8:58am May 11, 2015

I never know how to explain this sort of thing to other people.

I’m lying in bed, crocheting something, and listening to my Kindle read out loud a book called Failure is Not An Option, about being in Mission Control during the early days of the American space program.

And I realize that I’m not alone. My dad’s here with me, and he’s just as interested in all this as I am. There’s no sense of him communicating with me, and no sense that he needs to – or even that he should, to put it more bluntly. Just being there is enough. But it’s a very distinct sort of presence, it’s a kind that’s thoroughly uninvasive (invasive presences claiming to be dead relatives are a bad, bad sign) and that has not even announced itself to me – I only noticed it because I know how to look for things like that. He would probably be just as okay with it if I hadn’t noticed, and he would never have pushed his way into my awareness just because he wanted to. But the fact that he occasionally hangs around is cool. (And only made possible, ironically, by the fact that when he first died he walked into it knowing he might never get a chance to hang around any of us again, and that this was the risk he took in getting dissolved into love. But it’s only through getting dissolved into love that you can ever hang around your loved ones as yourself. It’s hard to explain, because reality gets very weird in these areas and we don’t really have language set up to deal with it.)

Anyway, hi Ron, and I wish i could’ve sat and listened to this with you while you were alive. But at least the chance hasn’t totally gone away. I thought of you when I downloaded the book, but I didn’t expect you to show up.