Today, my father passed away. I was watching Shrek 2 with my daughter and wife. For the last month or six weeks I’ve been thinking ahead to this date and been wondering how I was going to deal with it. For the longest time I’ve been thinking that I would pickle my liver and sit around, thinking and crying. Now I don’t know. I keep thinking of something that one of our pastors said a while ago in service, it goes along these lines:

We all struggle with sin and difficulties, and being human we will sometimes (often times) fail. But when we do, or more importantly when we are presented with a situation where we are struggling against sin or a difficulty, then we too often think of the times we have failed at it, and think that one more failure is nothing, or that we are bound to fail at this again, so why bother trying. (As Yoda would say it: Seductive is the dark side.). But when we are in this situation, all we have to think is that we will not let it beat us this time, and I will be successful against my problem this time.

So I think more about this. Alcoholism runs in my family, and my Dad suffered from it. Drinking is something that happens a lot in my family, not alcoholism specifically, but it is a social activity that we all take part in. I guess was thinking that instead of drowning my sorrows (which, to clarify is not something I generally do), I could do something more constructive.

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This weekend I was out doing yardwork and I went into the shed to get out the lawnmower – and was hit by the smell, it took me back to being a young boy and going to my grandparents house, I would love to go into their shed and smell the warm grass-smell, walk around their small backyard and look at how neat, and organized it was. I was fascinated with my grandfather’s small workshop downstairs, how neat he kept everything, hammers hung up by the prongs, little glass jars with nails, screws and fasteners, all labled and organized. Now that they’re both gone there’s no central point in my mom’s family anymore. Their house would be the central meeting place, the point of contact for Christmas, Easter and gossip. Now there isn’t one, and I wonder what will happen in the future… this year there wasn’t any family gathering to speak of (extended family), where there has been one for dozens of years past. I can remember doing it even when I was very small.