Getting ready to Reboot 

It's going to be a slow reboot for my new life, one step at a time.

Frank X. Shaw, who has been through it, says the hole in your heart will never close. I truly believe it.

I've heard from so many people who have lost a parent, it seems the experience opened them up, and if they won't say it, I will -- made them better, stronger, sweeter. There are a dozen people who, next time I see them, will have an interesting and personally warm conversation that wasn't possible before. Another way a big tree falls.

I know my father much better this week than I did last week. So weird. But the barriers he put up, and he was a man with a very high wall around him, come down. Just going through some of the pictures he left behind is an eye-opener.

Yesterday I went through each page of a family photo album. I had seen it before, of course, but had never studied it so closely. I had to this time, to choose a picture from each page for a thumbnail. One thing I can see clearly is that I was me very shortly after birth. Even though I don't remember any of it. The relationships you have with your family form very early and don't really change. And of course those are the relationships you have with the world. I've put my favorite picture of myself in the margin of this post. What a typical Dave expression. And it's funny how relaxed Mom looks, almost as if we had arranged before-hand that I would make the face.

And my father, as a boy of seven or eight, was the same person he was a few days before the end. You can see it in his eyes, and in the tentative smile on his face.

There are a few pictures of my parents where they are truly relaxed. There's one where I'm pretty sure they just did it. For all I know that might have been my moment of conception.

Anyway, this is all good.

Update: Here's the first batch of photos that are not in an album. I'm writing scripts to do the processing. The captions were written by Dad. I'm storing the originals and thumbs on Amazon S3. WordPress is doing the user interface.