It has been a whirlwind summer and all of my attempts to get a blog post written have come to naught. Despite my best efforts to get work done today, my mood has been off and I finally gave up and decided to direct my energies blog-ward to see if that would help refocus me.
There are plenty of things I could blame my mood on, but to be frank, I woke up feeling this way and everything else just exacerbated an already off-kilter state. I can’t remember the details now, but when I woke up this morning I was coming out of a somewhat stressful and upsetting dream. Basically, I woke up feeling very excluded from a core group of friends. I used to feel that way a lot until I figured out that for the most part I was projecting and excluding myself. But that is a whole different therapy session.
This morning, I went for a 13 mile bike ride along a route I used to bike somewhat regularly with friends.(yes, I am still walking and I am at ~430 miles but I am starting a 5 day a week class on Monday that lasts for 6 weeks and I had to get on my bike to make sure that I was in shape for my daily commute). It made me nostalgic for the days when I used to ride 35 miles every weekend. That thought process led me down a rabbit hole that led me to remember that my mother and brother were planning on going to the cemetery today to see my father’s grave. Just to make me that much more melancholy, my iPod shuffled over to the Superman theme music (and by Superman I mean Christopher Reeve and the John Williams theme). That made me think of all the movies that remain significant in my life that my father took me to as a kid (Star Wars and the Muppet Movie are two key ones).
Fast forward a couple of hours when I was on the phone with a client in New York. Our phone call was cut short because he received a call from his wife who was struggling with her mother, who has dementia. The conversation was mostly about his concern that his mother-in-law might fall and get seriously hurt. I could almost hear, in my mind, all of the conversations that my family had with my father and with each other expressing some of the very same concerns.
With stellar timing, my brother texted me from the cemetery shortly after I got off the phone. He asked if I wanted a photo of my father’s grave and I surprised myself by saying yes. In the abstract, there is no reason why I would want one. All it is right now is a mound of dirt that probably has grass growing on it. Whether it was the emotionally laden day or me just missing my father, I don’t know. I just know that even if it is just a photo of a mound of dirt, it is my father’s mound and I wanted some token of it.