Processing my dad’s death is like how imagine it is to ride a roller coaster (I say imagine because I don’t ride roller coasters). The ups and downs, the feeling of celebration in one second followed by confusion or something like fear in the next. I suspect that anyone who has experienced the death of someone close knows what I mean.

I’m back home in Seattle and spent yesterday with my mom, along with my brother Steve who is up from the Bay Area, working on those menial transition tasks that you don’t really think about before someone dies (like how the credit cards were all in my dad’s name). I spent a couple of hours connected to his email account unsubscribing him from the many mailing lists he followed. Each click of an unsubscribe link had a little pang of pain, like I was deleting part of my father’s reality from the present. But it also brought a feeling of clarity, like removing a veil that allows me to better see his true essence.

See what I mean? Roller coaster.

I’m adjusting back to the Seattle timezone which after being in France for a couple of weeks takes some doing. As such, I get tired at odd hours and am wide awake at others, like 2am Seattle time (11am in France). This past night, at 2am when I was wide awake, I remembered a fabulous video that Emerald Downs made of my dad in 2017. I looked for it and found it on YouTube and am embedding it below. Playing it, it’s the first time I’ve heard my father’s voice since he died.

That’s another of those roller coaster moments, believe me.