Today marks five years since my father died. At this moment my grief has settled deep in my belly - so far down that I can’t evict it with willpower alone. It’s the kind of grief that feels threatening, as if it’s taunting me. Experience has taught me that I have to let it rest in this deep, dark place until its work is done.
Each year I feel differently on this day. On the first anniversary of his death I drove to the ocean with my husband to see the sunrise - compelled by some impulse for a grandiose gesture I still can’t explain. On that day, I swear I heard him above me as the seagulls called to one another. In other years, I’ve kept the reality of his death quiet - moving through my daily life as if nothing was out of place. As if nothing was missing. Last year, I remember walking around all day feeling as if I was stifling a scream. I wanted to walk up to my coworkers and shout “My dad died today!” I wanted to confront their looks of bewilderment, confusion, repulsion, and concern. I just wanted to share my grief. I just wanted them to know that something is missing.
This year I feel ill at ease. Caught between the pressure to ritualize this day - meaningfully, publicly, in a forever kind of way - and the indecision of how to do so.
In college, I was taught that ritual is a way to engage with that which is not of our physical world - a concrete act to honor something untouchable, unseeable, unknowable. Since then I’ve learned how difficult good rituals are to find and create in our own lives.
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My dad lived and died in the same place his entire life. He was never well-traveled, he was never well-read, but he knew a hell of a lot about what was in front of him: Elkton. When he died, my twin brother gave a eulogy comparing him to deer. When deer have food, water, and shelter, my brother said, they can live their whole lives in a very small radius of these resources. They never have to stray too far from what they know.
Whatever well-spring Elkton offered my dad, I never found it. Elkton never nourished me sufficiently enough to stay for very long. Early on, I strayed from the herd to seek out greener pastures, fresher water, and safer shelter. And while this straying felt necessary and important, I’ve come to understand that this grief in my belly isn’t only for my dad, but for my home. For a grounding sense of place and identity that I’ve been looking for years to find.
Our parents, like old friends or childhood homes, represent a link to the past. A link to our former selves. In leaving my hometown at a young age, I unknowingly forfeited this link and others. In doing so I lost a connection to the rituals which might more wholly ground me.
***
When my Nana died, my dad’s mother, he would take us to her grave to lay forsythia branches at her tombstone. In the south, forsythias are a pre-eminent sign of spring and my dad, in all his poetry and mystery, died on the first day of spring. The trouble with this smack-you-in-the-face kind of symbolism is that I don’t live anywhere near my father’s grave, and where I do live forsythias aren’t due to flower for at least two more months.
My inability to access this ritual feeds the grief inside my belly. It deepens my sense of loss - not only for my dad, but for my former self. My inability to readily engage with a ritual that feels generational amounts to feeling that I can’t readily access different versions of myself that are inextricably intertwined with other people, in other places, at other points in time. It means that a part of me is missing.
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A few nights ago I dreamt of a conversation with a friend I haven’t seen or spoken to in over a decade. She was a best friend in high school and represents a whole group of friends I’m no longer in touch with. In the dream we spoke vulnerably about our emotions and openness to rekindle a relationship that in my waking life I’m not sure exists. When I woke up from the dream it lingered with me all day. It led to thoughts like, “Should I text her?” “Would she want to hear from me?” “Do I even have her number?” My conscious brain tried to create a place of reason and rationale for this dream in an effort to obscure yet another feeling of loss and detachment from a former self.
The timing of this dream, I’ve decided, is connected to my dad’s death date and an upcoming trip home. A trip I haven’t made in three years. In those three years the world and I have transformed. A pandemic has uprooted every rhythm and pregnancy and childbirth has reshaped my mind, body, and life. From a certain point of view I’m not going home at all. I’m going to a place I once knew as a person I’ve never been before.
This is where my grief lies.
I want all the artifacts, rituals, places, and people that I’ve lost to come back. I want them to tell me who I was so that I might better know who I am becoming. I want them to stabilize me and tether me and humble me into a place of recognition. And, I want to reorganize time and my choices in order to return to them sooner.
I want my dad to hold my daughter and tell me that she looks like me because I look like him. I want to ask him if, when he looks into her blue eyes, it takes his breath away. Or, if he sees something old and something ancient and something knowing, like I do. I want to find out if watching him holding her is the same feeling of him holding me.
But, these imagined moments, these dreams, represent versions of myself and my dad that we will never be. I suppose knowing this is its own kind of grounding force.
In grief I continue to learn many lessons, and my dad’s life and death annually remind me of this one: that we might love with our hands stretched out wide open even if what we want to hold, or were meant to hold, falls through them.
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