grief pt. 1

There’s no guide book for when you lose a parent.

From my experience, it seems like it always hurts and it’s always hard. No matter what the circumstances are.

I am convinced that a parent-child relationship is as complicated as it gets. Maybe for that reason alone is it a type of grief that is unexplainable.

No one tells you what to do, what to feel, how to process it.

No one can tell you how to move on, how to continue living your life.

I think that’s probably good long-term. It seems like an intimate and individual journey that people can ultimately only support, not tell you how or what to do.

But right now, it’s really freaking hard. It’s lost. It’s lonely. It’s feeling nothing and everything all at the same time.

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to process, how to feel okay. I’m not surprised by the confusing and conflicting feelings, but I do find myself surprised at how hard it is to get myself to do anything.

The truth is, I feel really selfish. Tonight, at least, that is.

How I’ve interpreted “always” and “forever,” words and phrases like that. I’ve always interpreted them within the perspective of my own lifetime. When my dad would tell me that he would love me forever and that he would always love me, no matter what, I heard that in the perspective of my life, not necessarily his.

To be clear, I think I always assumed (with, of course, the knowing that things can always be different and things happen) both of my parents would pass away before Zac and I. Parents before children. But I never thought about or considered how things would feel or how my perspective would shift if/when they were gone. I also don’t think that’s expected.

I guess I just expected to expect.

I expected to be able to tell, be able to see when they would pass. As if there was a bridge, a loading dock, a regression line. I guess I expected to see it coming and at that point, I’d be able to consider all of these things.

Then he was gone out of the blue. Before I could process the first hour of it.

I never got to process what his words and intentions my whole life, in our closing conversations in the hospital, what they would mean in the days after he was gone. How that would be different than what they meant when he was here.

I always thought the “forever” and the “always” were on my timeline and I’m so sad learning that they were on his.