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10 Days of 10 Years Later – Day 01

10 days from now, March 12th, will mark the 10 year anniversary since my father passed away.  It’s been looming a bit on the horizon for me, and I wanted to make sure I commemorated it in a way befitting the meandering course my relationship with my father took up until the day he died.  And the now 10 years that followed.

I think about those things quite a bit, our relationship up until that overcast Sunday morning he passed away, and the 10 years that have followed.  I think on who he was, how he became who he was.  I linger on who I was, and how I became who I was.  And inevitably I settle into thinking about who I am, and how fundamentally different I am from the 32 year old version of myself who had just lost his father.

I often wonder if 42 year old Adam would have tolerated 32 year old Adam.

As this date has gotten closer I’ve discovered that I increasingly wonder if 32 year old me would have liked the person 42 year old Adam has become, and I wonder if Adam32 would see his father when he talked to Adam42.

And how much would he see?

And in those things he sees, would they be those things he loved about his father, or those things he didn’t?  What has Adam42 learned from the experiences of Adam32, and the years since?  Did he keep promises to himself to evolve, or is there a genetic predisposition to collapse into some of our father’s less desirable quirks?

And then, most importantly, I think about Dad and wonder what he would think of Adam42?  Would THEY have been friendly?  Or are they too similar to ever be friends?

As it happens, there’s only 3 people in the entire universe who can answer those questions.  Unfortunately, of those 3 people, one is dead and another is ten years removed by a linear perception of time.

So that leaves me, Adam42 left to answer those questions and many more.  And what better way to commemorate my father than to try and make sense of those questions.  Perhaps an answer can be found.  Perhaps not.  But I invite you to indulge me in the hunt.

For the next 10 days I’ll post daily on some different aspect of these questions, the life of my father, and in a very real sense his death.  I’ll unpack some boxes buried deep in the back attic of my mind and try to answer honestly how the three of us would have felt about each other?  Is the nucleus of Adams within the probability cloud of Bob’s electron shell a stable atom, or would it decay into nothingness?

Giddyup, pop.  We’ve got some adventuring to do.


Lil’ Bob, Big Pimpin’.

Post Script:  You’d be proud of me Dad, I waited to start writing this until the VERY last minute, just like I did with your eulogy.  So now I gotta scramble every day for the next ten days to meet my own self-imposed deadline.  I partly blame your questionable decision to shuffle off this mortal coil during what would turn out to be a very busy season for me.  We always were a bit of an uphill battle, weren’t we?  I’m excited for this, Dad.  I hope I do you proud.

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