These days, there seems to be so much loss, so many people going through some stage of grief. My friends in the medical field say they have never seen so much death and I have to concur. One heartbreaking conversation after another.

My father died twenty one years ago and that loss is still hard to hold. I suppose it might always be. One of the ways I tried to process my grief back then was writing. The following is a journal entry that I turned into a non-fiction short story.

It is my heartfelt prayer that something that follows might help you in your loss, your grieving, your release from suffering.

Last Time Fishing

Most folks up north look forward to spring because it marks the end of a long cold winter. Here in Texas, it's the last breath of cool air before eight months of blistering heat sets in. April usually sees the first days into the 90's and we know we won't see a sweater until Thanksgiving. Sure do miss January when August rolls around.

The breeze is still cool then, as we turn off the deeply rutted track to follow two faint tire marks across the top of a bluff. City streets turn into the ruins of the old Breakenridge highway; you can still see the center stripe in patches beneath the brush and gravel. Over these tire tracks in the dirt, past cattle guards, and unlocked gates (leave 'em the way you found 'em), we follow landmarks from Dad's childhood. They all look like goat trails to me, I can't tell one from another. We finally get to a fence with no cattle guard or gate; we can't drive around.

"They come up from the lake to spawn. Only lasts for a couple of weeks, but they'll hit anything right now." Dad is thinking about a fish fry. My brother Jim stains his hands with rust as he spreads the strands of barb wire as far as he can. We still cut ourselves on the sharp barbs ducking through the last fence. Dad's already winded by the short walk from the truck.

Green everywhere, that's the other way you know it's spring. Bluebonnets, Indian Paintbrushes, Black-eyed Susies make the pasture look like a western artist had gone loco. Too much color for these badlands, too beautiful and rare to last.

"There's all the channel-cat you'd want to catch on the bottom, but we don't have any live bait. Anyway, who'd want to eat that when there's five hundred sand bass waiting for dinner?" Dad's eyes twinkle as he tells us again about his new electric fillet knife. "Plugs right into the cigarette lighter. All we take home is fillets."

Dad loves gadgets.

His Honey Hole is on Little Hubbard Creek; its location a closely guarded secret. "If anyone asks you where we caught these, tell them we caught 'em right here." He makes his finger a hook and pulls it into the corner of his mouth. He would never let on where to find the best fishing in Shackelford County.

The day before, Dad tried to give us his golf clubs, buckets of balls, his best fishing reel. It's as close as he'll come to admitting how sick he is. Besides congestive heart failure, he has an aneurysm on his left ventricular aorta. Surgery is usually mandatory in these cases, but the docs won't risk operating on him. They've done it enough in the past, but not this time. He's been cut into for three bypass operations and three times as many minor "procedures." Those rubber gloved devils hadn't killed him yet, and they're not likely to now, or so goes my father's logic.

Jim's fishing off a bluff farther up, but Dad and I are stuck trying to cast under some brush. "The water ought to be boiling with those things, they love to hide up under here." He loses another lure to submerged tree limbs and tries to come up with a cuss word bad enough, then stops trying. "I can't believe a grown man is out here wasting his time like this," but then grins like an eight year old when he starts getting strikes.

Jim and I try to cast closer to Dad's lucky spot without being obvious about it.

He would have his surgery after all the following November, two weeks before Thanksgiving. Three doctors told him he'd never survive the surgery, but wouldn't last long without it either. He wanted to go down swinging, so he kept looking until he found a doctor willing to give it a go. He surprised everyone (doctors included) by making it through just fine, and recovering faster than his seventy-four year old body had any right. He lived three more months, just six weeks shy of seeing a new west Texas spring.

Dad holds up our measly string. "All that work for four little fish. That's not even worth messing up the cutting board." He lowers his voice. "Did you boys know Thursday is all you can eat shrimp night at the Beehive?" We release the fish back to catch again when they get bigger. Dad is getting tired, there's no place for him to sit, so we start the slow walk back to the truck.

We drive carefully back toward the scattered lights of Albany, Texas, to dinner in Dad and Gwen's cozy little kitchen, and to each our own lives.

People might think of spring as a time of rebirth, but it's just the opposite in west Texas. The heat of summer lasts most of the year, and winter is nothing more than a rainy patch in January. Soon these fishing holes will dry up, all the Johnson grass will turn brown and the bluebonnets will hunker down, not daring to raise their heads again until a few short weeks in April.