I was going to have to do this. <\/p>\n
I went out to dad’s gravesite today, cleaned the stone, chased away a few spiders, discouraged some lichens. <\/p>\n
I have been in my life, fortunate enough to have known a handful of truly great men, men whose lives and accomplishments were admirable beyond belief. <\/p>\n
I feel I have walked in the company of saints. <\/p>\n
My father was one of those.<\/p>\n
Everyone who knew him felt the same, to a man. <\/p>\n
I was lucky enough to have gotten to know him, and even get past being an asshole kid and treat him as a friend, before he died, long before his time, at age 57. <\/p>\n
Today I stood at his grave and longed for him, wished he was here to answer my questions, to mentor me as only he could, to be Dad. I wished he could feel my daughter’s tender cheek against his stubbly face. I wished my daughter could know him, be with him, walk hand in hand with him. <\/p>\n
I bear a horrible and awesome burden, the burden of raising a child. Most times I have no idea what I’m doing. Dad was incredibly wise in that respect. <\/p>\n
I hope I can be to my daughter a small portion of what he was to me. I pray that he acts as her guardian angel. <\/p>\n
I miss dad. I miss him so damned much it tears me up inside. It’s tearing me up to type this now. <\/p>\n
I guess I’m lucky that he wasn’t a bastard, someone I didn’t care less about, but he was an incredible man, and if I’m ever a tenth the man he was I’ll be a giant. <\/p>\n
If you love your dad, if he means anything to you, I hope you were good to him on this day. All i can do, is clean dad’s headstone, and try to raise my daughter as best I can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was going to have to do this. I went out to dad’s gravesite today, cleaned the stone, chased away a few spiders, discouraged some lichens. I have been in my life, fortunate enough to have known a handful of truly great men, men whose lives and accomplishments were admirable beyond belief. I feel I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}