I’m making a hairpin turn away from the normal subjects of this blog — can I even consider myself to have established a standard of what’s “normal” for here based in 6 posts? — just for the sake of laying some cards on the table.

My father died two months ago. We did a memorial service for him then, down south where he and Mom had retired. This coming Sunday we’ve got another memorial service for him — this one up in New England, where we have lots of history and family ties. I can feel the emotional big-ness of this approaching, so if I go underground any time during the next week, I’d chalk it up to this. ‘Cos there’s lots of times that the grief has caught me unawares*, and then there’s moments like this where I can just feel it wrapping around me like tendrils of fog.

The weird flip side of this is a brief errand we have set up for Saturday. Matt and I have decided to do our wedding up in New England next summer (see note above re: history and family ties). One prospective site is very near the memorial location, so we’ve planned a very quick site visit to evaluate the place.

And I don’t really have words to express the oddness of these two movements happening at the same time in my life. Losing a parent, learning about bereavement in a much more significant way than ever before, losing a huge anchor on which part of my self-hood and identity was formed. And, 180 degrees away form that, the whole process of planning a wedding, forming a new family center, making a lifelong heart-commitment to Matt.

In this week, in this moment, that simultaneity is kind of wearing me down, in a hazy-foggy quasi-depressed beyond-words kind of way.

I’m sure things will cycle and I can get back to being more purposeful and thematic about my writing here. Today, however, is not the day for that. And I’m not so sure about tomorrow, either.

* Like last weekend at the movies. Though if I’d been a bit more alert at the switch, I might have realized that going to see the film that contains the heart-breaking death of Harry Potter’s final remaining and all-along most significant father figure might just be a little bit hard for me to take.