Dear Sunny

Dear Sunny,

If I told you the world is more beautiful since you died, would you understand what I meant?

You are everywhere and in everything. 

Last weekend I went on a long bike ride with my friend Lisa. It was down around Lake Erie. On Sunday morning, just before lunch, we rode on a country road where layers of wildflowers lined the road, bordering fields of mature August crops. Along this stretch I saw a yellow finch, and then another, and then so many more, flitting out of the flowers as I rode past, and you were there with me, you were each of those finches, dancing and playing alongside my bike. My chest tightened and I teared up and I had to remind myself to exhale (breathing is an important part of cycling, after all). 

A few days after your funeral, it was the Sunday I think, I was sitting on my balcony in Etobicoke, and a rainbow stretched across the sky. You were there with me in that rainbow. And this morning when I walked Frida you were a full maple tree spread across the blue morning sky and then you were a sunlit goldenrod on the edge of my parking lot.

You are everywhere and in everything.

I recently found a box you’d saved of photos from my wedding, and in it was a card that I wrote to you to thank you for being there and for being my escort and for your beautiful toast. I also thanked you for being my parent, and called you a “wonderful influence and guiding presence in my life.” I’m so glad I told you that (in writing, even!). You will forever be a guiding presence in my life, and will always be with me in the finches and the rainbows and the sunlit goldenrods.