I just want to put this here to get it out of my head. Barely anyone reads things I say here, so it's almost like a journal entry for me. My dad died in a freak accident almost a year ago. I like to think that I am fine. I want to be ok and not talk about it as much as I did in the beginning because I know my siblings also hurt and that my grief isn't any worse or more difficult than theirs. I don't want to make this all about me. I want to see my dad, not again, but before he died. I hadn't seen him in several years before he died because I couldn't afford to go home. I didn't call him as often as I should have. I don't know that he really knew how much I missed him all those years and cared about him and was so scared of getting that horrible call that he had died. Two days before he died, I had the strong urge to go home. I needed to see him, but it would have been at least two months before I could do that. I was too late. Life, or death in this case, waits for no one. I went home for his funeral and it was so strange, because he should have been there. It is also strange that at his memorial I really, really wished he could have been there to see how many people came to talk about him and remember him. The entire family, extended and all, showed up. They loved him and I don't know if he knew that and I wanted him to see that more than anything I have ever wanted. But, he couldn't see. He will never see anything, ever. I don't think about him all the time anymore and that also makes me a little sad. I am forgetting his voice. I dream of him, but as he was when he was younger. I will sometimes go an entire day and not think of him. But, there are days like today that remind me that he is gone. There are days where the pain hits me in the chest like a hammer. I had a nervous breakdown four months ago. I cover my grief with medication and therapy and that doesn't actually work. The medicine masks the pain, but the pain still simmers underneath and is ready to come raging to the forefront of my mind at any time. "Your dad is dead! He is in the ground! You will NEVER see him again! He doesn't even exist anymore!" And those days, like today, really, really suck. I will spend the rest of the day with a lump in my throat and telling everyone I am fine, but I don't know how long it will ever be before I really am fine. How can "fine" exist when someone is ripped away so suddenly? How can life go on so easily as if that person never was alive? How did my memory fade so quickly? I think the cruelest thing about this whole situation is that he died a week before his birthday. He was excited. He would have been 50. But my gifts never reached him. His birthday was spent in a coffin. His funeral was held the day after he should have been celebrating a happy milestone. And that is the most fucked up thing I can think of life doing to someone.