How Life Goes

My father, William Patrick Kenny, Sr., died on a Sunday.  The Sunday on which he died was the one that fell on this very date...thirty-nine years ago. 

I know not the relationship he and I might have had but for the fact he died when I was fourteen. No one does.  In the past thirty-nine years, to my memory, I have not wasted a minute playing the "what if" game.  Once upon a lifetime ago, he was here.  Then, he was not.  

The clearest memory I have - all these years later - is that May 31, 1981 served as my personal Line of Demarcation.  Childhood ended for me that morning.  When I tell people whose acquaintance I have made as an adult that I "have been old for a long time", it is because I have been.  It is neither a good thing nor a bad thing.  It is, quite simply, how life goes. 

And for me, the tally has now reached thirty-nine years...

...and counting. 

-AK