The last time I wrote on this blog was last May. My, that was a long time ago. So much and so little has happened in all the time since this day. This day.
Forever emblazoned in my mind as the single most life changing event I could ever imagine my young self would be witness to and part of. Today marks four years since Dad's stoke. Four years ago I was in Portland Maine with my mother and brother, while Dad lay in ICU, unable to talk to us.
Funny thing is, I remember in great detail the day before the stroke, just as much as today. I recounted it recently to a friend of mine. Time has a funny way of dimming memories, until, like Marcel Proust's Remembrances of Things Past, all it takes is the tiniest of things and suddenly your mind is flooded with images, thoughts feeling, once thought long dead.
The weather yesterday and today are exactly as it was four years ago. The day before I had gone snow shoeing in Acadia National Park. I asked Dad if he wanted to join me. He declined, to focused on preparing a turkey with all the fixings for dinner. How I wished he had gone with me. A few years prior we had gone snow shoeing with Bill Chymny. The three of us had a rough time of it, the snow so deep, we had to take shifts walking in front to make the path. It was the best time I remember spending with my father in my adult life. So I was a bit upset he declined the invite the day before. No one would have predicted he would never be able to do anything like that again after that day.
So the day before, I went snow shoeing by myself. I brought a couple of cameras and spend the afternoon traipsing around the woods, taking pictures of this and that. In the back of my mind, I couldn't wait to get home and tell Dad about it. It was just the thing he would have loved.
I went home and showed him the photos, pointed to the map where I had been. He loved it all like I knew he would. We all had dinner. The night went on like any other night and that was it. The next morning everything changed.
As much as I remember today, where we all were, what was about to happen to Dad, to all us, in the months and now years that followed, I also remember that day before everything changed.
Yesterday and today. No one realizes how quickly things change until they do.
Forever emblazoned in my mind as the single most life changing event I could ever imagine my young self would be witness to and part of. Today marks four years since Dad's stoke. Four years ago I was in Portland Maine with my mother and brother, while Dad lay in ICU, unable to talk to us.
Funny thing is, I remember in great detail the day before the stroke, just as much as today. I recounted it recently to a friend of mine. Time has a funny way of dimming memories, until, like Marcel Proust's Remembrances of Things Past, all it takes is the tiniest of things and suddenly your mind is flooded with images, thoughts feeling, once thought long dead.
The weather yesterday and today are exactly as it was four years ago. The day before I had gone snow shoeing in Acadia National Park. I asked Dad if he wanted to join me. He declined, to focused on preparing a turkey with all the fixings for dinner. How I wished he had gone with me. A few years prior we had gone snow shoeing with Bill Chymny. The three of us had a rough time of it, the snow so deep, we had to take shifts walking in front to make the path. It was the best time I remember spending with my father in my adult life. So I was a bit upset he declined the invite the day before. No one would have predicted he would never be able to do anything like that again after that day.
So the day before, I went snow shoeing by myself. I brought a couple of cameras and spend the afternoon traipsing around the woods, taking pictures of this and that. In the back of my mind, I couldn't wait to get home and tell Dad about it. It was just the thing he would have loved.
I went home and showed him the photos, pointed to the map where I had been. He loved it all like I knew he would. We all had dinner. The night went on like any other night and that was it. The next morning everything changed.
As much as I remember today, where we all were, what was about to happen to Dad, to all us, in the months and now years that followed, I also remember that day before everything changed.
Yesterday and today. No one realizes how quickly things change until they do.
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