Last year was a series of “lasts”.  The last Christmas with my Dad.  The last birthday celebration we would share (our birthdays are just a few days apart).  The last Father’s Day I would send him a fax with jokes he would enjoy.

And this year?  This year is the first Father’s Day that I had no one to send a funny fax to.  This year I celebrated my birthday alone for the first time.

And pretty soon, it will be the first Christmas without him.

Our relationship is on my mind a lot during these firsts and lasts.  I wonder if he felt the same crushing disappointments in his failures as I do, and what he might tell me worked for him to pick himself back up and try again.  I wonder if he felt the same exhilaration while working at a new idea, and whether there was that same niggling thought that … pretty soon the crash would come. I wonder if he felt the same urgency to get as much done on that idea right now before the crashing disappointment of hearing someone say what they thought of the “stupid idea”.

And not for the last time, I wish we had been closer.  I wish we had talked more.  I wish he had known me better, and been curious to know more about me.

My hope is that I am more curious about the people I care about than he was.  I don’t know if that is the last lesson I will learn from my Dad, I suspect there are a lot of them still waiting for me to discover them in my own imagination  and that some of the seeds of those lessons were planted by him.