My dad died one year ago tonight. Every morning this month I’ve said things like…In two weeks, he wouldn’t be here anymore…. In 9 days, he would be gone….In one week exactly, he would leave this earth.

And now… In the next few minutes, he would fall to the floor in his basement, all alone, and wait for us to find him.

It’s surreal. And awful.

And my heart is broken. Everyday, it splinters more. Pieces spill like flint — hard, dry, bitter pieces that skitter and scrape across the hard ground. Everything’s harder now.

I miss him so much.

I miss his mineral blue eyes, clear as heaven at high noon. Eyes that twinkled when he told a story — and he was always telling a story. So I guess they were always twinkling. They twinkled extra hard when he laughed.

I miss that laugh— a unique, slow, sort-of-horsey “hyuh, hyuh, hyuh” found at the tail end of a joke. Usually his own. Jokes only some of us ever got. Not a lot of us. Mainly just the physics fellas in our family. (Although honestly, we have three physics fellas in our family, which probably constitutes a lot in the grand scheme of things.)

But now there’s one less. And he was the youngest of the bunch. The end of an era.

And now, at the end of this full year of him being gone, I’m missing him more than ever. And my body is physically sick from the grief. It’s rebelling. No way it’s already been a year. I haven’t had enough time to wrap my brain around this loss yet.

Time should’ve stopped. The world should’ve paid more attention. Stopped spinning. Quaked or something. Been picked up as far south as his namesake geophysics observatory down in Australia

When Randall Douglas Peters fell, the seismograph in his basement should’ve noted the magnitude of loss. Registered it on his data like it registered in my body.

But still hasn’t registered in my mind.

It can’t have already been a year.

It can’t.