Three Months Gone

It occurred to me a little earlier today that it has been three months to the day since my Dad's passing.

I miss him.

I miss him in the obvious sense. The phone doesn't ring anymore with him on the other end of the line, wanting to know how the kids are doing, and how I am doing. Even this little passage of time has faded the frustration of many of our conversations in recent years, where he would ask many of the same questions and I would give him many of the same answers. Conversations that were apparently new to him every time we had them, while not new to me at all. I regret my eye-rolling, literal and figurative. I regret the times when I was in the middle of something else and the phone rang and I could see my parents' number on the caller ID and didn't answer the phone, knowing that we would talk again soon. Which we always did... but still...

But I also miss him in a more subtle way; one that I will probably do a poor job of trying to express. As a child, parents make you feel safe, or at least mine did. I always knew that mom and dad were around to protect me, and I had an unshakeable faith that as long as mom and dad were there, nothing bad would happen to me. I think that in some ways I have carried that belief with me into adulthood. It's not something that I consciously thought about, but I do believe that I still had that notion that mom and dad were there serving as a last line of defense against trouble in my world. And that as long as they were there, nothing bad would happen. And nothing ever really did. But now one of them is gone.

Even though I am surrounded by family and friends, and am fortunate beyond measure in so many ways, I feel a little bit more alone in the world than I used to. And it makes me sad.