I am probably repeating myself but, well, welcome to my world. I still dream of Peter, wake up with him in my mind and I suppose that is not surprising, as troubling as his death is. I can’t abide speaking of him in the past tense and get an eerie feeling whenever I contemplate the void created by his absence, the void he has entered, the void we are all headed to. I go to the blog his sister Gretl has set up and look at the photographs of Peter, his work, and sigh and get sad and angry and cry again and wonder why am I doing this to myself?

I am trying to understand, to comprehend how this could happen and how could I have underestimated how much I loved him, how much he meant to me. I know that I am also mourning the part of me that is gone because he is gone, a critical, transitional phase of my life that he fully participated in, a time when I was coming into my own as an artist. Of course I see clearly now his crucial role in that. As I said before, he helped to pull me out of a deep depression and encouraged me. As tough as he tried to appear outwardly, he deeply cared for his friends and was very nurturing. It was his own brand of tough love as well for he insisted that I, we create and would not take No for an answer. He inspired by setting the example, modeling for me how it is done.

We can never share those memories; he can never remind me of the way I was, fill in what I have forgotten about all the travels and adventures, certain details now irretrievably lost. And I am trying to assimilate the loss. Loss. Period and in general for it forms a motif in my life and I realize I am not alone in this. I heard a woman on PBS discussing the adoption of a child. She said that because of infertility she had lost the experience of having her own baby and the baby she adopted had lost his mother and father. I thought, I was born into loss too, having lost my real father before I was born, my mother having taken that experience, that relationship away from me or perhaps it was taken from her, from both of us. I can only speculate. The back story is I found out in 92 that the man who raised me, the only man I had ever known as my father, was indeed not my biological father. Of course it came as a shock and to this day, I don’t think I have entirely assimilated it. I should have a handy one liner to whip out because it’s become part of my myth, a part that fascinates people and still niggles away at and disturbs me.

Besides all that, I miss him! I miss Peter so much it hurts. I have been feeling bad, guilty that I seem to be mourning Peter more than my sister Diana but my sister-whom I always loved-distanced herself many years ago, while we were still teenagers. Peter and I bonded when I was in my early 20s and he helped me to forge my identity. He was kin, a kindred soul. Why does this all become so painfully evident now that I can’t share it with him? It’s just one small aspect of the tragedy of his death.