I have been waiting for the right subject matter to kick off this blog again after a nearly a year's absence. Or, more properly, I keep waiting for the wrong subject to dissipate, to move aside and make room for something else. But the fact remains that whenever I sit down and position my hands on the keyboard, it just keeps coming up: grief.
I hesitate to write much about grief because a) I have done it in the past and b) I have nothing unique to add to the conversation about it. Googling grief returns more than 26 million entries. And somehow that still doesn't feel like enough.
My father died almost three months ago - and just writing that is mind-boggling on so many levels. The fact that he died at all. The fact that it's been almost three months. None of it seems possible to me.
Even right after my father died, I knew intuitively that I would feel better in time. That the searing weight would not press down on me forever. I knew because my mother had died ten years earlier and although I didn't believe people when they said it at the time, the grief did ebb. The pain retreated, although it never really vanished.
What I am discovering is that the weight of losing a second parent is a different animal. The sheer existential mindfuck of not having parents anymore is compounded by the loss of not just both of them individually, but them as a unit. It is the greatest sadness I've known.
And even though time has begun the healing process, there are times when it feels as fresh and raw, as painful and hopeless as the day he died. So maybe that's why, when I sit down here to try and write something again - something maybe witty or creative - nothing else comes up.
Just grief.
Because it's still there, coloring my outlook on the world. And so I decided just to write that. Just to say that. The grief is there. It is my constant shadow. It is an uphill battle that, sometimes, I feel unequipped for. And I know it will get better, because it has already, but I also know that I am profoundly changed in a permanent and perhaps inexplicable way. I know that this is life and that sadness is the price one pays for knowing joy.
I know all that, and I just miss my dad. I'm just so sorry he's gone. The world feels so, so much emptier.