Ten years have passed since my father died. Ten years! Shortly after he died I wrote my first blog post. It was called, “A Landslide”.

In that post, I commented about how my Dad’s death felt like a landslide and I was suffocating under the debris.

I ended that post by considering what happens, over time, when a landslide occurs. In time, flowers push through the new earth and life returns.

It feels surprising to me that my father has been gone ten years. I don’t know how it’s possible.

I miss his physical presence. His ability to take over and take up a room. I miss his self-confidence. I miss his absolute complete amazement and appreciation of me, my husband and my kids. I miss knowing that if I ever got in a pinch all I had to do was call my Dad. He was a force to be reckoned with and that force was always on my side!

When my dad died, I poured my energy and time into my mother. It seemed like the best way to honor him and it helped ease the grief. Now they are both gone and I find this anniversary has things to reveal to me.

Ten years reveals that the loss can still make me cry. When I stop to think about it, it breaks my heart that they aren’t here.

But ten years reveals something else as well. I don’t constantly feel the physical separation their deaths caused like I used to. They have somehow become a part of me. It is as if they move and walk with me. I take them wherever I go.

Ten years ago I had hoped that life would return after the landslide. And it has. It’s a different life than before, but life is indeed present. Like the layer of the new earth that a landslide brings, both of my parent’s deaths brought new challenges into my life. A new way of living was required.

Initially, this new way of living felt heavy and unnatural. The vacuum created by the physical loss of them threatened to pull me under. Their deaths, their final act of helping me to grow, meant I had to stand on my own two feet fully and completely for the first time. I needed to learn to push through the grief each landslide brought and discover how to live without their physical presence.

A time of laying fallow was needed. Time was spent recovering from the seismic shift the landslide created.

Now, as I had hoped, new flowers are blooming. I’ve learned to stand, then walk and even dance again.