I type this as Keira sleeps restlessly behind me on the couch, exhausted after a bad night. We hopped off the plane and into a sick nightmare – exacerbated by the cabin pressure on her poor ears, and I feel for her because it always happens to me. Riley barked like an asthmatic hound during the night and I’m running on adrenaline again.
Like I did last week, and like I did when both were tiny babies and had no other energy reserves to call upon.
But as I sit here, drinking copious amounts of coffee and wait for the rest of the family to wake up – including the cat, which has been banished to the bathroom until I can face feeding it and chasing its naughty self around – I feel happy to be here, more able to face what needs to be faced when I’m surrounded by familiar walls and furniture.
There’s so much to say. I’ve been drafting for days the beginning to the post about this past week about dad:
One of his ex-cricketer team mates wore full whites to the funeral.
There were close to 400 people there.
His ex-cricket team wore black arm bands last Saturday when they played.
His favourite bowling club (read: watering hole) had the flag at half-mast last Friday.
These are all true and our family thanks you all so much (another thing that’s been made clear to me is that half my home town reads this blog through Facebook. Hello!), but I’m still searching for the best way to memorialise my father. I think the reason why I can’t is because I still haven’t fully accepted he’s gone.
And that is what takes me back to the start, where I so easily can reenact the first blast of shock at receiving the news. I reel. I bellow. I can recall the moment I saw my sister’s face at the boarding gate as I walked off the plane into a different reality.
So it might be a convenient ‘distraction’ if the kids are sick these next few days. Lord knows, I need it.
I’m not glad they’re sick. Far from it. It will just be nice to nurse them back to health, because my father couldn’t be.
