It's Things Like This . . .

My step-mom, my youngest sister, and her boyfriend are on their way down from Missouri right now. My dad isn't with them.  We love it when they come down to visit but it's always hard. It was this time last year when my dad came down for the last time. It isn't easy to think about the fact that he won't be coming through that door with the rest of them.
When my dad came to visit, he slept on the couch.  Except, it is a couch with recliners, so he would sit in one of them and sleep.  He had to have a fan on, even in the winter.  I just moved the floor fan out of the living room last month. I decided it didn't need to be there anymore. He said that our TV was exactly in the right spot so that he cold see it perfectly from that spot on the couch.
He would wake up at the same time the girls got up, even if he had driven late into the night to get here. It's a six hour drive and he usually wouldn't want to miss work so they would leave around 5:00 or 5:30. After several stops (he'd tease my sister that she had to stop and get ice cream five or six times) sometimes it would be 2:00 or 2:30 AM before they would pull-in the drive.  Even though PawPaw had to have been exhausted, he would be up bright and early to see the girls.  Imma would usually sit on his lap and watch cartoons or play on the couch next to him.  Lucy loved to sit on his lap, too.  She'd bring in her blankets and her bottle and curl-up.
It's things like this, the normal things that occur in life, the events we look forward to, the places where he is missing.  Those are the things that make me really miss him.  Lucy talks about him all the time.  Every time she sees his picture, "It's PawPaw!"  Imma still calls a popular character on a television show PawPaw every time she sees him because, in her mind, they look similar.  I know eventually it will get easier but we still have a lot of firsts, a lot of events, a lot of moments to get through before that happens. We'll be very happy to see Grandma, Aunt B, and Uncle Cristian, but we won't be able to get past the feeling that everything is not quite as it should be.