So This is How to Pick Yourself Up Off the Floor...

I'm luckier than most...when I lag behind, there's usually a friend around to kick my ass.
In this case it was a family member who claims he's missed my blog. Well, he didn't exactly say he missed (or even liked) this blog, he just complained I could not keep a commitment.
So, partially in response to Chris, mainly in response to life, I'm picking myself up off the floor and resuming the human march, and this blog.
Falling on the floor is what we do when things don't go our way. In my case it happened in response to the funnel cloud swirling around my father since his dementia got the better of him, and then he died.
Just the act of typing the words "he died" pushed me again into that whirling tunnel, spinning my thoughts towards the emptiness we are witness to when a loved one is no longer there. I chose the image of the funnel cloud with reason - death is a force of nature, that, though understood, is impossible to comprehend or manage. The closer you are to that cloud, the more you are sucked into its vortex, the less you comprehend, the harder you fall.
It's natural to focus on death once a parent dies, or you yourself have lived past that mid-century mark. Given all the thought I've expended on death lately, I confess to not understanding its consequence.
A few years ago, when my husband's dear uncle suddenly died, I read Buddhist tracts because I could not (still can't) wrap my mind around the idea that a person ceases "being". Buddhists (or at least the one I read) explained that it's like a radio in the room: the signal is always there, it just gets turned "on" and "off" occasionally. Okay...I'm Christian, but the idea that the "signal" is still around seemed so much more comforting than the idea that the person left us completely to go somewhere much nicer than where we are.
So it was natural then that when my father died, I saw him everywhere - even in the personality of stranger's dogs who, I reasoned, were nudging me to pet them because somehow my father's being was in them, and he wanted me to know he loved me. I've been told it's common.
When I was around seven, I finally mastered the art of skipping and was showing it off to my father ("Look at me! Look at me!) when I tripped and fell breaking my arm.
Fifty years later, I can still feel his strong carpenter's arms picking me up off that floor, and that wave of comfort that I forever associated with my father -- that I was going to be okay, that he would take care of me, that there was nothing that could hurt me as long as he was around.
I think that's what a good parent is supposed to elicit, and he did.
Recently I took my widowed mother to Boston for a treat. We were walking arm in arm down Back Bay's charmingly wobbly sidewalks to a favorite restaurant when, in a rare moment of blitheness for both of us as we are too similar in spirit, I tripped and fell.
No broken arm this time, just a bloodied lip.
I picked myself up.
Life goes on.