by J.A. Jennings

Created on: February 12, 2009   Last Updated: March 13, 2009

Her dad's death nearly three years ago feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago all at once. Vivid memories of him still come naturally each day, like the times he taught her to sail a Sunfish or the larger 14-foot Vagabond at the man-made lake near their house, or the day he took her to the USC-UCLA football game and they sat in the UCLA section adorned in cardinal and gold from head-to-toe while they fended off somewhat good-hearted threats of a food fight. Her dad's softened face and somewhat gruff voice fade a little more each day though and this worries her.

Mourning the loss of her father takes twists and turns she never imagined, and more than this, grief never ends.

Helen's clearest memories of him are stalled in childhood and teenhood, the days when she lived together with her mom and dad at home. Also very clear is the moment he died. That image is stored in her brain, burned on her eyes, felt on her hands, and kept in her ears forever and ever; yet the days following that surreal morning in the hospital are blurry, empty, almost unlived. Those memories likely fragment and distort the actual events-sitting in the mortuary next to her mom, staring at the mortician with near-hatred emanating from her eyes as the insensitive man explained the final forms and necessary signatures; and in her bed, sleepless and hopeful there would be some sign to let her know her dad had arrived in his new spiritual place.

This last memory of that terrible time is the one that still haunts her. Having never experienced the death of someone close to her before, she had always found stories of ghostly visits and comforting spirits interesting and possible. Helen hoped these stories were in fact true, because they provided her with a sense of continued contact or peacefulness in the face of death. Her grandparents were all dead by this time, but their physical distance from Helen and her parents had also kept her at a mental distance. She could imagine them in England where they lived, but having only seen them ten times over the years she was more emotionally distant. She felt sad at their deaths of course. However, the losses were more her mom's or her dad's losses at the death of their parents. Helen did not know them like a grandchild whose nana or papa live in the next town or just a quick bike ride away.

The most painful loss she had experienced came at the age of thirty-two and involved someone she had never met, her birth mother, Juliette. She had given up Helen for adoption

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