So today I went to lunch with my dad at this local place that we both frequent - enough for the owners to know my dad by name. Its a small place that’s technically a grocery store by law but its truly a restaurant run by an elderly couple just fifteen minute’s drive from where I live.

We get our food (and it’s the best comfort food ever, seriously), and my dad starts to talk to the wife/owner of the restaurant. Its amicable and humorous but she then tells my dad that her husband won’t be returning to the business indefinitely because he has cancers in many different places in his body. When my dad ended the conversation he turned to me and kind of talked to me about it and about his best friend’s brother (like, best friend of 30 years best friend) having a stroke and being paralyzed on his right side. I felt bad and I could see it in his eyes that he felt strained too. He brushed off these events by saying “oh well, its another funeral I’m invited to.”

I was confused by that statement - how could he brush off death and tragedy so easily? I realized he was getting to the age that people are beginning to unravel health-wise (he’s in his early 60s) and when death is sitting, knocking at all the doors around you, you kind of lie in wait.

After lunch I took him to my favorite place in the city - a cemetery off of an industrial road. Its a hilly cemetery and you can see the entire city (Buckhead, Midtown, Downtown, and Stone Mountain) from the crest. Then I took him to my favorite little house nestled in a sketchy neighborhood. He drove me around the neighborhood and showed me a few of his favorite sites.

I was really content actually, amidst all this sadness and death, I felt by showing my dad these places (I try not to show many people these things) that I was comforting him somehow. His son had come to the big city and had figured himself and his surroundings out. I knew that that made him happy. When he dropped me off I gave him a big hug and thanked him for the impromptu lunch and that I was sorry about the recent news.

Life goes on.