Excerpt: Coming Home

From 7 Days:

Journal Entry: January 5, 2006

What do I do now? It's all over. He's gone. And I'm just supposed to go on with my life? I'm supposed to just go out for a drink after spending the last six days in the hospital? I'm supposed to just...what? I don't know what I'm supposed to do. There is no rule book. There is no manual. There is no one who has the answers. No one who has done this before. No. One. None.

Pulling my hand from my father's cooling chest was almost harder than watching him die. Almost. Once he was gone, I was left to return to my life. I missed work to be with my father while he was sick. I took him to the hospital during my lunch hours. I left work at exactly 4:30 p.m. to visit him in the VA Hospital. I arrived at work religiously at 7:15 a.m. to ensure that 4:30 departure. Now that he was gone, what would I do with my life? What would I go back to now that he was finally gone?

The life I'd come to know over the previous year had vanished with my father's death. There was nothing to get back to. My relationship had begun to fall apart long before my father fell ill. It was just a matter of time before that met its death, too. Reese spent the days between my father's death and his funeral comforting me as best she knew how. And in the days after his funeral...well, she spent those days withdrawing from me. And all I could do was cling tighter, feel her slip through my fingers like sand, and fear I would not be able to stop her. Because then where would I be?