The Goodbye

I haven't wanted to write anything on this blog until after the memorial service for my father happened, which it did yesterday, just to have privacy.

It's said that grieving is a strange process, so I've felt justified in being cheerful and normal one moment, and accepting that I am going to be extremely gloomy the next. Right now I'm in one of the glum stretches, so I don't want to write too much.

I hope I can also see and find the fine qualities in people who are not Papa or the rest of my family, because I had the subjective and probably snobby habit of measuring people against him and not thinking that they quite reached the mark. He believed, I think, that it's pointless to feel restricted to the idealization and pursuit of an abstract goodness, like a distant figure of God; one must seek it in the one place one may ever see it: in one's fellow man.

Extroversion has also been forced on me a bit, which has its disadvantages because I find it exhausting, but it has made me feel less lonely.