feels like working on a really difficult math problem. You feel totally preoccupied with it, yet you look for distraction and really welcome all the warmth and love of other people that converge to support and share and celebrate a great life. At that level you can laugh and talk but meanwhile your brain is working away at a lower level, trying and figure out the problem. Every now and then, you realize there's no solution to the problem no matter how many times you run through the whole equation, all the last details and moments. But that realization doesn't always surface as grief. Then because your brain is working at these different levels on really tough stuff, you feel really tired of people and welcome being alone so you can think better, The way I act now reminds me of how dad often was, and I wonder if it was his brain trying to figure out the absence of his family. We grew up more than a decade after the suicide of his closest little sister, plane crash with his parents and brother's family, then car crash with his first wife, and but maybe it takes that long for things like that, a whole lifetime of working on problems without solutions, puttering around for answers.

Just thinking about this process. I downloaded all of the photos on dad's computer from the past 2+ years tonight. He was terrible about looking backward; preferred never to look at a picture he had taken. There are some good ones, and I'll post a few of them here tomorrow.