On Grief
I lost my father to pancreatic cancer (sort of; it was really a massive arhythmia of the heart that killed him, but it was probably induced by the chemotherapy) in January of 2006 (has it really been more than four years?). At the time of his sudden and unexpected death -- we'd been told he had six months left, but it was less than a month after the diagnosis -- I was living in Europe. I didn't go home for Christmas that year because I didn't have enough money and had a big thing coming up in February that would have been massively more difficult if I left the country for even a week. I planned to go after my event; after all, he supposedly had six months.
The night before he died, I was out with a former roommate watching The Chronicles of Narnia; Dad and I talked that evening on the phone about the movie. He hadn't seen it yet, and I told him he'd like it, but that the big fight scenes were a lot like Lord of the Rings, and so on and so forth. It was the last time we talked. When my mother called me at 2am my time, several hours after I'd gone to sleep, I couldn't believe it. I booked a flight to go home for the memorial and left four days later.
When I got back to Europe and tried to resume my life there, I began watching Narnia every day as soon as the DVD was released, sometimes twice a day, and crying and thinking about Dad.
For about six months to a year after his death, I thought about him every day, grieved for the loss every day. I cried a lot, tried to find creative expression of the grief, and thought there would never come a day when I didn't think about him.
Of course, as everyone who's lost a loved one knows, that day eventually comes. You stop thinking about them all the time, or even every day. There comes the first day you laugh without feeling guilty. The first time you can talk about the dead without crying, talk about your grief process without breaking down. It's startling and sometimes even sadder to feel that the grief is going away. It's something that I hear a lot of people have trouble letting go of, because the grief somehow feels like payment, like penance, like it's the final connection with the dead.
Tonight instead of my usual audiobook to accompany through my evening work, I put on the soundtrack from Narnia. I've done this before, and so am not surprised by the sense of loss and remembered pain that it brings up. But it no longer pushes me to tears, as it would have a year or two ago. And I think I'm okay with that. There's enough to grieve for among the living; I don't need to hold on for dear life to a four-year-old loss.
But it is nice, in a way, to revisit those feelings, to know that the hole in my heart is still there, that I am not so callous as to have fully scarred the wound over. That's comforting. I feel human because of my pain.
(...and because of that, the events in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are far more meaningful than they ever were.)
The night before he died, I was out with a former roommate watching The Chronicles of Narnia; Dad and I talked that evening on the phone about the movie. He hadn't seen it yet, and I told him he'd like it, but that the big fight scenes were a lot like Lord of the Rings, and so on and so forth. It was the last time we talked. When my mother called me at 2am my time, several hours after I'd gone to sleep, I couldn't believe it. I booked a flight to go home for the memorial and left four days later.
When I got back to Europe and tried to resume my life there, I began watching Narnia every day as soon as the DVD was released, sometimes twice a day, and crying and thinking about Dad.
For about six months to a year after his death, I thought about him every day, grieved for the loss every day. I cried a lot, tried to find creative expression of the grief, and thought there would never come a day when I didn't think about him.
Of course, as everyone who's lost a loved one knows, that day eventually comes. You stop thinking about them all the time, or even every day. There comes the first day you laugh without feeling guilty. The first time you can talk about the dead without crying, talk about your grief process without breaking down. It's startling and sometimes even sadder to feel that the grief is going away. It's something that I hear a lot of people have trouble letting go of, because the grief somehow feels like payment, like penance, like it's the final connection with the dead.
Tonight instead of my usual audiobook to accompany through my evening work, I put on the soundtrack from Narnia. I've done this before, and so am not surprised by the sense of loss and remembered pain that it brings up. But it no longer pushes me to tears, as it would have a year or two ago. And I think I'm okay with that. There's enough to grieve for among the living; I don't need to hold on for dear life to a four-year-old loss.
But it is nice, in a way, to revisit those feelings, to know that the hole in my heart is still there, that I am not so callous as to have fully scarred the wound over. That's comforting. I feel human because of my pain.
(...and because of that, the events in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are far more meaningful than they ever were.)