[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his last year has been one of the best and worst of my life. Our family found a new church and have been active in our church. Tom and Alex got baptized on the same day of my confirmation to the UMC. Alex graduated high school and is applying to colleges so he can start his path to getting to Duke Divinity and being a UMC Pastor. Tom and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary and bought our first home. There are many blessing in our busy lives. I could live life or I could make posts.
Technology has not been my friend this year. The drive I had the family history on was dying and I had to move the contents of the drive to our family ever before it was lost. I wanted to make the loss of the drive into a positive experience and decided I should rearrange the genealogy into the four-color system as I moved it back. Of course, I had to work on using the four-color system on the hard copies of documents, let us say it has been a project. I go the digital art done and soon after my primary hard drive with my operating system started to fail.
I almost forced myself to make posts on Thanksgiving
The family slept through most of Thanksgiving. The day before Thanksgiving is when my family got home from West Virginia and laying my father to rest. Dad died less than a year after my Pap Pap died. After Dad died I tried to get back to the genealogy. I see received emails from cousins and want to pick up the phone to call Dad, and then that moment comes where you remember. I run into questions I want to ask him and then I remember. I think of posts and then I remember. Dad and I did family history together for my entire life. Doing it without him is sometimes unbearable.
I promised my Dad on his death-bed I would keep working on the family history. Every time I tried to delve back in like I had been before he got ill it was honestly too hard. Posting on here was even harder. It was admitting that he was gone. How could I post on here and not mention his passing but that would make it real, so I didn’t. I pressured myself into thinking I had to make a post for his passing like I did for my Pap Pap. If I did not it was disrespecting his memory. I still can not write the post for Dad. Never posting until I make that post mean never using this again or become fully active in genealogy again. That is what would dishonor his memory.
Everyone please know I will never have words to thank you enough for your prayers, condolences, and support. I want to reassure you I will not go again so long in posting and I will get to every email as soon as I can! I appreciate every one of them and am looking forward to developing relationships with my cousins, especially those that worked on our family genealogy with my Dad.
There Are No Words
I do not think I will be able to make the post just about Dad for some time. I do not think I could capture my heart or his essence more so than in his Eulogy (My Dads Eulogy and TNG Page). So I found reasons not to post, literally postponing the posts until I could move forward. As I write this I think of Eulogy I wrote for Dad. This is one of the baby steps I have to take in moving forward but never letting go.
