EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: How I’m doing with all that

I’ve been putting off the writing of my father’s obituary — not the generalized one that we posted online, which I wrote shortly after he passed in January, but the real one, which I’m to read to the people who will assemble for his service. If I want to, that is. I’m putting off that decision as well.

I suppose you could say we’ve pushed the whole thing back, scheduling the ceremony more than three months after the day he passed… quietly, at home, surrounded by loved ones… and moving the burial one full week after that.

Surely there’s no rush, right? We’re not in a hurry to say our final goodbyes.

I’m throwing myself into work, a fine distraction, healthy as long as one doesn’t go completely overboard with it.

I might be going a little overboard with it.

I’m connecting with my children, who have lost both their grandfathers in a brutal, three-month span. It’s a way to keep the continuity going between parents and children, I believe, and to remind them that their father is, for now anyway, still close by.

I’m trying not to show them the depths of my sorrow. They’ll be looking into their own abyss soon enough.

I’m keeping an eye on my mother. We all are.

I’m trying to exercise more but still putting on weight, trying to sleep more but still exhausted all the time, trying to eat more sensibly while I’m buying gummi bears in bulk.

I say I’m trying to drink enough water, but that’s a lie.

I’m thinking about all those bad habits that used to get me through the hard times, but then I remember that, often, they were the cause of them.

You want to know how I’m doing with all this? The answer is that I don’t know. All I know is that my father is gone, that his ashes sit in a fancy box on my mother’s shelf, that in a couple weeks we’ll lower that box into the ground, just like I placed those same ashes in that box a couple weeks ago and sealed it shut, just like I lifted him up— so light! — back in December and placed him into a hospital bed from which he would never arise.

And I know I’ll have to write something about it, soon.