Again the Morning's Come, Again He's on the Run

For the fourth time in the last year, I've used a lyric from Melissa by the Allman Brothers as the title of my writing. And, for the fourth time in the last year, I'm sitting down to write about the man who named me for the song's title. In fact, these four writings have been the only times I have written anything in this past year. Writing, the thing which has always been my solace, my comfort, my therapy, has been halted by a great wall. A wall named grief.
When deep grief entered into my life almost a year ago, I had no idea how long its presence would remain or how it would change me. I am not the person I was before. Period. If I had been asked just weeks before I received the news of my father's death, how I thought his death would have affected me, I don't know what I would have said, but whatever I would have guessed would have surely been wrong.
I have always hated it when people lose someone they love and then spend years focusing on the single day that that person left the world rather than the years they shared with that person. To me, focusing on a single day of sorrow and ignoring an entire life worth of memories and joy is an insult to the life of the loved one. But, now, this. Because of our complicated relationship, so much of the grieving process has been piecing together his life in the months leading up to his death. I am haunted both by what I know and what I don't know.
I know that August 22 of last year, he drove to downtown Greenville where he received the news that the excruciating pain in his back was not just from a work injury, but due to metastasized bone cancer. It had started in his lungs, who knows when, and was now permeating the bones in back and ribs. On that exact same day, I, too, was in downtown Greenville, a city I had never before even driven through. But, there I was, just a couple of miles from the doctor's office where he was, at a children's museum with my babies, smiling, laughing, loving.
This fact, this physical proximity that, of course, I had no way of knowing, has haunted me. So close, but so, so far. Why wasn't I sitting with him in that doctor's office, holding his hand, loving him? What exactly did the doctor tell him? How did he respond? Why did he leave that appointment and not share the news with a single soul?

Here he is at my hospital bedside, summer of 1987.

I know that on his coffee table, I found a little paper calendar that he had used to count off the days by marking an 'x' on the dates as they passed. And, I know, that a date came when there were no more 'x's. And, then, I don't know. I don't know what the next days looked like for him, and when my mind goes to the dark places, the imaginations, it's almost more than I can physically bare.
I know that on October 26, 2016, I received the phone call that changed me. I know that I was a wreck when I called and frantcially blurted the news out to my aunt, his only sister, moments later, and, that too haunts me.
I don't know why losing my father hasn't brought me some sort of enlightenment, to a deeper spiritual level, to a sense of peace, but none of those things have come from this grief. I know that I feel music in a way that I never did before. I like to think that as his spirt floated away (another Melissa reference) that maybe he left a little of himself behind in me. I wish that I wasn't putting this much focus on his death and certainly don't want to discount his 62 years of life. I'm just walking this road the best way I know how, crying when I need to and smiling and laughing as much as I can.

Bearing sorrow, Having fun - Gregg Allman