Has it been a year?

Has it? Has it been a year, almost, that my father died? DIED? how strange? How incongruent? How nonsensical? How disrespectful? and, How unbelievable? For, my father, can never die. Our parents whom we dote on, who become, no, are a part of our 'selves' who are an important ingredient in the 'I' we all use to acknowledge ourselves, how can they die? What does it all mean - what does it actually mean - to die?

I don't want a treatise on death, for I don't claim to understand what it is. The death meant one certain thing to me - the death of my father - that he will not be there, where he was always. And that breaks my heart in a thousand pieces, thousand times in a day. I want him to be there always - approachable, available, solid and tangible. I am not happy with a memory, an image, a remembrance, a longing, I want him in person to be beside me, so I can see him with my eyes, I can hear him with my ears, and I can touch him with my fingers.

I don't want to be told that he is in peace, that he is in heaven, that we all will die one day or another, that this is life, or that he lived till a full age and lived his life well, that he was loved by so many for he had helped and loved so many - nothing - nothing matters and nothing makes me feel better about this massive hole that I find in my SOUL. I am broken, shattered, ruined, and depressed beyond sadness, beyond melancholy, beyond repair - for I believe that I needed my father the most at this time in my life as opposed to any other time, that somehow, he went before his designated time, that somehow I contributed in his being disappointed in this world after all that had been done in it. Yet, I know that he wasn't disappointed in me, or in any of his children for he was a father that was Proud and Loving, and full of pride at his pride!

I want him because I feel lost and lonely without him, I feel the center has given in, the whole world around me is collapsing and only his presence will make it all good again - perhaps a child's wish but it is so!

Has time stopped? Or has it been going very fast? I can't seem to understand. At times I feel I was with him just now, a few minutes back, talking to him, listening to him. He seems so real and concrete, full of life, there, touchable. And, at other times I feel eons have passed since set I last eyes on him, where is he? amidst the fugue and the mist that envelopes him for all I see is him receding from my vision. I am losing him, and its this continuous losing that is so painful, for it cuts at the strings of my heart, and the strings of love that bind me to him, it cuts at that primal bond that every parent has with the inner being of his child, it cuts at the the universal 'I' and the individual.

He did not die at one point in time at a specific date. He dies every minute for me. And has been dying for a year every moment .......and that is HELL.