In Light of my Father

In the aftermath of my father's death before Christmas and
the memorial nearly two months later, I have begun to figure out
that there is a reconfiguration taking place in me, a realignment
of polarities.
The gravity well of his presence once defined
the positive and negative return posts in the ellipsis of my comings and
goings, the alternating currents of my personality and character
around which I would then make my many ways between the equally powerful
bi-polarities of my mother. She, still alive, like me and my brother and
sister have just begun to sense ourselves in his absence.
Dissociated,
because the resonance that came from him actually being here has been lost,
I cannot simply re-conceive him as memory or even spiritual presence, because
there is an absence now as real as he alive had been. What is left can be
traced by memory, or re-envisioned as eternal,but even then
the imagination has no cure for flesh and bones and blood reduced to ash.
Dad,
tangibly gone, however present he may still be, has left me searching for
him in spaces he once occupied, and in those places instead, I catch glimpses
of me as I was.
I disturb me.
I dissolve myself through ache, shades of my father's own darkness still
haunting corners of my psyche, like ghosts released as I disintegrate.
In the shadow of his death, they remain, lost children, ruins of selves, forgotten, freed now.
Left behind,
the broken me's are gathered up as my father becomes light, his shadow
only slowly no longer shading me from those lost selves, burning them into one, revealing me as I am, other, waiting to be born different into the circumstances and incoherencies I have lived with for so long.