a letter to my popskie

Dear Dad,

Today as I went on my morning run, I couldn't stop picturing your face in your final hours and the way we said goodbye. You told me there wasn't enough love in the world to show how much you loved me and I told you that you were the most vibrant soul I know. But I left. I left before the final moment, and your final breath and I can't forgive myself. I hope you can if I can't. I left and I took a plane to London and then a train to Paris to be with my two best friends, knowing that when I walked out of that door, I would never see you again. I knew that was it, forever. I hope you know that I left because I was at a point of exhaustion, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Had I stayed after already losing Sonia, after sitting by Helen's bedside in her dying hours until she agonisingly took her final breath, and after losing my mum so cruelly, it would have killed me. It was self-preservation but you may have thought it selfish, unforgivable. I will just need to trust that our love was strong enough for you to read me and decode my actions. I want and need to think that you probably did. I hope so. There will never be a more flamboyant person in my life as you, and I say that not so much in a melancholic way, but more out of absolute pride. I see so much of you in my own actions, and as I said in your eulogy last week, from now on I will be holding onto the love and refusing to allow the grief to blind me and obstruct the future and the now. It's all I have left but it is worth holding on to. You and my beloved ancestors have given me the most powerful tools I will ever need, those of survival and knowing how to keep loving.

Yours forever,

Annie.