Bereavement

to them has changed one more time. (After death). It is my father's character to be nurturing and supportive. I'll get that through the memories: him constantly sending me newspaper articles to read when I lived away from my hometown, trying g to convince me when I was an angel in a school play when I was 5 or 6 that I had in fact flown around the stage and he mimicked flapping wings (i did not buy it but thought he was nice and fun), talking politics with me every dinner after I came home from college so I got some sturdy political sea legs (he came from a political family, we talk long after the wine glasses were empty and the table cleared of dishes), creating the summer Olympics at our cottage in 1976 where we kids jumped over a horizontally held broom handle and into the lake as the high jump, etc, teaching me how to change a tire including the part where you roll a big stone under your car near the flat in case your jack fails,
buying me a stuffed animal when he took me to what I think was the dentist, helping me clean out the larder in the cottage from top to bottom when my parents had given us adult kids the cottage to invite our friends up to because they wanted us to have fun, cooking dinner all the time when he was newly retired, making pound cakes for family and friends every Christmas, teasing my 97 year old grandmother, his mother-in-law, that she put a hex on his foot because he voted for the Conservatives a few times (she loved being gently teased and I don't know that she was someone who had been gently teased a lot in her life), supporting me in many ways when I was harrassed, he was constantly thinking of others etc.. He could be grumpy and sometimes said stupid things as most people do, but he was overwhelmingly thinking of others all the time. So I'm sure I'll land on a few more aspects of his personality but on the whole he was a pretty nice guy. It is nice that his death was not shocking and that he was 92. I tried to nurture him back. I find myself thinking of others these days. And that makes me think maybe my relationship to him has already changed as I mimic that love and support. It is time for me to nurture and support the great people in my life, to pass it on and to say "What would Dad do?".