Trying to find a piece of sanity
People don’t like to talk about grief, particularly their own. It’s scary. But there is no way to avoid grief, particularly when you are waiting for the worst to happen. So, I will tell you about my grief.
Waiting. By definition, it means “to stay in place in the expectation of” or “to remain stationary in readiness or expectation”. It means you aren’t moving forward. And so by that, my definition of time has shifted. Life continues to move forward, but at the same time, everything is on pause for me. My dad wants me to continue to live my life, but I can’t. I live in fear of missing out on time with my dad. I live in fear of the day my world will stop, when time stops, and my dad will be dead. How can I move forward knowing the floor will drop out from under me? And it is coming. I can’t stop it, I can’t control it.
Control. By definition, to have power over, or to exercise restraining or directing influence over something or someone. I can’t control anything about this - not time, not the cancer, not my dad, not my grief. Some days I feel like I’m walking around with a weighted vest on, and I find the on-goings of day-to-day life exhausting and trivial. Then I have weeks like this week, where I feel numb, matter of fact about the situation, and I miss the feeling of sadness that I’ve been carrying around. It’s almost as though something inside me says that if I’m not sad enough, it means I don’t love my dad enough.
A list of things I have done as an attempt to have control over something:
Therapy - I can’t do this alone, and it’s going to be messy, but I can control how I chose to process it.
The wrinkles in my forehead - you would be 100% correct if you guessed I got Botox to stop the development of wrinkles in my forehead. Ugly crying is no friend to vanity.
Lists also make me feel more in control, and so I’ve been making lots of them lately - who in my inner circle have lost parents early, famous people who have lost parents early, fictional characters who have lost parents early (I take great comfort in Harry Potter these days).
Here’s another list: I have 20 first cousins, 16 aunts and uncles, 1 grandparent, 1 brother, 1 brother-in-law, 2 step-sisters, 1 step-mom, and 1 mom. At a minimum, that is a total of 43 people experiencing the same thing I am. And what about friends - of my dad, of mine, of all those people I’ve listed. And the friends who have reached out to me since learning about my dad who have told me they’ve been going through something similar, or have gone through the same thing.
That’s the thing about grief, and death, and the loss of a parent - everyone experiences it. Some of us just have to try to make sense of it before it’s even happened.
So while that big long list of people I made above and I wait for the worst, maybe something good can come from me talking about this - maybe just one person will get something from this. Maybe we can all find a piece of sanity somehow, while we adjust to this new state of being, and then have to do it again.
Thank you, everyone, for being a part of this with me.