My dad died 10 days ago, suddenly, with no warning.
The entire first week after, it felt like I was floating alone in a cold, green lake. Unable to move against swells of shock. I did not want to talk to anyone but I was also terrified of being alone.
Day eight was his funeral. That is when fear punched me in the gut. Scenes of that day and each of the seven days before loop through my brain in Polaroid photos of muted, scattered gray. Snapshots of wrenching ache and fear and
There were the high heels I shouldn’t have worn clicking as I retreated down the aisle, faces of strangers in the pews looking away as I sobbed or not try not to sob with every step. Hugging men with tearstained faces who whispered stories about my father from a decade before I was born. Burying my face in my husband’s neck in the parking lot outside the funeral home, sobbing “what happens now?” against his chest.
“It will feel like you’re on an island,” my cousin, who had also lost her father, cautioned me about the mourning. They were only words to me, no different from the click clack of black shoes on the church atrium floor.
But soon, I knew exactly what she meant.
I watched over the next week as the world moved on with their lives—-what else were they supposed to do? But I was still in my small space of sadness, away and alone. I did not see how everything could return to the way it was, not when my father was gone from us all, forever.
It is overwhelming to live in the space where there is nothing to do but just accept the waves of sadness as they come. Because they just keep coming.
And still there is the feeling that I am where I am supposed to be, grieving and missing, loving and hurting. I do not even WANT to leave this place yet, where should I go?
After a friend heard the news, she sent me a text that said, “I’m not going to try to tell you there is a silver lining. I’m just going to be there and listen if you need me to listen.”
And now it has been three years, and I remember those noisy funeral shoes. I remember crying to see my brothers crying. I remember the cavern of emptiness in my chest and the paralyzing sorrow.
But If there really is any silver lining in the wake of loss, it is in the kindness that threaded through the mourning. The silver lining was in the pink-enveloped sympathy cards that arrived in the mailbox, through the snow, in the darkest part of the new year.
It was in the sad eyes of friends, who in their 20s and 30s have had no real experience of death or loss, but still came to sit in between the great aunts and third cousins at the funeral home on a Friday night. The silver lining is knitted in hot meals from neighbors and worried messages, that were often unanswered, brimming with concern and helplessness, “I just wanted to make sure you knew I was thinking of you.”
I remember the grief, but I also remember the kindness. The way it folds itself into the fear, which still comes. It's hard to always be missing someone.
I remember that the people I loved did not try to make it better by saying things that were not true, nor did they leave me be, when I tried to convince them that I needed no one, wanted nothing.
They go together for me now, the grief and the kindness.
It is a beautiful thing to love someone, it is a terrible thing to lose them. It is sometimes a terrible thing to love someone grieving. In the time of their grief, when they are suffering through loss, when they want to be--and do not want to be--alone. When all you can do is hold their hand through the crying, when there is nothing you can say that will make their pain go away.
When all you can do is be still and quiet and near in the face of their gasping, lonely hurt. To bear witness to the sadness, and all that love.
Thank God we do it anyway.
Thank you, all of you, for doing it anyway.
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