Denial and anger are two of the first stages of grief. I understand these emotions more than I
could have possibly imagined. I
seem to vacillate between the two in these weeks following my dad’s death,
continually moving back and forth between disbelief and rage.
Denial is a strange one. I think I understand why it’s necessary to process death
though. I don’t know that our
brains can fully comprehend the idea that someone is here one day and simply
gone the next. I’m not sure we
would be able to allow another person to immerse themselves in our day to day
lives so fully, depend on them so completely if we really understood that in a
moment they could be gone. And so
when that very thing happens you must function with a certain amount of denial,
believing the person to just be on a long trip or out to pick up coffee. You do this until you can get used to
life without them.
It’s funny, even though I saw the death certificate with my
own eyes, hugged his hard, decidedly un-lifelike body at the wake, even hid the
box of his remains after his cremation from my mom, I still have this strange
little hope that I’ll come home one day and see him reading the paper at the
table. Or that he’ll come walking
through the front door, explaining it was all a misunderstanding. Or even that I’ll run into him at
Mariano’s where he’ll marvel at what an amazing grocery store it is. Even if I never see him again there’s a
part of me that thinks he’s out there somewhere else in the world, alive still
and blessing the world with his Irish eyes, just not able to be with us
anymore. I understand why people
find comfort in reincarnation now.
I understand a lot of things I never used to.
Before all this I thought that it would be the worst to have
a loved one missing, their whereabouts and status unknown. It seemed like torture to wonder year
after year if they’d come home, to hope day after day that this would be the
one on which they’d walk through the door. It seemed easier, to me, to know for sure that they were
gone than to be stuck in that endless cycle of mostly false hope, unable to
move on with your life. Now, I
would give anything for a shred of hope that my dad would one day walk through
that door again.
Anger bubbles beneath the surface and I never know when it
will lash out inappropriately. I
yell at Toots for changing her mind about milk or water when really I want to
yell at God for writing this part of my story. Hard to open packages infuriate me and when my kids and I
all got sick two weeks ago and no one slept I literally pounded on a wall at 2
am and considered taking a carton of eggs outside in the middle of the night so
I could throw something that would break.
I’m afraid of getting stuck in these stages, trapped between
anger and denial. I don’t want to
become a person who lives only in states of fury or disassociation from reality.
I find myself running through a list of reasons of why this
is still so hard. I defend myself
not being able to interact normally when the subject of my dad comes up or make
it through the day without crying.
We’ve been living with him for seven months. That was seven months in which he had become an
indispensible part of my every day
life. He was so young; we were
still so dependent on him, all of us.
It was so sudden; we didn’t have time to prepare. He was just so good. There really aren’t enough words to
encapsulate all the wonderfulness that is now simply gone. And maybe these are all significant
reasons for why this still feels almost as hard as it did three weeks ago. Or maybe death is just this hard.
I understand that acceptance is the final stage of grief in
as much as I understand that I have not reached acceptance. It almost feels as though my whole
being fights against acceptance these days. I think about how my mom will have to attend weddings alone
from now on or how he’ll never take Toots to the park or build a Brio train for
Monster and something deep within fires up, actively pushing this truth
away. My lack of acceptance may
just be the truest thing about all of this right now.
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