Getting Back to Normal

The title should really be, "What is normal?" Just barely over a week ago today I lost my father, (Bill) William Eugene Martin. A week and it still doesn't feel real. One minute I'm talking to him and a few hours later he's gone.

I wish I could say I have no regrets, but unfortunately I can't. The day he died he tried to call me. It was maybe an hour at most before he slipped away. I had talked to him earlier. And right after I did I put my phone to busy so that I wouldn't get interrupted as I was working on an issue that demanded my attention. Apparently looking at his phone and my call log he tried to reach me a couple times and I regret not getting that one last time to talk to him.

I keep telling myself that I had no way of knowing. That if I talked with him one more time I wasn't going to say anything that would have made a bit of difference in our relationship. That there's nothing I could have done to prevent what happened. That he went quickly and if I had been on the phone with him I would have felt powerless to do anything.

It's just another example of how I can rationalize my feelings, but still can't change the way I feel. It's one of the reasons I don't think therapy will ever truely work for me. I can see what I'm feeling, know why I'm feeling it and know that I need to change it, but I can't actually make the change.

But all this is off the topic I started. The truth is normal for me is feeling sad and lost. I think that's why I don't feel the loss as much as I think I should. To me these feelings are baseline. The only difference are the times I realize something that I'd relied on dad for and how now I have no one to rely on. It's much easier to get me to cry, but sometimes it feels like I have to force myself to cry just so I can get the thoughts and feelings to calm down.

I now feel a temendous sense of responsibility for my brother, Kyle. I'm now the closest thing he has to a father figure. I have to be there for him as much as possible now.

I know, I'm doing my usual rambling jump from topic to topic, but my brain is doing this a lot lately. I think I'm still trying to process the last week and prepare myself for the long months ahead. There is so much to do for the legal process that we're about to embark on. It's deffinately driven home the point that it's never too early to plan for your death.