6 years ago

 

It's hard to believe that it's been six years since you left us.  This year's anniversary completely snuck up on me.  I literally opened my TimeHop app on my phone and the first memory I saw was my post from last year.  It hit me like a ton of bricks and I started to cry, feeling guilty that it had slipped my mind.

Then I gave it some more thought and I realized why I hadn't been watching the calendar as closely as I used to.  Daddy isn't here anymore to remember the date.  I always worried about how he felt on this day and how his mood would be.  It some ways this made even more upset, but in another way it felt freeing.

They are together again, as my dear friend said at my Dad's funeral, the Jack and Joan Roadshow had been reunited.

My parents were married for 61 years and they were the epitome of a team.  I remember when my father was in the hospital when he had his by-pass surgery.  I was at home with Mum and she started crying while doing the dishes.  She was so worried about him and I remember her saying that he was like her right arm and wouldn't know what she would do without him. The irony is that she went first.  Jack was three years older than Joan and told me how he would worry about what would happen to her after he died, because he assumed he would go first.  

I love this photo of Mum and it reminds me of our many shopping adventures in Target.  My mother was English and had her "stiff upper lip" persona but underneath was an absolute fun loving goofball with an absolutely wicked sense of humor.  I remember going shopping later in the evening one time and we couldn't stop laughing at some silly joke we had made when we first walked in the store.  We just kept going back to it and would crack up all over again.  It got to the point that we reached that doubled over, completely breathless type of laughter because we had laughed so much!!

I'm crying while I type this but that's because I'm all in my feels at the moment.  I can talk about Mum without bursting into tears each time - that's definitely progress.  *Unless I'm talking to my brother, I guess we have such a shared connection that it's still emotional.  I have so many great memories of the amazing woman who raised me to be a strong, independent woman (my sweet husband would insert completely hard headed in that description) and I'd like to think that I have passed those traits onto my own daughter.  I do know that she definitely inherited the Target shopping trait from both of us.

I'm sure I'll cry again today, but they will be happy tears full of Mum memories and love.