3.5 weeks

It is a cozy November morning, with rain, a gentle rain, and I am sitting with my breakfast, and a coffee and the Julio Iglesias playlist that I listened to with my dad in the hospital.

I feel so grateful, for being here, for everything. Even this pain of missing my dad so much and in so many ways that are different than what I expected. 

I keep going over and over in my head, every minute detail of what happened those last two and a half weeks when my dad was in the hospital. It was such an insane time. So much happened in those two and a half weeks and I feel that I became closer to my dad during that time than in many years of regular living. 

All barriers were gradually forced down during that time. Things were happening so insanely fast, like from one day to another he would lose another essential bodily function, that there was no room for pretence or artifice and only the raw stuff was present between us, which allowed a sort of closeness we didn't have before. 

I read somewhere that death is intimate. I think that is a perfect word for death. Being with someone near death is the most intimate thing. We have corrupted the word intimate like many other words, but if we use it in the sense of knowing someone deeply without any barriers, then I think it's appropriate to use it in describing what happened. It was intimate and terrible and terrifying and I also miss that time, which logically seems contradictory but it isn't.

I feel like I know so many things now but they don't line up with the way we're supposed to know things because often they're contradictory; like this feeling of how painful things were with my dad but also in many ways, how beautiful. Or how something so dear like my whole childhood in Romania, or my youth in Montreal, can seem now one step closer to being lost with my dad's passing and also feel more deeply and permanently a part of me than ever.

Below are pictures of and from the hospital. The last two are Aiyana's pictures of Montreal.

peace