The Lives of Others.

I miss him.  It's not like I saw him very often, so there are moments where it doesn't seem like anything has even changed.

I remember getting the phone call.  It's not like his death was unexpected.  He spent years suffering.  Drowning.  Dying.

I've never had the luxury of needing anyone.  My mother never had the luxury of raising a dependent woman.  She herself never had the luxury of being one.

Maybe if I had needed him more, I would have visited more.  But I believe, and I could be completely wrong... and totally off base, but maybe had I needed him more, maybe, he would have respected me just a little less.

I don't get the opportunity to write much anymore.  I spend my days on a truck, I spend my evenings in class, and when I get a moment free...  I spend my time at the gym.

Life hasn't slowed down one bit since his passing.  

My kids are getting older.  I'm getting older. Things are more complicated.

I'm employed full time as an EMT and in school full time for my paramedic.  I'm now raising 4 children.  One so very much like me, that in those moments of complete and total frustration, I'm forced to flash back to his face...  and it must have looked identical to the one I'm sporting in that moment.

He didn't get to see how things turn out.  I'm still not certain what the finish line even looks like, but regardless...  he won't see mine. 

I guess that's the design of this whole flawed system though.  It's like a story game you play in grade school where you write a paragraph and someone else gets to finish your story.  You have no guarantee how the whole thing is going to turn out.  It could be total crap for all you know, but you do your best to guide them with your words and actions.  You're honest about your expectations and lay out the consequences for a total crap ending, but when all is said and done...  you only get one chapter...  all the other chapters are to be written by someone else.

I'm doing my best to write a chapter worth reading.  For as Pericles says:

"What you leave behind is not what
is engraved in stone monuments,
but what is woven into the lives of others."