Yesterday was the second anniversary of my dad’s death

I still get choked up time to time when something comes along that reminds me of him. I have a stack of documents right now sitting in my dining room that my stepmother gave me this past summer that includes information about his Army record during World War II, mom’s death certificate…and lots of photos.

For some reason I’ve let them sit. I don’t know why. Tonight, with a bottle of beer in hand,  I intend to sort through them.

I wrote a column for the newspaper the year my father died.  For copyright reasons, I can’t reprint the whole thing. But it says it all. Here’s the opening few graphs:

“Most years seem to come and go. Occasionally, one comes along that jars and tears at you deep inside.

“This was one of those years. This was the year I lost my Dad.

“Paul Andrew Figura, 84, died Oct. 7 of a heart attack in West Virginia. I had seen him just three weeks before after not having seen him in more than a year. We’d been apart since the summer of 2009 when Dad and his second wife, Micki, sold their summer home in Kirkwood, just south of Binghamton.

“Dad was a passionate, friendly man who was always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. He had countless friends and no enemies that I knew of. He loved the outdoors.”

Read the full column, click on this link: https://blog.syracuse.com/outdoors/2010/12/my_column_4.html.