The Broken Heart.

How do you measure the importance of someone in your life? Particularly when they have been gone longer than they were with you. How do you place those memories and half understood moments, phrases and truths. Where do you place all the stories you have heard? How do you make peace with the person you remember, the person people describe and the absence. I still feel something... pain, nostalgia, longing? Longing to have had more time (but isn't that always the case) to have gained more knowledge, to have shared more experiences. Would I be the person I am now, had he been around? Probably not.  Would I be a similar person? Who knows. Genetics and family, nuclear influence, the eternal debate of nature versus nurture. Psychological and mental traits that exhibit generation after generation.  When at a family reunion someone says "you sound just like your father", it makes me wonder. Why do I sound like him? (HOW can i sound like him?) What are they referring to. Every year my memories of him diminish. Every year there are less people around to tell his stories, less people around who knew him.  Time passes, and he slowly becomes dust, and dust is blown away.  I am my fathers daughter, but how do we explain the behavioral patterns and attitudes when it is something so far removed. We return to the debate of nature vs nurture... and yet, even that falls flat on its paradigms. After 16 years, how can we even give credence to people espousing the comments of "sounding just like him".