Father’s Day always sets off an extreme stretch of weeks for me emotionally; from the Final Mile of Walk 1 to today to Murphy’s passing and then Indiana’s birthday bringing up the rear of June. Totally appropriate for my Great Pyrenees I commonly refer to as Fuzzybutt No. 4.
But honestly since Hudson died last September, my days have been mostly spent in constant motion until I’m entirely empty, then do it again and again. As I have aged though, Father’s Day has become a very necessary day of reflection, and I will attempt to pick up where I left off with Part 1 and continue this story.
Hudson Part 2
I haven’t written about Hudson since last December because pretty much everything I do during my days now is inextricably tied to him. I suppose I did so by design but being busy nonstop also serves a dual purpose of permitting me to push way away the crippling pain that I keep deferring, delaying, and in part denying.
Because you see Hudson’s untimely death was as a result of a whole chain of mistakes made by several, but as his father and the one who approved all the medical decisions surrounding his treatment for metastatic mast cell cancer, I am the one who bears the ultimate cross for that. Some would say that’s self-defeating and indulgent and I offer no counter to such claims.
Indeed, I’ve burdened myself with an unshakeable guilt and regret surrounding the deaths of my three boys to cancer ever since Malcolm and my walks have been some type of personal atonement. And admittedly, a particular type of punishment I imposed on myself.
But that’s not the entirety of my own personal reasons. In my Austin to Boston walk, I truly hoped to heal my heart but within weeks of its completion, Murphy started sneezing blood. As I sat in the Oncology ward at Colorado State University awaiting a diagnosis I already knew, all hope of healing was lost.
I then sunk down into a sadness that I don’t ever think I completely recovered from and whatever God given mission I believed to be on for canine cancer, became a cruel irony. In 2014 with the West Coast Walk again, a reckoning was what I sought but the outcome was the same though for different reasons.
12 Weeks to Walk 3
I am 51 years old and still unforgiven. Twelve years after the completion of Walk 1, my heart remains inconsolable with an unavenged sadness. But I’m at the place now in life that I know to remain here is untenable.
In 12 weeks, I am going to meet a river I have never crossed. And it awaits me.
