{"id":3889,"date":"2023-01-15T08:45:09","date_gmt":"2023-01-15T08:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/?p=3889"},"modified":"2023-01-15T17:40:07","modified_gmt":"2023-01-15T17:40:07","slug":"long-enough-to-forget-a-little","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/long-enough-to-forget-a-little\/","title":{"rendered":"Long enough to forget, a little?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This admission is hard to say, but I hope it&#8217;s just some natural part of living on and getting older&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>My feeling of personal connection to my parents has faded, lessened, a lot.<\/strong> Dad died in 1989 (over 32 years ago as I write this), and Mum died six years later. I just don&#8217;t feel that strong an association to them anymore. It&#8217;s almost like losing some personal faith. They just feel like ghosts to me now.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;ll always have been my parents and I can easily say that I loved them each, once upon a time, but it&#8217;s been so <em>damned long<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>I think I&#8217;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&#8217;ve been writing about them and forming my web shrine to them here for about 25 years now. That&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe time just erodes everything, and maybe old family times have no special bedrock that can withstand it. It&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Friendships with the living do slip away, so of course one-sided posthumous relationships with dead family would slip away too.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll get my pride back to full strength and accept how life and time change everything.<\/p>\n<div class=\"pdfprnt-buttons pdfprnt-buttons-post pdfprnt-bottom-right\"><a href=\"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3889?print=pdf\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-pdf\" target=\"_blank\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/pdf.png\" alt=\"image_pdf\" title=\"View PDF\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3889?print=print\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-print\" target=\"_blank\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/print.png\" alt=\"image_print\" title=\"Print Content\" \/><\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This admission is hard to say, but I hope it&#8217;s just some natural part of living on and getting older&#8230; 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&#8217;t feel &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/long-enough-to-forget-a-little\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Long enough to forget, a little?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-memoirs","category-relationships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3889"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3896,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3889\/revisions\/3896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}