Donald Dennis Carew 1933- 2017

A few days after my last blog post, my father died.

I loved my dad.  He was a good father.  I always always felt loved.

I am desperately sad that he has left this world. Ever practical, he requested no funeral.  He was cremated.  He also didn't want his ashes interred anywhere.  "It's too expensive.  Flush 'em for all I care."  With no funeral to go to, no arrangements to coordinate, I was left adrift with my grief.   For a while, the sadness threatened to overwhelm me.  In the end it just made me short tempered. I apologised to the family members living at home for my irritability.  I have all this grief and I don't know how to make it not suck so much.

With nothing to do, I just went back to work after two days.  There was no point in staying home and wallowing in sadness. What I did find very helpful was gratitude.  I was so lucky to have such a loving father.  I thought the world of him and he thought the world of me.  I had a father in whose eyes, everything I did was terrific.  I was smart, capable and talented.  Who wouldn't love having that in ones life?

Dad on his last visit to me

My dad and I shared a lot of the same interests.  Love of nature was the big one.  He used to take us on nature walks when we were really little.  Probably to get us out of our mother's hair.  We would look for wild asparagus in the spring.  Identify animal tracks in the mud and listen to bird song.  He taught me how to identify a lot of North American birds by song alone.  I was quite adept at that by the time I was grown.

He taught me how to fish and how to tie a fly for fly fishing.  He showed me how to read a river and identify spots where trout were likely to be hanging out.  If we caught a fish, he would slice it open to see what the fish had been eating.

If the fish weren't biting, we entertained ourselves in other ways. We scooped the beds of rivers and he showed me the little stick and pebble houses that caddis fly larvae made for themselves.  We caught little sticklebacks.  I remember bringing one home with me and keeping it in an aquarium for  a bit.  He taught me how to catch crawdads.  I got really good at that. It turns out that if you come home with a bucket full of crawdads you will not have the hero's welcome you think you'll have. 

Of course there were a few times when our relationship was tested, but I think that happens in many relationships.

The last photo of us together.

 I called him on Sunday.  I sometimes couldn't wait to speak to him and would call him in the middle of the week but it was rare for me to fail to call him on Sunday.  Sunday evenings now suck a bit because I still catch myself thinking I should call him before I go to bed.

I am enormously grateful that I had you as my dad.  Most of the time the gratitude wins out over the grief I feel.