It’s been almost two years since dad died. What I thought I’d prepared for I hadn’t and what I didn’t know I’d prepared for I had. Isn’t that always the case, though. The process of learning to live is a far messier one than I’d planned for.
Grief. It’s such a small word for something so enormous. In the last two years I’ve thought so much about it’s physical manifestations, it’s emotional weight, and it’s little tendrils that reach out and prod those closest to you without even knowing they’d left my tangled vines.
So many people with hearts ripe with good will and empathy did all they could for me and so many didn’t because death is scary and can render even the most eloquent speechless. I bathed in this grief, let it permeate, really leaned into, because as far as I could tell, it was right. And I don’t know what’s right. Do you push on and bury it so that it can dissipate in it’s own way without your interference, or do you partner up with it and tend to it’s every need, making sure your grief is so well tended to that it takes up residence in you and weaves itself into your new personality.
The line I toed was one of inviting this new word into my life wholeheartedly like a new family member but also trying to tend to those family members I already had. Those tendrils had touched everyone close to me and while I was deep in the thick of the tangled vines I didn’t see those tendrils growing around the ones I loved too.
With emotional growth comes the ability to be emotionally devastated, thus my children’s recent foray into the understanding of their grief. They speak to him in the wind. They go through old pictures and videos. They cry. So many things about this aren’t fair but that his death and the pain that goes along with it is still just starting to take seed in my children is an atrocity on its own.
Two years. So much has happened in two years yet I can still hear his voice and smell his smell. I wish so many of my senses weren’t caught up in the last months of his life but his death was part of his life so I can’t and won’t forget it. I can go a day without thinking about him now but sometimes I can’t go a minute. I dwell on if this feeling is a fault or a feature of this direction I’ve chosen to go. I dwell on the exaggerated anxiety I feel when I find a lump I can’t define. I dwell on the damage grief can do to young and vulnerable minds. I dwell and I dwell and I dwell but still I go on.
Soon after he died a friend of mine hugged me, looked me dead in the eyes, and said “we live for the living”. That was enough to get me through. No matter what, I was needed. If my life was solely to be caring for those around me while I wallowed in this, then that’s the way it would be. And for a while, it was.
I saw a diagram a grief counselor once made showing a dark squiggly stormy looking spot in the middle of the paper. This was grief and it took up every part of the circle. What stuck with me is that over time, the circle got bigger but the big scary stormy looking spot stayed the same size. My grief has not diminished. I have gotten bigger. My heart can take more. My brain can process more. I am not alone and I have so much to give. I’m not overtaken by grief. There is grief in me. It molds decisions and changes perspectives but it does not define me. Today “live for the living” means something much different than it did two years ago. Today, I am part of the living. I live for me.