This admission is hard to say, but I hope it’s just some natural part of living on and getting older…

My feeling of personal connection to my parents has faded, lessened, a lot. Dad died in 1989 (over 32 years ago as I write this), and Mum died six years later. I just don’t feel that strong an association to them anymore. It’s almost like losing some personal faith. They just feel like ghosts to me now.

They’ll always have been my parents and I can easily say that I loved them each, once upon a time, but it’s been so damned long now since they each died that it almost feels like my living with them or knowing them happened to some other kid, in some distant other life.

I think I’ve been without them now for almost double the time that I was ever with them, including times we were living apart while they were still alive. I’ve been writing about them and forming my web shrine to them here for about 25 years now. That’s longer than I knew my Dad (23 years) and it feels longer for Mum: she left our home to be permanently hospitalized when I was about eleven, and we saw her less and less as the years passed.

Maybe time just erodes everything, and maybe old family times have no special bedrock that can withstand it. It’s frustrating to feel my kid family realities starting to just slip away, but nobody is gladder than me that I started writing it all down here, before time takes more of those old feelings and memories away from me.

Friendships with the living do slip away, so of course one-sided posthumous relationships with dead family would slip away too.

I’ll get my pride back to full strength and accept how life and time change everything.