Happy Birthday Dad

It's not quite midnight so I can still say that today would have been my Dad's birthday.

He died a little over four years ago from cancer.

You think in four years the loss would get easier.  But a day doesn't go by that I don't think of him in some way.  To be honest it didn't seem like four years had already gone by.  The amount of time was reinforced recently to me.  I was at Best Buy picking something up that I had ordered online.  They asked for my drivers license for identification purposes.  When the clerk handed it back to me I gave a glance at the expiration date, wondering when it was coming due.  In Louisiana a drivers license is good for four years and expires on your birthday.  This was back in July, a few weeks after my birthday.  When I looked I saw that my license had expried that year.

The last time I had renewed it was four years ago, just weeks before my Dad died.  I had to take a trip for work to Texas and my license was expiring and had to get it renewed before I flew.  The week I came back from Texas was the week my Mom called to tell me to get up there, my Dad was not doing good.

So it had been four years.

Four years.  I thought at first that couldn't be right.  He hasn't been dead that long, it wasn't that long ago.  Was it?  But I guess it was.  Time continues to pass and his death recedes into the past, if not in my memories.

One last thought of him I had recently.  Last month I had to drive to Alabama for a meeting for work.  Coming back I passed by the turn off from the highway that would have brought me to their old house when they lived in Mississippi before Katrina.  When I lived in Florida and came back to visit that was where I turned to go to their house.  A brief thought went through my mind of turning off and stopping by to say hi on my way home.  My Dad would have appreciated the unannounced visit and insisted I get something to eat and sit and rest before I continued on my way home.

Damn.

I still miss him.