Hawai’i Return

 I’ve returned to say goodbye to a friend in hospice   It’s difficult to see, to say goodbye but an honor in the same moment.  After landing in Honolulu I dissolved in tears   It is not just my friend  It is returning to my own past and all its attendant memories. I miss this place, people and cultures.  

Then it occurs to me it is also the sadness from the way in which I left in 1999.  I learned my father was dying.  So part of it is my father’s death.  That sadness and sense of being uprooted from everything I had known and grown to love and cultures I had embraced. It was being ripped, torn and up rooted from a life.  So I flew back to my father’s dying and death. The winter of my discontent, to darkness, sadness in unending rain, overcast darkness for months while I waited for my dad to die.  This is my sadness. It was my sadness but is no more.