My Dad, Pt. IV

As before, I am going to share some personal things that involve death and concern a parent. So if that is a tough thing for you, this is a place to bail. My point in sharing this is because writing it helps me and it is my own process for what I am feeling, but also to normalize the feelings around something like this. There is grief involved, so proceed with care.

Tomorrow will be two weeks since my dad died. Grief and mourning are very weird things to go through. On the one hand, there are moments where I almost briefly forget that he has died, and I am having to relive the whole process all over again, but then there are other times when the loss is much more at the forefront of my mind. We held the service for him this past weekend, and the ten or so days between his death and the service seemed almost abrupt, despite the amount of scrambling and planning to try and get everything together. I had intedned to try and write more the week of his service but between my work schedule, planning the service, and writing for the service it just becmae an impossible task to find the space and energy to write about my feelings more than I already was having to brush up against them with the eulogy, obituary, and assorted planning moments. I figured all of us would wind up falling apart after the service, and I guess in our individual ways, we faced it, maybe just not as viscerally as I had anticipated.

Writing obviously has helped me process my feelings, and so many of my most emotional moments of this have come as I write about the loss I feel and how those emotions are coming up in various ways. The playlist we put together for visitation and the reception at our family home is a landmine of emotion. As I have listened to music that I shared with Dad or that he introduced me to, I find myself becoming suddenly tearful realizing I will never get to share that song with him again, or recalling being in the car as he drove and heaing Les Brers in A Minor, and how now my kids are in the car as I drive them, and they hear it. Honestly, the circle of life sucks to live, even if it is a great song. Thank you so much, Elton. I knew these days were an inevitability, but had not expected them as soon as they arrived. The weird part is how life just chugs right along. In some ways, it feels inauthentic, like everything is perfectly fine and normal, but the reality is that I am more floating on this raft of an emotional ocean. There are moments where I am floating along, peacefully and with sunlight beating down on me with a faint but pleasant breeze, and then suddenly there is a swell of a wave, a dark, threatening cloud, and now I am riding a naturally occuring roller coaster as it rises and falls, twisting and putting me through the waves, and somehow only my face and shirt wind up wet.

I have always said to clients that funerals are for the living, so they can get closure and say goodbye with a palpable moment they can delineate. I still hold true to that, but as a direct family member, I felt like we had to make it a perfect sendoff, making sure to capture who Dad was so those who knew him could say their goodbyes and so those who didn’t know him could have a sense of him to carry with them. I got a lot of compliments on his obituary and then again on the service and his eulogy. On the one hand, it is nice to know I did well and captured him in words (as did my sister), but it is also a weird feeling to know that you are celebrating the goodbye to someone being done well. More than that, having to be social with so many people coming to pay their respects, when I want to be hidden under a blanket and be able to just be sad, was a lot. Most of the people who came to the service have known me my entire life, or damn near it. Hearing them offer condolences and sharing memories was nice, but also a death by a thousand cuts. They served as a reminder that I shared Dad with so many others and that it was not just me who had wonderful moments and experiences, that those were pretty damn universal with my dad. But also I don;t have the capacity, I am trying to hold it together the best I can to get through the service, to be with my kids, to show up with clients, who may be going through similar issues, or who ask about Dad knowing he has been in the hospital and trying to not let my grief become an elephant in the session. I can be sad but also show up and be present and engaged with other people and their own hurts and grief. I just don’t want them to feel any duty to me in my grief. It has always been easier to work with other people on their emotions than to have to feel and discuss my own (which is why I am trying to be so present with them outside of work). Like Taylor Swift said, “you’re on your own, kid, you always have been”.

While I know I have love and support all around me, from so many people, I am alone in my specific grief. Again, “everybody grieves different” and I am the only one feeling my exact mixture, even if it may be similar to most others. The death by a thousand cuts of everyone saying they are sorry for my loss, the words are well-intentioned, but also lack oomph. It feels “thoughts and prayers”-y, but not as hollow, just like reflexive, because we don’t know what to say exactly. There is not a lot to say when someone experiences a close death of someone who means so much to them, so I don’t have any ill-will or bad feelings, but it also feels like at a service I am just taking on other people’s pain to give them respite. I know it isn’t that, but the introvert in me wants to just hide; instead, I am literally front and center, so double the discomfort.

I recognize this may be a bit more of a ramble than usual, but it is also the culmination of weeks of feelings, and it is just some of the earliest stages of my own grieving process. I know that the next year will be one of “firsts” I never wanted to have. The first batch of birthdays without him, the first holidays without him, and every moment I want to share with him is another thorn of grief reminding me he is not here to call or test and share. There will be tears along the way, inappropriate jokes, and a lot of love, but it is not always going to be easy, and I am not always going to feel okay or comfortable. The big moments in life going forward will have a weird pall over them now; it won’t detract from them, but like in Inside Out, it will be a mixture of Joy and Sadness. I guess it is fortunate that not only have I always been comfortable with sadness, but that Sadness is my favorite. Even though I basically watched him slowly fade, the loss still feels sudden, and it has not fully set in. I am not sure when it will, but I know there will be a day when I wake up and am not surprised and no longer feel blindsided by the words “my dad is dead”.