Left to my own devices

Dear Dad, Today would have been your 69th birthday. I've thought about how to acknowledge your birthday anniversary. Taking a page from Chaz Ebert, who wrote a letter to her deceased husband Roger about the most recent Academy Awards , I thought I'd write a letter to you. Granted, it's a bit odd, but then that's not always a bad thing. So, it's coming up on seventeen years since you died from cancer. I've often wondered what the intervening period of time would have been like had you lived. Unfortunately, we didn't have the closest father-son relationship in the world, so if that had continued, perhaps life wouldn't have been all that different. I tend to hope, of course -- in that fantasy world that only the dead can inhabit in the minds of the living -- that we would have grown closer, healed any rifts between us, and enjoyed a stronger relationship. Your children -- including Dillon, who hadn't yet turned 3 when you died -- ar...

It's easy to self-project. How we think, how we feel, how we go about things, how we try and relate to others, it's easy to assume that everyone else should think and behave in the same way as we do. I'm guilty of this, no doubt you have been to at times. It's a constant struggle to overcome thinking in such a way, and to instead try and appreciate how someone else is, well, their own person. I think about these sometimes in the context of the relationship with my father.