Perhaps the dog says it best…

It’s been a week since my dad died. And I’m exhausted. We’re all exhausted. I haven’t taken my allergy medicine in a week (finally did tonight) and my head feels congested. I hope I’m not sick.

In news not related to grief, I returned to work yesterday. In retrospect, this was both good and bad. I needed rest after all of this craziness and I didn’t get it.

The checks for the incorporation paperwork and fictitious name registration for Parisian Phoenix Publishing Company have been cashed.

Darrell Parry’s poetry manuscript, Twists: Gathered Ephemera, opened to presales yesterday. And Gayle has been hard at work with cover designs for Not an Able-Bodied White Man with Money. And Joan and the residents of Plastiqueville have been hard at work with the illustrations for Trapped.

Currently I am in bed, under the heat blanket with multiple cats on my lap.

My week has included some beautiful text messages, like one from the administrative assistant at ProJeCt, and heartfelt cards and so many flowers. Phone calls. And sympathy food! Offers of halupkis and coffee cake and delivery of alcoholic egg nog and rum cake.

I have gained back the weight I lost.

My work performance today was almost normal, but my emotional state was… what’s the word? Unstable?

I called my traveling companion and told him all my tales from the funeral— and he told me it sounded beautiful and that he thinks he would have liked my dad and wishes he could have met him.

And a couple times today I folded this sweater, the same style and color I was folding when I got the call.

My days are full of loss and laughter.

I built a little shrine. A place for my dad to have coffee. Because I anticipate that sometime soon I will feel his presence here.

My mother gave me the photo at the funeral. It was from 1975. The year I was born. Probably around the time they got married.