Grief...

It looks different, daily.  Monday I cried a lot.  Tuesday I was just low key pissed off all day.  Today, I am not sure, I guess I haven’t been up long enough to tell which way my emotional range is going to go today.  I guess today, I kind of feel numb.  And tired.

Grief feels like a houseguest that has arrived unannounced and has no definitive plans to leave.  There is a certain low level anxiety about their stay...how long will it be?  How much will be asked and required of me?  I do not want to attend to this other person right now.  That kind of shit.

But the house guest remains, no matter what I prefer or want to the contrary.  I feel like I get brief moments of reprieve when my uninvited guest goes on a walk without me, or I am able to eschew them and go about my life without a constant feeling of need to entertain.  Grief occupies everything and nothing all at once.  It consumes you while also filling you up in a way and manner that never satiates you, but leaves you feeling barren and starving.  It is a desperate feeling at times, and other times, it envelopes you in a warm embrace that almost, almost feels good.

It is very isolating, like your unwelcome house guest is also very jealous and demands all of your time.  Like a dependent relative who has thrust themselves upon you...and now is sucking the life out of you one idle chit chat after another.

This time, grief feels different.  I feel taxed, with this looming knowledge that I will never be the same once he is gone.   It isn’t like heartbreak, exactly, that you know you will recover from and likely find yourself wondering what you ever saw in your lover to begin with...This one hits differently.  This one, this primary, foundational relationship in your life will forever change you, you will forever be altered, and fatherless.

I know I shall move through the stations of grief:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  I know I am already in this process.  And that each is not a passage to the other but instead, this great mixing bowl of stations that I will encircle day after day.  And this process will go on, long after he has passed.  I am never going to be done with this grief.  But I will be ok.  I will go on.  I will be altered, changed, transmogrified.

And when faced with such challenges, I think it best to just be here.  Allow what occurs to come and not cling to anything at all.  Him, his life, this process, the surety I seek in my every day life.  Instead, untie myself from expectation and demand.  And trust this process has a path, and my task is merely to walk it.

I am immensely grateful to have the faith I do today.  I am grateful for every day of the 56 years I got to spend with my dad.  I am grateful for the recovery and healing that took place in our lives and relationship.  And I am grateful for this process of grief.  And to be able to see death as a friend.  That death is not this rapacious creditor coming to collect my dad as some sort of ransom to my nice little life. No, instead death is appearing to me as a benevolent guide whose task, a thankless task, is to pry my father from this world and usher him to whatever awaits him on the other side of this life.  This idea brings me immense comfort and peace.

I will be sad.  I am sad.  I will cry and hurt and laugh and love.  I will be present for the exhalation and the pain.  Praise and grief coexist together, always...

Again, still...