Disclaimer: The following is regarding loss and the death of a parent (albeit an estranged parent). This is an odd post to make. Like, do I start with backstory? Current status? Do I state my non-emotional one-liner? Or weave through the depths of all the philosophical thoughts it spiders into? ...do I even post at all (clearly I decided to hit post). On Tuesday, I discovered that my dad had passed away in March of this year. I say "dad" lightly as I hadn't seen him since I was 10. The only other points of contact with him came in my early twenties when I was at college, with a couple of odd emails out of the blue. Odd as in, an email stating he'd gotten remarried (his fourth marriage by that point) and they wanted me to come with them on their honeymoon trip to Hawaii. Uh, yah.....no thanks. Gunna pass on that. And then over a decade later, I got a random connection request on Linkedin from him. I often wondered what adult me would think about adult him, say if I ran into him in a coffee shop, or out on the street, or through mutual friends. What would my impression of him be? I used to think about if we were ever to connect and say go for coffee, how much of me would I see in him? How many of our unspoken mannerisms would match, mirror each other, or feel familiar? Ever since the random Linkedin request, about once a year I would sleuth the internet for anything I could find on him. An obituary, any social media, etc. There was never really anything, as expected for someone of that age bracket, just the odd photo. So I guess this week was my random "yearly dad-search", except this time a post about his passing came up. Just as it was odd knowing a stranger was out there who I shared blood with, it's equally odd and complicated to realize that this stranger, who I didn't know at all and had no right to feel loss over, is now gone. It's funny how brain and body can be so disconnected sometimes. I treated this news kind of like a fact, "this thing happened, ok, now I know", and it wasn't until late yesterday when I was trying to sort out why I felt so awful and out of sorts that I realized that my body had been responding to the news all day long. So today I've been trying to place that and listen to what it needs. I still have no clue what it needs, so I'm just trying to give it kindness and space. I felt like I had to do something. Perhaps as a marker for the moment, or for this shared DNA that once existed and has now gone back to the earth, or maybe just to throw some gratitude into the air for my existence. So I did a small sketch. sidenotes • ·· • —– • ·· • —–