Painting dark lilies.

On Monday it will be ten years since my Dad died and I still can't really look at a seldom seen photograph of him without crying.   I wish he was still here.

Ten years though is a long time, the normal grieving process is apparently three, and I am past weeping into my coffee and running away to Thailand.

I am past divorcing my husband in a depressed and desperate search for something, I am past staring silently at the wall in the mental hospital and painting pictures of dark lilies.   I don't even think about him all that much anymore and yet not a day goes by without him being in my mind. I don't try and call him like I did when he first died, and I can look at the photograph of him in my living room because I see it everyday and it has become almost unnoticeable.  But love is a strange and wonderful thing and sometimes even when you have forgotten about it for a while it can suddenly overwhelm you again.

I'm still angry with him for leaving us all, too early, too selfishly.  Addiction is a terrible thing and it stole my father from me just when he was about to begin a delightful part of his life.

So if you still smoke, you should stop making excuses and just stop.  My Dad made excuses. ' I love it, it feels like losing a member of the family when I stop.  I'll quit next year.  Next month, next week.'

Next day.

Not now.

And then he fell off a ladder and broke his collar bone and that was the beginning of the end, because  he found out he had a brain tumour.  A great, big, fat brain tumour, that was messing his brain up and making him fall over.  When he found that out, he quit smoking, right there, right then.  But it was too late because that brain cancer was secondary cancer;  the primary cancer was in his lungs and had already started to kill him.   So he started smoking again.

Might as well when you've only got a year to live.