Monday, October 16th. So, a little less than a month from now it'll be a year since my dad died. Amazing how fast time has flown, how much has changed, how much I've grown. I'm close to be done all the paperwork. I promise to make sure I have an honest lawyer that will help my kids with everything. It's funny that only now, 11 months later, that I'm finally allowed the opportunity to grieve, finally given the chance to cry and be angry and be frustrated. And it amazes me how things come about, when they come about, like on sundays when I wanna call my dad and talk about the Pats and the Bills, or when I want to let him know about things going on in life, or to ask him what spice I should use to bring out the flavor of something. And I can't. And people will ask me what my dad was like, and I think how you should've met him, cause for all the good and bad, it's hard to put in to words. You should've tasted his cooking. It was fantastic. And that is part of what stirred this writing. This weekend I found the cookbooks, the recipe books. And I flipped through them, excited and ecstatic that they are in my possession. I can't wait to cook them, grateful that I paid attention to the pinch and pile, the dash and splash. And I think how could someone who was so meticulous, so precise, and had spent so much time in the medical field NOT been more pro-active with his health, with his doctor visits, and keeping people in the loop. And really, it doesn't matter, because it doesn't change anything. He's gone, he won't be back. Stories. We leave behind all these stories--and yet these stories are only good so long as there is someone to tell them. The months leading up to my dad's death, we'd sit and talk--he told me of all these stories from his youth, from his 20s, from his time with my mom. I remember them, as I remember most things. Sure, I suck when it comes to, "hey, thursday at 5 we're meeting at the clubhouse", but I remember your stories, all of your stories. The stories of the people I know. It's through those stories that we live on. My grandfather told me lots of his stories just before he died. I never pieced it together. My grandmother, who I spoke to every week at the end, we talked all about her stories, and it was fun to connect about my living in Newton, where she studied nursing. Stories. People pass on those stories, ever more so as they get closer to the end. The need to live on. Even if one person only tells one story of another person, that person still lives on. Eventually the stories end...eventually they fade. Like the words on a page, or the grooves in a record. Faint, faint, fainter...gone.