His name was...his name IS...Russell Edwin Dring. A father, once a son, and everything else one could imagine. Then more. More than even I can fathom. I struggle to speak of him in ill ways. It would be a million years before I could come up with a single place in my memory that is worthy of notoriety. Where we differed was religion, but he had faith in so many things and I have faith in many, too. In his passing I find myself with more faith rather than less.

I...I don't know what this is. Why even write it, why even speak it? Why even share it? It isn't like any written or spoken word is stronger than those thought and heartfelt, those never released into the ether. But bottling up those thoughts and emotions melts me in aching ways. We all lose loved ones as time passes, for time can be cruel and diseases crueller, but love is stronger, love is mightier, and love is something that can't be conquered. So I shall muster my own strength to express myself in these times, with the hope not that anyone is listening, but the hope that he is somewhere out there - not UP there, but EVERYWHERE - and can hear, and can feel, my deferential elegy.

A vast sea of good memories conjures a smile on my face, and keeps at bay any torrent of tears. But it is my final memory of him that breaks those walls of joy down and ushers in the grief. I called him, knowing full well he couldn't respond, and was likely not even conscious. Cardiac arrest. After warring with cancer for two years and then rattled by covid. But he defeated the coronavirus; however, his body couldn't recover. He would often tell me not to fight feeling certain ways, not to get worked up trying to change events and emotions that were beyond our control. So I don't battle my sadness. I give in to it. As do I accept his fate. And these things surged through me as I called him. Literally his last seconds, for moments after I hung up, at center a maelstrom of melancholy, we received news that he had passed. Half past nine on a Wednesday night. Thirty-some miles away. And I wept. For I wept on the phone. A crumbling mess of love and sadness. The greatest paradox.

That night stays with me. What I felt and what I said. For I said "I don't know if you can hear me. But I love you. I love you so much. We all love you. And we always will."

And I always will.




But I also wanted to say:
"Please forgive me for the mistakes I've made, and the mistakes I will make. No matter what, I'll never stop loving who you were, who you became, and who you still are."