Acceptance

Photo by Daniel Plumer

John David Williams

July 18, 1940 – November 6, 2021

The poor man’s Tony Stark.

A piece of us dies when we lose a loved one. That was their piece anyway. It belonged to them.

Seems impossible to reconcile with the fact that someone is gone when they die, and I don’t believe there’s ever any “getting over” this kind of thing, their death; their transition; their passing. There’s no getting over it because you never forget them. There’s just “accepting” and “adjusting” once the initial shock of their absence from our lives eventually fades. We accept living the rest of our lives without them, and we adjust someway, somehow, for our own reasons, and continue living. The place in our hearts that those people filled, though, will always remain empty. That’s how it goes. If you’re left feeling especially hollow after losing someone, I suppose it means you had an incredible relationship with them.

I have a giant crater in my heart since you died, Pops. We had a lot of good times together.

You lived a long life, a solid 81-year run, the last quarter of which you lived with a pig valve attached to your heart to keep you alive. The price of that heart surgery, the one by which you acquired that pig valve, came at a heavy physical cost to you over the years, a slow deterioration your health. You weren’t the model of good health these past few years, but you always kept your spirit up. You kept that fire burning through all the stuff with your heart, and through all of these recent issues with your lungs and the cancer. You kept it positive right up until the pump driving your cardiovascular system decided to finally shut down, and that was it. That’s a wrap. 81 years of living came to an end, just like that.

Your spirit transcended this realm, and has, no doubt, already traversed the cosmos, shot past Andromeda and whatever exists in the spectacular beyond. Did the pink hippos guide you? Were there other large flamboyant mammals floating around in space?

Where has your spirit has landed? Have you settled in somewhere? You were never really the settling type. Maybe now that you’ve exited the third dimension and entered the fifth, you can be in multiple places at once.

Wherever your spirit maybe, we’ll carry the fire here for you.

Love you, Pops.

2013