the choices that we make, the equality that we all have, the toleration for others and dealing with the oppressors of freedom and truth. We talk about things far greater than ourselves and how we, as small specks of humanity can help further the progress of humanity. Working on perfecting humanity. These are a lot of words to think about, when you think about death and dying, and how short our lives here really are.

It’s also hard to think about those things when your ankle hurts or you sprained your wrist doing the dishes, or maybe when you wake up from a bad dream, something you can never remember from your youth. It’s easy to get caught up in the physical and emotional pain of living. I think this is how most of the world works, living day to day, thought to thought with the ideas never really rising above the surface for a bit of fresh air. These workshops remind me that there is more, and there are better goals we can all achieve. If I can get out of my own way. The physical pain is generally temporary. The angst of living an unlived life, I think, is probably far greater. I don’t want to be that person. I used to say I don’t want to regret anything when I die. I’ve learned that we will all regret something. It’s about minimizing those regrets that seems most important. Have I done all in my power to make the world a better place? Even if I have to take Advil to do it?

Spring seems like the perfect time to pull yourself out of the mire of a year’s worth of mourning. A year’s worth of inward focus on pain and suffering. It seems like it’s time to take a little joy from the flowing Bleeding Hearts or the small bit of green that shows on my hydrangea. I saw a hummingbird for the first time today, whizzing past my window to land on our feeders we just put out. The house is settling, the mourning is settling. Perhaps it’s time I did, too, and just enjoy the warmer days, the beautiful green trees, and the fact that I have the opportunity to wake up and work on the world, aches, pains, and all. Take the days while they are here, because the Night comes when not one of us can continue to work.