Seasons turning, and the longest of Februaries.
It's been a year this morning since my grandfather-who-helped-raise-me died. It's been three hundred and sixty-six days, in fact, because not only is February the cruelest month, last February was excessive enough in its cruelty to drag on longer than usual. According to Victorian mourning tradition, the definitive Western example of excessive mourning and foundation of much of Gothic subculture, it would be socially acceptable for me to start wearing colours other than black or grey or possibly even purple, now. I wouldn't particularly want to anyway; that's not my style. But I did wear a Batman t-shirt with the logo peeking out of my nice blazer to work today, because coded dead parent internet jokes: that's exactly how classy I am.
What the irreverent commentary does nothing to hide is that I've been through a lot more this year than I expected, dealing with my family in the wake of his illness and death. Most of what I've been through and what I've learned centers around what grief isn't. It isn't sadness over the loss of the joy a simple good person brings to your life, or the shock of surprise at their passing. It isn't coming to terms with your own mortality. One ends up grieving without any of the former and a healthy dose of the latter. It is unpacking all of the impact a person has had on your life and the lives of others, alone, and with those people. It's deciding what to let rest with them, and what to carry on. I've slowly left a lot of my fears behind to rest with him, ones I hadn't even known I was carrying with me all these years, left the little voices berating me for my smallest failures and exhorting me to conform to a disappeared world as imagined by a small, scared man who broke trying to do right by his family. I'll keep the knowledge from a discovery of secret photos and letters in his desk that convinced me he ever really cared, though I will never pretend it was ever any more obvious. I'll keep the work ethic and love of puzzles and stubbornness that perhaps ironically helped me escape his world. I hadn't expected to mourn a person whose influence on me had been so subtly abusive I barely let myself be aware of it before they died. But in all the months of cleaning out the house, of helping out the surviving members of my family as best I can, in all the teary nights of processing my own issues at my nearest and dearest, I have. The bulk of my emotional work is done, right on time as the seasons are finally turning around again. Spring, please come on out whenever you want.
What the irreverent commentary does nothing to hide is that I've been through a lot more this year than I expected, dealing with my family in the wake of his illness and death. Most of what I've been through and what I've learned centers around what grief isn't. It isn't sadness over the loss of the joy a simple good person brings to your life, or the shock of surprise at their passing. It isn't coming to terms with your own mortality. One ends up grieving without any of the former and a healthy dose of the latter. It is unpacking all of the impact a person has had on your life and the lives of others, alone, and with those people. It's deciding what to let rest with them, and what to carry on. I've slowly left a lot of my fears behind to rest with him, ones I hadn't even known I was carrying with me all these years, left the little voices berating me for my smallest failures and exhorting me to conform to a disappeared world as imagined by a small, scared man who broke trying to do right by his family. I'll keep the knowledge from a discovery of secret photos and letters in his desk that convinced me he ever really cared, though I will never pretend it was ever any more obvious. I'll keep the work ethic and love of puzzles and stubbornness that perhaps ironically helped me escape his world. I hadn't expected to mourn a person whose influence on me had been so subtly abusive I barely let myself be aware of it before they died. But in all the months of cleaning out the house, of helping out the surviving members of my family as best I can, in all the teary nights of processing my own issues at my nearest and dearest, I have. The bulk of my emotional work is done, right on time as the seasons are finally turning around again. Spring, please come on out whenever you want.