I dreamed I'd been dead a thousand years...

I dreamed I'd been dead a thousand years... and the stars and firmament above where the house had stood had changed by degrees. Giant's Mountain stood silent, quiet, still. And "the circle" which had once marked Giant's peak in evergreens, was bare. The trees you'd planted the year we'd moved to Fernwood, the year I turned 16, were enormous, spanning the acres where the hay had once permeated the morning and evening air with their aroma. Some of the trees were dead and long gone- their whispers buried by tens and hundreds of years and days, the dust of time settling on everything. I couldn't see the corn stalks or peas poking out of the garden, and the raspberry patch was a memory as distant as Byzantium- that is how far away time stood from the days I'd go out and either weed or pick with Mom and my kids. But in the dream I purveyed it all... wandering this way and that, looking for the house, a piece of glass window, a spoonful of powdered brick, a memory, a meaning- anything to tell me, "It was real... and it meant something."

You'd moved on, and I yet I could feel you still, deep in the soil as though you stood, a great sentinel watching over the lay of the land-

Early morning hours,
and I have nothing but tears and tired aches where my heart dreams of you, Dad.
There is more -- smiles and gladness
But tonight, remembering the end... grief and nothing but grief comes for me. A great wave, I will ride to the end of the world . . . looking for you

Sometimes you feel so near, and I'm grateful,
but I never see you
and the memories I have are finite.

As C.S. Lewis said of "H", his Joy - he might think and wonder on how she would respond here or there to this and that, but his mind creates his perception of her, and it isn't her. He wrote in "A Grief Observed" that he was just creating a shadow person when he thought of how she might respond or think or comment on things surrounding him without her physically there. I don't know though. He knew his great love for a few years...

and I knew you for 1,000. And besides, you're my father - which means I'm part of you. Doesn't it? I feel like

When you left us all (and there were so many of us), you took pieces of me... and those pieces are simply no more. They're in a galaxy, in another universe, in another time - just beyond a veil and a wish - a feeling - but inaccessible to me. And gone. With you.