Living with boulders

I think this is my last entry for this blog.

I created it to mourn the loss of my father, to grieve through the written word.  So why is this the last entry? Am I done grieving? Is everything okay now?

I think that grief, especially sudden grief, is a bit like waking up, and finding a boulder in your living room.  First, there’s shock. (What is this? How did it get here? This can’t be real.)  Then anger, and denial.  You try to move it. (Nope.) You yell at it to go away. (Also, nope.) And then you’re exhausted, and left to confront the boulder in your living room, which hasn’t moved, or gotten any smaller, at all.

Uncomfortably close

I’m drinking a cup of coffee, and arguing with an article.

“Celebrities were dropping like flies at the end of 2016, most from heart related conditions,” the article said. “The only surprise, is that we’re surprised.  Heart disease is the number one killer in the country.”

“But, Cancer!” I replied.  “We’re always being told to memorize our moles, and poke ourselves.”

“Nope,” says the article.  “Heart disease wins this contest.”

Memories: Working around the house

 

I have many memories of my Dad fixing, installing or building something.  The most vivid is of him shoulder deep in a washing machine.  The memory is set in an oddly shaped bathroom, one of two oddly shaped bathrooms in the house we had while I was in high school.*  Dad asked me to help him at one point, because he needed to turn something that was at an awkward angle, and couldn’t because one of his wrists didn’t bend.**

Mourning the might have been

This morning LinkedIn sent me the usual list of people that its algorithms thought I should connect with.  At the bottom of the list of friends and former colleagues was Dad. Ghosts are a well known hazard of the internet. Dad’s LinkedIn profile had never been completed; he had listed his position as Nonprofit Organization Management, but the rest of the profile was empty.  A career that included degrees from two Ivy League schools, and years in business and missions, summed up by a blank page.

The Goal

I’m a trainer by profession, and when I design a class I start with the class’ objective.  What do I want students to do differently as a result of having taken the class?

That kind of thinking spills over into the rest of your life, so, as I approach grief, I find myself wondering what the objective is. How will I be different once I finish the grieving process?  What the grieving process is, how to go about it, that all comes later. First, I need to figure out what I’m even aiming for.

A Paradox

My father died two years ago.  That’s a fact, easily expressed.  The ramifications of that fact are a lot harder to wrap my head around.  There’s all the usual stuff that goes with a death: managing wills, closing financial accounts, distributing emotionally meaningful possessions, the tidying up of a life abruptly left.   You can make a to-do list of these things, and tick them off.  Ticking off that list can feel like progress, but I think it obscures real grieving.  Maybe you have to get past the logistics, before you can get down to the business of serious grief.  Maybe you have to work until your mind has nowhere left to hide, until the only thing left to look at is what you least want to examine, because it hurts like hell, and any reasonable person will try to avoid it as long as possible.