What We Take For Granted

I had never seen a BMW X1 until I bought one. Then they were everywhere. On the road, in the parking lot at the store. I have a dark green one, San Remo Green Metallic, BMW calls it, and even that shade I started seeing everywhere. There hadn't been some too-good-to-be-true sale. I'd just become aware, and awareness is the whole thing. There's a name for it, the frequency illusion, but the name isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is that the world doesn't change. You do. And then you start seeing what was in front of you all along.

A friend came into the bakery a few days ago to buy bread. We said our hellos, but he had a sadness to his demeanor. He looked so distraught that it stayed with me the rest of my day. Later I remembered why. He had lost his wife recently, around the same time I lost my father. He was at Dad's funeral, and I remember offering my condolences for his loss.

The thing is, the act of going on when those you love have gone is taxing in a way that feels physically difficult. But the world moves on, and so do we. There isn't another option.

I don't know that I recognized that grief because I'm someone who reads people right away. I recognized it because of my own, the thing I've been carrying these past five months. Everything lately seems to pull sideways into it, no matter where it starts.

The YouTube rabbit hole is crazy, and I am always happy to go down it. YouTube pushed a travel video, a young woman in Switzerland, and something she said made me pause. There are no bad angles here, she said. Everything is beautiful. That was a familiar feeling. When that bus started its trip around Europe, our first stop Portugal, I knew exactly how she felt. It was as if I could just blindly lift my camera and press the shutter and get a great photo.

It got me thinking about the places, the beauty, I stopped seeing because it was everywhere and had become commonplace. I live, at least these days, part time on a beautiful tropical island. Blue skies, crystal clear water at the beaches, gorgeous sunsets.

And it isn't just places. The things closest to you are the easiest to stop seeing.

We were a typical Filipino family, and affection wasn't really a thing. Not the spoken kind. The hugs and the I love yous didn't come down the pike until we were much, much older, when we had kids of our own and found ourselves saying it to them, easily, without thinking, the way it should be said. And then somehow it worked its way backward. It got easier with each other. It became normal.

But I wish it hadn't taken so long.

All those years we had, and we spent them not saying it, and it wasn't for lack of love. It was just that nobody had shown us how, and we didn't know we should be in a hurry. Now my father is gone, and it's been five months and about twelve days, and I can't go back and start earlier.

My mother said something to me recently. We were talking, and she said, good for you, you still have a partner. Just like that, no self-pity in it. Sixty years with a man, and now she's the one saying that to her son.

And Lyn told me something after a bike ride. She said she likes to ride because it reminds her to appreciate the small things. The shade. The breeze. The ones you stop feeling because your head is too full of everything else.

That's it exactly. That's what all of this is. The shade and the breeze are always there. You just have to still be able to feel them.

My friend Michelle told me it takes a while. She and her dad didn't always get along, and it's been twelve years now, or something like that, and she says she still finds herself missing him.

So here's where I am. Five months and about twelve days into missing my father, and seeing things I didn't see before. My wife is at home right now. She's still here.

However bleak things get, I'm reminded to keep living for the ones who aren't here anymore. It's for them that I move with purpose through this life.