Right now, I am about one-month shy of the 1st anniversary of the day my Dad passed away. I keep going back and forth right now in my emotions, and many of them center around this repeating thought of ‘Okay, this is ridiculous, just give me my Dad back now.’ It feels in my heart like that is a reasonable thought. As if I’ve suffered enough, my Mom and Sister have suffered enough, it should be over now. He should be given back to us; as if in reward for toughing it out this long.
My life over the past year has been wonky, I have had so many starts and stops. I stopped writing, I started writing. I started classes, I stopped classes. Some days I felt like, I’m good now, the world is brighter, I am happier. Feeling like myself again. And then the darkness would come back up and take me down. It’s been a roller coaster ride.
I felt called to share a blog post I made a month after he passed away, since this event was the catalyst to the massive change, my awakening. Which is the theme for the final part to My Story which will be posted later this week.
Writing Through Grief
Repost from March 2019:
I am on my couch, half in and half out of denial. Writing this, I’m not sure what number attempt this is – three or four. Writing through grief – am I writing through it? The words, my words, the ones I’ve counted on are gone. Makes sense though, if I think about it, since the man I’ve counted on my whole life, who was always there for me, no matter what, is gone.
This blog, whatever I decide to call it, has been stuck in my brain since the end of January, when my Dad first called to tell me there was nothing more they could do. I broke down then – I don’t think I’ll ever go back to that Kentucky Fried Chicken. And I wanted to blog about it as soon as I heard, but there was this part of my brain that thought – If I write this now, my Dad will die.
How stupid is that thought? He was dying, my writing would not change that, he was going on hospice.
No Daddy, not hospice.
I am a writer, I write, through good times and bad. But it was stuck, right there, the blog about how I’m dealing with my Dad’s diagnosis, half written in my head, not written at all on paper and my fear that if I were to complete it and hit ‘publish’ he would pass away. What is wrong with my brain?!?
I couldn’t write anything, not even a tweet. All my beautiful words had fled from me, chased off by my irrational fear.
And then he did die. How can someone I love, be gone forever? If I’m busy, or distracted, it’s nearly like he’s not gone at all. Just doing his thing, while I’m doing mine. Until it occurs to me, and it does at odd times, that he is gone. They say time heals all wounds – does it really? Or does it simply desensitize you to them, over time that wound just becoming a part of reality. The fact my Dad passed away becomes the default reality.
This does not compute – it makes no sense – It is some serious effing bullshit.
It was a shock and it wasn’t a shock. He’s always been a bit broken, in and out of hospitals as long as I can remember – but they were always able to fix him. He was always fine. Until he wasn’t, until there was no more patching without destroying something else. Systems failure The go/no go officially no go.
Red light End of the line.
To say my heart is broken would be an understatement. It’s shattered. I can’t feel much of anything. It seems that I am pretending to function. But I can’t pretend with my writing, I was writing nothing. My words, like my father, left me.
Almost a month has gone by since that day, and slowly the words are coming back, but he never will. His passing has become a fixed moment in time that will inevitably move further and further back.
How cruel. I don’t want to be okay with that. I don’t want this to be my new normal. I want my Daddy back.
Pulling up that blog post and making the decision to share it as myself, not hidden behind a pen name has been my biggest fear the last week. My default is to avoid difficult situations. I preferred my head planted firming in the sand. It’s important though, to challenge yourself, face the hard times. Embrace them with grace. Accept them and incorporate it into your life. These pains never go away and burying them creates a host of other issues and not just mental ones. These things have a way of affecting us physically too.
Between my postpartum and the loss of my Dad, I felt a kind of rawness I’ve never known before. And it’s not something that should be hidden in the darkness. We all need to shine a light on what scares us. If we want to grow and feel whole.
One final story to share, thank you for sticking around this long!
