31..and My Dad is Gone

I have not blogged for several months. I think I can be forgiven, or at least forgive myself, for this. My father went to the hospital in late November for "ulcer pain," which was found to be pancreatic cancer. A short two-month fight later, he passed away on February 6. He was only 58 years old. I am basically shell-shocked. I have so many different feelings inside of me about it, but probably the main things I want to express on my blog are 1) how much his remorse and repentance and my forgiveness of him affected our relationship and 2) how much I relied on Jesus to get me through those two months. I almost feel kind of bad saying that, because, um, HELLO. I was not the one suffering pancreatic cancer. He basically couldn't eat a meal for that entire time. But let me just say how much it eased my fears, my worries--how it gave me hope in the face of his dire circumstances, the ability to be honest with my father about his own relationship with God, about how I felt about him and our relationship, and how Jesus helped me just relate to a dying man. I read several times about Jesus' reaction to Lazarus's and John the Baptist's deaths. I went through a ton of photos yesterday, thinking about how He worked so many things out--the biggest one, being led by Him to move to Tennessee, which was an hour's drive away from where my dad had moved 8 months prior, and how my dad ended up in our city's hospital that entire time. I was literally just a 20-minute drive away from him that entire time, and his last week of life, just a 5-minute drive, since they had transferred him to a hospice just down the road. O_o I mean, for real. And mainly, how God mended our relationship and enabled us to have a real FRIENDSHIP as I grew up. I haven't had time to fully process or grieve, but I think this will take a long, long time. I miss you, Daddy.