More for today, August 8th

Well, after staring at the date all day today, it hit me. Today is the 42nd anniversary of my father's death. He died on August 8th, 1963. I was 6 years old (yeah, whatever, do the math) and I barely knew him.

It surprised me, actually, that I don't think about him that often. In fact, rarely. My last memory of him was seeing him from the parking lot of St. Margaret's Hospital, framed by the window of his room on some upper floor. He was small and vulnerable-looking, and that was the closest they would let me get to him. At that time, children weren't allowed to visit in the hospital at all. You had to be at least over the age of 12 to get in to see your loved ones. I had to stand in the parking lot to get my last glimpse of my dad.

Kids weren't even allowed at funerals. Well, they were, but the mentality at the time was to leave the kid home and let him or her deal with it in therapy 20 years later. I guess this kind of hits home for me because my boss passed away this summer after a long and amazing fight against mesothelioma. He was a dad, too. He had a few more years with his daughter than my dad had with me. But even so, it's never easy for the ones left behind.

Rather than wandering down the path of "Gee, I wonder what happens when you die" in this entry, I'll just say this: I hope that whatever a person believes is going to happen to him or her after death really happens. If they believe they'll see Jesus, then I hope they do. If they believe they go to sleep, never to awaken, then, I hope that happens too. Death, after all, should not be the final disappointment.