Wow. Amazing to find this thread now. Rustic Rebel, my heart goes out to you. I'm going to grieve a little myself, here, too, if you don't mind. I had been intending to, anyway, but this is more appropriate. Thank you, RR.

Tonight, I can't sleep because tomorrow I testify in the trial against the terrorist regime that killed my father lo these 20 years ago, back in the very first car-bombing of one of our embassies, this one by Ayatollah-following, Syrian-trained, Moslem Lebanese, who later began calling themselves (well, the group, not the individuals) Hezbollah. (Somewhere, there is a thread about his death and what it was meaning to me on one of the anniversaries. Somewhere else is a thread about the trial.)

This evening was the prep session with the lawyers, and I had just been talking to one of my sisters about feeling that I was all cried out about this, what with the first part of the trial (where we sat in the audience and cried and cried and cried), and 9-11 (after which I went to a candlelit vigil and just cried and cried and cried, and people would bring me candles when mine burned down, I love my town), followed 6 months later by the terrible drunk-driving death of my favorite and eldest niece just after her 20th birthday, on MY birthday... perfectly unbruised, with seat belt and air bag, she hit a tree so hard she shredded her brain into separate pieces inside her unmarked skull, and her parents had to decide whether to pull the plug and then wait for her to suffocate after they did, which took days in both cases, it was horrible. So I thought I'd be OK in the deposition. But no, just telling them about the same things I've told others about, I couldn't not cry and cry. I cried about Dorian again too. At the same time this weekend, we had to put Mom back in the hospital yesterday, she got out of rehab in mid-January after 6+ weeks on a respirator not recovering well from her massive heart surgery (there is a thread about that, too). Since she's been home her feet have been swelling so much the skin was cracking, and now she has terrible infections in her feet and all the skin has come OFF and she is in so much pain she can't stand or walk and the home help wasn't enough any more, and the skin started coming off her knees and elbows and any place that cloth rubbed her, and and *I'm* the one who got (what a treat, right) to call 911 and spend 7 hours in the ER with her trying to get her admitted while they wouldn't bandage her feet till everyone saw them and the AIR was hurting so much she was actually weeping, and she a holocaust survivor and all. So it's been a fun weekend thinking about and talking about death.

The main thing, I think, is that being atheists, we all believe that death is IT. There will be no more Daddy, no more beautiful Dorian, and Mom will suffer through this end all by herself, and then there will be no more Mom either. That makes the memory of the dead person, the survivors' memories of them I mean, critically important. I understand cultures that prohibit speaking the name of the dead to protect the living from their shades, or chindi, or whatever... it was well over a decade after Daddy died that I could have his name pop up in conversation and not burst into tears. I found out in the deposition that even my sister the lawyer, the most grown-up of all of us, still tries to take the 18th of April off every year - I certainly do, I spend the whole day thinking about how awful it is. BUT I also spend every August 16th, which was Daddy's birthday, thinking about how great he was, what a great father he was, how great my childhood was growing up in Africa because of him, and so on. It balances my year out - I mean, I *think* of him, and of him being dead, every single day. There is always something I'd like to tell him, or ask him. But I *concentrate* on building his memory twice a year, with the life-affirming stuff in the Fall, as the year is waning, and the death-resisting (defying? Resenting?) part in the Spring, as the year is growing again. It feels right to me that way. And since a fellow catter told me about the Beirut memorial in Jacksonville, NC, every other year when I go to NC to go to the beach, I drive by there and my twins and I put roses under the word Peace in the phrase They came in peace that is carved into it, and put roses on one of the 17 pear trees the town planted for the civilians in Dad's bombing (the memorial is more about the Marines).

Meanwhile I resent tremendously that Mom is having to go through these throes alone, instead of with Dad at her side, where he would likely still be, they were only getting closer after 30 years of marriage, and his parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts all lived to be well into their 90's, Uncle Will was hit by a bus at 96, Aunt Bea thumped a would-be mugger on the head with her umbrella and when he fell down in surprise SAT on him till the cops came - at 98 - and still lived to be 100 and a half. Dad was ROBBED. WE were robbed. All our kids were robbed. Death may be natural and all but premature death BITES. I guess that's what I think about it.

I'll tell you more after the trial tomorrow, if you like. RR, you hang in there, and talk about your friends as much as you can - that is all you have left now, the memories, they will have to suffice. I hope they are good ones, sounds like it, tell a lot of stories about them. I heard a new one about Daddy just tonight, a memory of my eldest sisters, probably from before I was born, of Daddy trying to play Superhero with them and diving theatrically onto the bed... which promptly broke under him, which they all thought was much more funny than he did. That is exactly the kind of thing I remember about him. We haven't gotten to the happy stories about Dorian stage yet, but I'm looking forward to it.