But yesterday as I drove home from Corey's house, I thought about the fairy tree in Ireland that we saw on a tour. Legend has it, if you tie a white object to the tree, you may make a wish on someone else's behalf. I rummaged in my purse for something white and found a scrap of paper. A piece of my journal or a receipt perhaps. As I fixed it to a branch, I made a wish that Corey's dad would be ok. Because I knew the pain of losing a dad and felt that she had too good a heart for it to be broken that way.
But a wish is just wishful thinking, or maybe a strong wind blew my wish from the tree, or the fairies don't like tourists. In any case, we all gathered atop Mt. Pinos to say goodbye and pay our respects and wait for the reality to sink in.
It comes in waves and I let out a quick short sob as I rounded the corner a half hour from San Jose and got a glimpse of the purple and pink clouds of the sunset.
When I got home I had to pull myself together to finish my physics homework but was too tired to grasp friction forces and centripetal acceleration.
This morning my eyes are puffy but the day is full of responsibility and the world doesn't stop no matter how much you ask it to, and I think I was blessed that when it was my dad's time I had several months to pull myself together since I was laid off for the winter. The girls are all now back at work as they try to figure out their new normal.
I guess it's too much to ask- to not suffer, to not feel pain, to not be stripped completely raw by reality. Being in a room with a group of women- all of whom had lost their fathers, some more recently than others, put me in awe at the sharpness of grief as well as the bond that loss forms. We relate by pain. We see little pieces of ourselves in the scars of others. Maybe it's easier to share ourselves if we're already broken into little pieces- perfect sizes for handing out to others to take home.
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