With time comes healing, and with healing, some degree of acceptance. With time, comes the willingness to talk.

To some degree.Today, I'm making available something that has been up on cat.net for quite some time, but that I wasn't ready to share: a cancer diary. Behind the scenes, I kept track of all the entries relating to Dad's diagnosis (and everything that happened afterwards). I knew that eventually, I'd want to compile the entries and make them available in a slightly more accessible format.

But I don't read those entries. Don't really even like to think about them. Even now, when the random-entry generator turns up an entry relating to Dad's illness, I reload the page to get a different random entry.

Am I in denial? No. Denial would be easier.

Someone—a friend—described grief as the blow that strikes you from out of nowhere. As time passes, it strikes less and less often, but with equal force. I still catch myself in thoughts like, "I'll have to show Dad this when he and Mom visit next." Only afterwards do I realize that there is no more next time, and that what I have to do now is something I should've done a long time ago—look at my achievements, accomplishments, and daily life and take those things on their own merits. Not in terms of how someone else would have felt about them.

It's still difficult to not be … angry. In some ways, losing Dad was the catalyst for forward motion; to move forward with my life, with a greater understanding of its fragility and brevity. In some ways, it was a flash-freezing of the soul. (See 'Touch' for my thoughts on this, which were originally part of this entry but grew too long to be included.)

I can't promise that you will find the entries enlightening or even helpful. They are what they are. I just find myself wishing that someone could have prepared me for the life I would live as I wrote those entries; so much of what I was prepared for was clinical, not psychological.

It saddens me to think that every day, somewhere, there is another dove on another door.