It’s Been A Month
This is a personal post. Nothing to do with work, unless you count the fact that I am who I am because of my father.
It’s been one month since my father died. In that time, I’ve moved through a strange choreography of mourning and motion. The first few days were drugged with Xanax-assisted sleep and numbness. The first text I sent after it happened was, “My dad died” and I hate that I did not capitalize “Dad” or end the sentence with a period. He would have. Funeral potatoes. Legalities. Buying, according to my mother, an “appropriate dress for the funeral,” which we ended up finding, to my horror, at Talbots. Shamefully, having little patience for anyone trying to help me in the dressing room.
I spent the day after the service in bed with my mother, holding her hand and watching her sleep next to me after Jeopardy. We ate dessert for breakfast. I went back to work two days after the service. There were things to do. There are always things to do. The distraction was welcome. Those first two days back, so many moments caught me off guard. A colleague not known for small talk shared their condolences, and to my surprise, I cried twice in front of them which elicited a couple of half hugs and pats on the shoulder. It was a quiet kindness. Others don’t know what to say but offer movement and normalcy. We get margaritas and sunlight, and it all feels like a dream, this life. This wonderful life.
Random moments undo me for a second. A TikTok about a senior dog. A Jeopardy clue about the Dardanelles. The columns on my front porch that are, according to my mother, “too thin,” and her insistence that they be larger was a source of constant eye rolls between my dad and me. I pulled into my driveway the other day and broke for a second.
What’s the saying? Bad news come in threes. In the span of three months, my community lost a beloved student, I lost my dog, who gave me purpose and companionship, and then I lost my father, my best friend and my source of advice and confidence. Spring felt absurdly large, so full of endings for a season built on beginnings. But I am a compartmentalizer - or at least I think I am until there is a leak, metaphorically and physically. Death requires absurdity.
He had a list of places for his ashes. My mother, brother, and I went on a scavenger hunt for the more local places after the service. The rest will take time. He kept adding to the list as a joke and now there are 16 different locations. Seven of them involve bodies of water, which explains why I am a water baby.
I’ve been running again, mainly to offset the funeral potatoes and breakfast bundt cakes. Running has always gotten me out of my own head. I feel behind at work, though I suppose that is nothing new. Some days I think I’m not sad enough and maybe I should take a few days off to “process things” like an adult - whatever that means. And take off, like really take off, not just work from home where I do laundry and catch up on emails. (That’s an idea though, since I could use a day or two like that.)
“It’s a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering.”
I came across this quote in an excellent interview discussing grief between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper.
“It’s a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that.” says Stephen Colbert. He goes on to say that suffering allows us to exist in the “fullness of humanity,” to recognize others’ suffering, and that recognition allows us to love more deeply. And that is a gift, to be the most human you can be, to experience the full spectrum of humanity.
My father’s life was a gift. Not only for all the good things he did for others, but for every lesson he taught me, every encouragement, every piece of advice. His death, strangely and painfully, is one too. I have felt the immense love others carry for those they have lost, shared with me through kind messages or gestures, and in that shared humanity, our suffering opens us to each other and deepens our capacity to love.
Grief is the ache of love unspent, rerouted, looking for someplace to land. It’s nonlinear, something that ambushes you in aisle 15 of Kroger while looking for Lao Gan Ma spicy chili crisp, or while scrolling, thinking how much my dad would like some Reel I see as I fall asleep, or seeing my dad’s old passport with a never-used Chinese visa in it, obtained just in case I needed him. A conversation with a student about her goal to learn to drive this summer and being immediately transported to the cab of a Jeep Wrangler while my dad forced me to learn to drive a stick, on a steep hill, before learning how to drive an automatic. An email search, a Heath bar, a bottle opener from Thailand.
I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. She writes, “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” She describes the irrational part of grief, the part that refuses to believe someone is really gone. I still expect my dad to email me. I remember how many emails I was “too busy” to respond to when he was there to receive them.
I won’t wrap this up with a ribbon. There is no moral here, no bullet points to help anyone else through their own loss. We each carry our own shape of grief. I seek no sympathy and have been surprised by my own composure. This is just me putting this out into the ether through my keyboard. Maybe this is what processing is. Pun intended.
I made promises to him as I held his hand as he died. I will not break them. That in itself keeps me solid and unwavering and driven. Thank you for that, Daddy. I love you. I will always need you.
