On October 11th 2023, I said goodbye to my father for the last time.
He passed away in his house October 15th 2023, after a brief stay in the hospital.

I do not know what to say. Men are not culturally raised with the resources to express how to properly express how they feel. It leaves them as half human husks, always pining to prove something called masculinity to each other. Desperately trying to prove something without looking too much like a bunch of dweebs. As if anyone knows any better. So this is to say I lack the emotional intelligence and/or vocabulary to adequately pontificate what I want to say. So the cruelest yet closest thing I can say is:
And the reason that statement is so cruel, is that when you miss something, the solution is inlaid in the statement. You need only hit instead of miss. It's poetic that hitting someone up is the phrase for reaching out to someone. There in lies the problem. I can't very well resolve this. In between each second in time, there is an infinite number of countless micromoments. Yet each second ticks by with the infinite amount of time unnoticed. Yet every time I think: “I miss my dad”, I realize the ever accumulating moments. Like the only thing between myself and my dad, is an intangible tiny yet expansive force, the problem is it's ever growing. I imagine it like a pillar made of smoke, pushing me ever so slowly further away with every moment I give it recognition. As if the only thing between my father and myself will forever be an ever growing distance.
Especially while I was growing up, it was his circle that encompassed mine. He helped raise me after all. As I got older, it was more like a ven diagram. Where I took on aspects of him, and him maybe some of mine. But now they are 2 completely different circles, not connected at all. And I see for the first time all our differences. We had almost nothing in common. Our backgrounds, our beliefs (I mean we couldn't agree on the same book), not the way we lived, or the way we’ll die. And yet I have come to realize that my father gained something I lack profoundly. I do not know love, as I have never experienced it from another person. My father now knows the love of the heavenly father and is able to spread that love across the universe. Something that I cannot know, and thus I cannot give either. What my father expressed to me, what my partners have expressed to me, and what I express to those close to me, is not and never was love. It was and is a form of discrimination. In the Bible love is described as something infinite, equal, and free-flowing. If I cherish one person differently than all the rest, is that not discrimination by its very nature?
I think way too much about it and other things in general. I think too hard too. And thinking too much or too hard can and probably will get me killed one day. One way or another. The circles that represent my father and I will never be close again, except for one fleeting moment. A moment when I've thought too hard and too long. A moment I’ve thought about too much. A moment that will grant me clarity so sharp the very fabric of my reality will be shred to ribbons. A moment when another grim and alien reality will forcibly exchange from me my very humanity, leaving me nothing more than an animal, shattering , but providing me with the knowledge of what love is.
And those circles will eclipse each other for one final moment. A moment where my father and I will be indistinguishable. As in that moment we will have both faced the equalizer.
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I just hope there's someone there to bury me on that day. Whenever that day comes.