It’s five years today since my Dad died. Sometimes it seems like only a couple of years. On other occasions it feels like ten or more years.
We’re living in the house that he and Mum lived in for close-on thirty years at the end of their lives. There are a few remnants around the house–the odd bit of furniture, some cutlery, a stack of slides and photos to continue to cull and distribute. It’s funny looking at some slides and photos that Dad features in when he was in his twenties and thirties (he was usually the artist, not the subject). Here we are sixty or seventy years later and everything has moved on apart from that frozen image.
Occasionally I say or do something that I can imagine Dad doing; or I see one of my adult children with a facial expression or using a turn of phrase that Dad used. Sometimes I’ll see or hear something online and think “Dad would have appreciated that” (or not, as the case may be).
Dad’s gone, but his legacy continues in a sense, not in the “stuff” he left behind, but in the family he was jointly responsible for.