I have always felt it important to share the positives on this blog and to be uplifting.  I feel very blessed in general in my life, but I have been a really bad cycle for a few months.  I know that eventually the clouds part, you see the light again, and things go on the upward swing again.  However, the journey to that place can totally be sad and challenging.  While I try to limit the sharing of that personal side of my life I will share the following:

My father passed away this weekend after a long illness.  I find myself feeling particularly sad and lost.  He had made the decision many years ago to not share his life with my sister and me, as he moved forward with a new family.  I had limited contact with him over the years.  While it is always hard to lose a parent, I think it is particularly hard with one where so much was left unresolved.  One dear friend had a similar experience with her father and shared that she also thinks this is true.  There is an old wound that goes way back to being a little girl that just gets exposed all over again.  While this makes me feel really sad, I also have to honor what he did do to help shape me while he was a part of my early life.  

My father came from the generation that did it yourself.  I learned early to figure out how to do something or make something myself from him.  I think this is why I move pretty fearlessly through a hardware store, having done my research on a project on the house. He loved many of the things that I do, baking, gardening, and doing handy tasks around the house.  He was particularly adventurous about trying new, international foods, as I am.  For these things I am grateful to him for instilling the love of the same things.  He told me when I was about ten years old, to make sure that I knew how to make something with my hands, so that something will outlive me when I am gone.  I tend to remember these words when I am stitching.  

I also am grateful for the foundation of faith in my life.  My father was a devout Lutheran all of his life. The Lutheran faith has been a part of my life since I was a very small child, and I am grateful to say that it has seen me through the best and worst of times.  

So I have a process of grief that I have to go through now.  I go between feeling really numb and crying my eyes out.  I did not realize either that the passing of a parent totally brings you more in touch with your own mortality.  What I do know is that I need to make certain that when my own time comes to leave this place, that I do so with no unfinished business.

I am sorry that I have not been uplifting and positive lately.  This too shall pass.