Back into the Stream

Well, I am back at this. After my dad died, everything just seemed too raw. It didn't seem fair or even possible to write about our daily life or post pictures of our smiling kids...who are kids after all, and incapable of staying in a state of devastating sorrow over a single event for very long. I didn't want to write about what we were up to, because for a good while there I wasn't feeling much of anything about anything. I also didn't seem to have the energy to write as eloquently as I wanted to about my dad and what his love and his life meant to me and to my whole family. To be honest, I still am not at that point yet.

But it is amazing how life goes on. It's amazing how something like a death can so totally devastate your life that you expect the whole world to crumble in on itself. It shakes your confidence and it leaves you in some alternate world where everything is standing still. But the world around you continues on. People are still shopping and pumping gas; the mail is still being delivered, Christmas still comes, and your dog still wants to be fed. At some point, you step back into the stream. The kids pulled us back in before we would have gone ourselves. It's one of the things kids do best.

I have missed blogging, though. And I am newly thankful that I've created this digital history of our family over the past 6 years. One day, if Aiden wants to, he can look back over these posts and find evidence of just about every significant chunk of time he spent with his Hapa since he was 6 months old. Every weekend in Vermont, every vacation in Florida, every sugaring season. This is a slight comfort to me, though it also makes me panic just a little about getting this blog into a hardcopy format too, in case the whole of internet cyberspace crashes into oblivion someday. I plan to tackle that project in the coming year, one of many New Years resolutions.

Aiden and Haley have been active and growing these past few months. They had a good Christmas holiday and are thriving, as they should. For the adults- between my dad's death and superstorm Sandy- Andy and I, my mom, Micah and Becky, and also Andy's Dad, brother Dan and sister-in-law Paulette have had a difficult stretch all around. I still feel like we are staggering about like a bunch of zombies most of the time, going through the motions of life with very few of the emotions besides grief and depressing sense that nothing will ever be the same again. At the same time I feel sure that life will improve, slowly, slowly, slowly... it already has gotten a bit easier.