Death visiting your life

My father died of acute leukemia about a year and a half ago. He had been struggling with it for about 6 or so years, and had been hospitalized previously a few times and made it back. But when he got back home he needed a lot of special care. When he got back the second to last time he was hospitalized, he said that he didn't want to go through with the chemo-therapy again, because it was just such a painful experience. But he did in fact go back to the hospital and get more chemo-therapy. I think the third to last time I visited him, he was in a cheerful state, just happy to see my brother, my mother and I. The next I visited him with my mother and he was convulsing and more or less unconscious. That was not pleasant. I didn't know how to feel, so I didn't feel, basically. Then the last time I saw him, we had recieved a call from the hospital on his death. My brother came home at midnight immedietaly and all of us cried together. Strange enough, prior to recieving the phone call (I was the first to realize his death) my cable modem was out of service. Which is disconcerting to any high speed user I'm sure, and I recieved the call then. Weird couincidence?

The night of visiting him in his deathbed was very sad. I really didn't know how to feel, the concept, the idea, was and IS so abstract to me. I had only dealed with death a couple times before, and only one of those times was it for someone I knew, a friend who I had associated with.

To this day I still have a kind of sad numbness on my father's death. I have not fully grieved. My mother proposed that teenagers of my age group can often suppress their grief when something like this happens, and then later in life deal with it harder. I've avoided the grief, but I still think about him, and am constantly reminded of him. My friends set it aside, and I haven't really talked with anyone a lot about it. At this point my salvation to grieving is going to come through the act of writing.

A part of me says, however, that I shouldn't be sad. You know? That my dad would not want me to be sad. But to continue on knowing that he was proud of me. But I know that it's this numbness of feeling that ails me, a bit. As an aspiring poet, I find solace in words often.

I'm taking a poetry class at the moment, and just this week we covered the Elegy poem. I'm thinkin' I'm gonna have to write some stuff.

Gee, I hope that wasn't too sad.

Jam it back in, in the dark.