It was Matt H! I kept looking for a photo that might have caused it and couldn't find one.
Thank you all, DRs, for the kind thoughts. I didn't have a real reaction to my mother's death until several months after she was gone, but I truly miss my father, both for his kindness and his eccentricities, like not wearing his hearing aid and walking around deaf as a post, which caused him to respond strangely to things he misheard. He was traveling about four years ago with the Macbeths and Lady M asked him when was the last time he went on a plane, and he replied "oh, she went down in the Pacific and they never found her (Amelia Earhart)." I miss his malaprops, like "oldtimers" for Alzheimers or "oxiekin" for oxygen. As a naval aircraft carrier welder in WW2, he loved to visit New York and walk about the Intrepid which is docked on the Hudson. He always called it "the Interpret."
When we thought he was dying in ICU last June, I looked at him and thought, ohmigod, he's turning into Elmer Fudd. I miss his optimism about beating the cancer and living to 90 and his courage in having laser eye surgery last fall to correct his vision. When I took him last year to renew his driver's license at 85, he looked at the expiration date of 2009, and said "we have to come back in three years."
