Complete

My father holding the doll he loved named Nancy,
my mother's name.

Today is my father's birthday. He would have been 84, but instead he passed at 71 which seems quite young now. I miss my father, but I know he is not only fine, but thriving in the dimension of pure potentiality: love. He told me this when he passed, well, the morning after. He also said it and I clairaudiently picked it up the evening before as he was dying. He could no longer speak, but I kept hearing, "It's all about love!" I wasn't tuned in enough to really hear it until the next morning as I stood in the hot sun of a June morning, trying to take a walk, and breaking down when realizing this was the same route we used to take as father and daughter. "It's all about love, Sheela," I heard him say like a wisp of wind. He was exasperated; tired of saying it. How could I not grasp the concept?

No one in my family heard it, but me. I heard him saying it in the hospital room when his mouth could no longer form words. And I heard it plain as the tears on my face the next day. Recently, I attended a workshop to awaken my pyschic abilities. We all are psychic, connected, because we are one. When my father left this plane, he was still the same spirit he was while alive. He is still alive; he has simply resumed to our continuous state of non-physical.

Military retirement. He was 45 years old
and had served for 25 years.

While he was physical, my father grew up in a family that was a struggle for him. His sister broke down at 16. He left for military school as a teen. His father was a womanizer and his mother a good woman in a bad spot. His upbringing wore on him and brought him sadness, but still there was an uber joy about him.

When he married my mother in 1950, they started a family and he traded in his Harley for a Pontiac. He did not go out drinking with his buddies when she objected to it. They "got religion" in the cold of Alaska while stationed in Fairbanks. And when he left the Air Force, and then went back once my mother was pregnant with me, he left his dream of attending photography school. And by the time he flew away on June 11, 1998, he knew everything, and he knew it was all about love. And he was kind enough to stick around to tell us before he jetted away, probably on a Harley.

He and I have the same smile and enthusiasm. And we both have the same fear of finishing a task. I struggle with it everyday. I find myself doing anything but writing so today on my father's birthday, I vow to continue to be a writer and to finish my writing pieces. And when I go, I will leave signs that indeed it is all about love.

Dedicated to Frederick Reed Hastings aka Reedie Boy. One of his favorite songs.