dad died two months yesterday. really? i’m not sure if it seems more like yesterday or two years ago. damnit.
a lot has changed in the last two months, and while I would like to be living in three-months-ago-land, i’m doing a lot better these days than i was initially, which i really didn’t expect. In fact, I acted about exactly as I would expect myself to from the minute I heard about my dad until I went to sleep that night, and pretty much not a moment since.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve heard me say that a lot. there have been a lot of surprises, but in the last two months, i’ve observed three major ones:
The first surprise was that I don’t feel guilty about things I might or did expect to feel guilty about. Dad and I were really tight. We were really similar. We played into each other’s emotion and stubbornness and said a lot of things to each other that we’d take back now. But most of those things we did get around to taking back sooner or later, and we told each other how much we cared all the time. I expected to beat myself up about the bad times, but that only lasted about 3 hours. he was very agitated the last time we talked, and i don’t regret that either. should i have called him earlier in the day so he had time to talk? that would have been nice, sure, but we had a lot of good talks, and maybe it’s just as well that i dont have one single meaningful last conversation to dwell on all the time. i have 24 years of meaningful conversations. The unglamorous exit is the least of my concerns, honestly.
The second surprise was how much grief comes out in the physical rather than the emotional. I’d be fine transparently as far as I or anyone else could tell, and then get headaches and stomachaches and the shakes and not be able to sleep. It was also a much stealthier kind of sadness than I’d imagined. and for how much of a loss this is for me personally, i am surprised that i’m not more theatrical about it. not intentionally, of course, but i find that i am rather possessive about my grief and unlike pretty much every other emotion i have, i don’t share my sadness with most people. and more than i don’t, i can’t, and that is surprising for me, too.
All that brings us to today, where I am pondering the third surprise, which is that things don’t have to suck. I mean, sometimes they definitely do have to, and will, and you don’t get a choice in when that’s going to strike. but it isn’t guaranteed and it isn’t always. at times I feel more at peace, internally, than I ever felt before this happened. sometimes I’m really happy.
I’ve long given up on trying to predict how i’ll feel through extrapolation—there’s simply no utility in it. Other people’s experiences with grief are different from mine as often as they’re similar, and my past impressions/emotions seem not to suggest any sort of future response. So while I can’t conclusively say that I’ve made a lot of progress in two months, and while I don’t know that this isn’t just a peak before the next valley, i can definitely say that 2008 has started on a much more promising note than i really thought possible, and i’m really hopeful about that.
i guess i’m lucky in being pretty fatalistic. i mean, i don’t think i’m assured much in life that i don’t secure for myself actively, but i accept most things that happen as inevitable. i do really think that while nobody can understand all the variables in the universe (from when an acorn will fall to a person’s state of mind at a particular time and tendency to act based on previous experiences and personal chemistry), it’s still got to be a finite number of variables, and an omniscient being would always understand what’s about to happen, the way you know exactly how a glass is going to fall off the edge and shatter on the floor as soon as your baby nephew runs his Big Wheel into the leg of the table. And since none of us are omniscient, we can forgive ourselves for not knowing how things will go, and we pretty much have to do that if we don’t want to go insane. If having an eighty or ninety year old dad can’t be part of my future, i’d say we had a pretty good run.
The picture of Dad distributed at his wake is in the center of my refrigerator. I didn’t consciously put it in the center of my refrigerator, but it’s all you see (or at least, all i see), and that seems right to me. There are many things on my fridge—pictures of other loved ones, information about work and rent and upcoming events. But Dad’s face is what my eyes fall on whenever i look at the fridge, sitting outside, looking content, like he might really just be chilling in my kitchen. And occasionally that makes me cry, but most of the time i’m ok, and enjoy that my fridge represents a fairly accurate cross-section of my state of mind.
in other news, i got my hair cut (jury is still out on whether i like it, but at least i got my lazy ass out of my pajamas and took care of that), and more importantly, i finally posted my recovered pictures from shitmas 2k7, which you can check out on the picture page/ my flickr feed.
happy friday, everybody.