up, down, love & loss, a tear in the fabric

hardly a day goes by that i don't think of my dad

it's been more than a year, and the pain doesn't rip through me any more, but it's not dull either. it can be acute and, the hardest thing perhaps, it comes on me when i don't expect it.

watching a doco on beethoven the other day, the narrator commented he was quick to offence, quick to hurt, quick to anger, but generous and loving. and hearing it made me think of dad, and when they showed beethoven dying, i mourned and cried.

walking down the street i remembered a video of my dad carrying my nephew on his shoulders, singing and dancing - i don't know what triggered it. sometimes images, memories just appear, conjured from a thought, a smell, a glimpse. a tear in the fabric of time.

the other day in a shop near china town, i browsed the colourful figurines and bits and pieces, things i only understand by their surface colour and texture. i picked up a wad of hell money (after-life money; wikipedia tells me that missionaries telling chinese that they would go to hell when they died if they didn't convert to christianity was understood as going to the afterlife ... no problem, they knew that already)

but hell money isn't something you should leave lying around, it shouldn't be used for decoration even though it is quite exquisitely lovely. it should be hidden until you need it, and then burnt for the dead.

ancestor worship. i'm not comfortable with worshipping ancestors.

i spent my early years paying my dad enough obeisance, i don't think i need to do more now

last weekend, i read a review of a book called Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir. the book is by psychologist kay redfield jamieson and it is an account of her grief at the death of her husband. according to the review, poignantly titled a wife's voyage to the farthest shore of grief, she looks at grief and contrasts it to depression because as well as being a clinician she also suffers from bipolar.

she has also written the unquiet mind in which she explores her own difficulties with manic depression and the manner in which bipolarity threads through creative minds and lives.

i wandered down to the paperback at lunchtime and bought both. i am looking for insight, comfort and understanding, enlightenment, and ultimately hope.