On Thursday June 18th I had just settled in for my usual late afternoon nap, when there was a knock on the front door. I peeked outside, and could see a cop standing on our front porch, his car parked across the street. For a momentary flicker, I was excited (neighbor drama?! Our street is so boring!). He asked me my name, I confirmed it was me, and then he said something that I never would have expected: that my father had died. Apparently the police in Emmett, Idaho, where my father had been living, had contacted the police in my city to inform me of his death. I immediately burst into tears, and ran upstairs to call my brother first. Then I called the Emmett police.

My father does not have a true reason for death on his death certificate. They put pneumonia, because “he had a lot of dirty tissues on the floor” when they found him. A few weeks prior to this, I had talked to my father and he told he that he was “throwing up a lot”. I encouraged him to see his doctor and call me when he had more information. He’d had a similar conversation with my brother around that time, only his symptom was diarrhea, and he had told my brother, more alarmingly, that he was too sick to go to the doctor. This should have been a red flag for us, but it’s not unusual to be sick and certainly I’ve been too sick with flu to go to the doctor. There was nothing really wrong with our father, long-term–his conditions were managed by medications. If anything, I worried that he would have a stroke, due to his chronic high blood pressure.

I think what happened to my father is what happens to many, many elderly people who live alone and don’t have someone to check on them every day: he became too ill to get up off the couch, couldn’t reach his phone, and died of dehydration. And it’s fucking tragic. How tragic that he didn’t reach out to us. How tragic that he didn’t reach out to ANYONE. Or call 911. I know he didn’t take his life because Lucy was with him, and he never would have left his beloved dog to fend for herself. Lucy was fine–and adopted out to a local shelter. If I hadn’t just bought myself a new puppy just weeks before he passed, I would have taken her myself, she was always such a sweet girl.

Grief is weird. It catches you off guard, and hits you whenever it feels like. Like when I was gathering together pictures of my Dad to make my social media post, I found a particularly cute picture and thought, “I should text this to Dad.” And then–realized. No more Dad. Dad is not in this world anymore. One parent, just blipped out of existence. Or I was watching a video on Instagram of a woman who said she was having a Dad Day, she was going to be a Dad for an entire day–and the first thing she did was get in a white Porsche, which had always been my Dad’s dream car. So I got sad all over again. And I do seem to spend more time in the backyard, meditating to the sound of the wind through the trees. And I do talk to him. He made a lot of bad decisions in his life but I still love him. And he knew that.

I dragged my mother to the local Pride festival the weekend after he died. We did a little walk-through. She seemed amused.

As a family earlier in the month, we all attended the Pride parade in Snohomish, where my friend Lauren had designed the Pride poster and was raffling off the original painting that the poster was based off of.

My artist friend Georgia marched in the parade as Glenda, the Good Witch. Her dress got SOAKED. It POURED RAIN!

I added my rainbow tee to a little rainbow tennis skirt (shorts built in), did some rainbow eyeshadow, and added rainbow hair tinsel. As I’m looking at these pictures, I just remembered that I dropped by another Pride festival by myself, but I can’t remember what city it was in! Not Seattle. Huh. Well, June was weird.

You know what’s helpful for grief? Little baby dogs! Timmy is glued to me wherever I plant myself. I bring him to work and the patients go nuts. EVERYONE loves him. He only loves me, and seems to like Josh and my mom, and he sort of tolerates everyone else. So maybe he’s not going to be a therapy dog. But he can be MY therapy dog.

Goo had eye surgery the weekend before I promised my brother I’d go to the Tri Cities to watch his daughter’s ballet recital, so I ended up taking the little redhead and we made the 4 hour drive together. It was HOT, and my brother’s family had rented out an Air B&B for everyone to swim at during the day, so we got roasted. The recital was cute. It’s always nice for me to see my brother. How tragic that less than a week after this picture was taken that our father died.

As it turns out, there is very little merch in the world for Piebald (Timmy’s coloring), long-haired mini dachshunds, so I had to create my own! I made up these little stickers. My mother recently watched both dogs while we went on our family vacation and came up with a new slogan for Timmy after he pooped and peed all over the house in our absence: TIMMER DON’T CARE. Tee-shirts, maybe?

Well, life DO go on, don’t it? I continue to paint silly little pictures and sell them. The boys and I try to spend as much time in our little inflatable pool as possible. I try to go to Pilates once a week. We do our best. Ta ta for now.