It was two years ago tonight that we held Dad’s wake. It also would have been his birthday, so we had a birthday cake, and it featured a pretty damn good mariachi band. I find I’m still figuring out what his loss means to me; I had no time to grieve at the time, so I seem to be doing it a bit at a time, over time, at moments where his presence in my life was important to me like his birthday and father’s day and christmas. And that makes me introspective, so I hope you’ll be patient with my relative lack of scintillating commentary and verbal amuse bouche that I try to serve up here.

My view on life has changed fairly radically in the last couple of years. I’m in that time where I’m losing people, friends and family and others I know — my dad to heart disease, another to breast cancer, a third to bone cancer, another to liver cancer, while others have either fought and won or fight today, including one more close fried who fought breast cancer and won, and two others dealing with different cancers right now.

I’m finding that I’m a much different person than I was a few years ago. I’m still figuring out who that person is, but I find I really like this new person, much more than the old one. I’m finding that plans I made and things I started in motion are starting to come to fruition — and that I’m now not so sure they’re the plans I want to be the priority in my life today.

I’m realizing I started on a journey back in 2003, and while I didn’t realize it at the time, it’s transformed me. That transformation seems to be rounding into its final form now. That journey wasn’t always a lot of fun; no, honestly, it was definitely never any fun. But now that I’m here, I’m glad I made it (as if I had any choice in the matter).

So if you’re here for pretty pictures of birds or wry discussions of the challenges of the left wing lock — you’ll probably still get some of that. In fact, you’ll likely see a lot more, given part of my relative quiet has been because I’ve been introspectively trying to understand what I was becoming. But I think it’s finally time, and I’m finally ready, to write the final pages on this chapter of life, and start mapping out the plot for the next one. “and they live happily ever after” is still not a given, but whatever’s next, right now I’m looking forward to finding out what it is.