It will be my eighteenth Fathers Day with out my father. I woke up feeling a bit sad. Yes, I still miss him. I always miss him. Feeling the need to express my self in a more mournful manner, I picked up my guitar and began to play some blues progressions. I usually begin too fast and slow down as the moment takes me. I was starting to reach the proper tempo where the feeling in my soul begins to resonate with the notes but before that happened I stopped and decided that I needed to look at his death with a different perspective.

I put down the guitar and thought about this. I thought about my sense of loss but more importantly my father’s sense of loss. My father was a type one diabetic almost his entire life. He was diagnosed at a time when the only self administered glucose test was a urine test. Use of the urine test is kind of like using a history book to predict today. It reflects the amount of blood sugar of the past not the present. It also does not reflect low blood sugar levels.  Because of this it was very hard for diabetics to be accurate when trying to maintain normal blood sugar levels. It’s the extreme rise and fall of blood sugar in a diabetic that causes major damage to many of their organs.

My father’s body was no exception. By the time he was in his mid 50’s, the blood circulation in his legs was poor and several procedures to increase blood flow showed minimal success.  It became very hard for him to walk and his vision was very poor.  This was difficult for me to witness, I can’t imagine how hard it was for him to live through. He had been very active his entire life and he was now unable to take part in many of the things he loved.

I look back at  the direction my dads body was headed, with blindness and amputations just around the corner, and I know that it was a blessing that he never got to that point. I have suspected this as truth for a while but I was hoping that full recognition of  this would help me become more at peace with his passing.

I went back and picked up my guitar, hoping I could now play a happier tune. I strummed a few chords to the Eagles “Take It Easy” but they just didn’t hold together. I thought that my soul was not ready for such an upbeat tempo so I then tried “Teach Your Children” by Crosby , Stills and Nash. Still it fell flat. I then went back to the blues and my soul hummed in harmony with my guitar as my fingers danced along a blues progression in E.

I guess I will be a bit selfish for a while longer but the good memories I have and the knowledge that he is at peace will help me to strum a less mournful tune someday.

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