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good grief
Jan. 20th, 2020 02:39 pmIt’s been six years since I lost my dad. It wasn’t unexpected. He’d been sick, had cancer, and then got pneumonia and died. There’s a lot I still carry regarding my dad. A lot of things I really need to put down because there’s no other way to get closure because he’s gone. Every year, it gets a little easier to put things down, although this time of year will always be a bit of a slog. Today’s extra not great because I have a headache that’s not going away.
Anyway. Six years. I don’t feel like I have a lot to talk through this year, not in the way I’ve talked through other anxieties. But I would like to share something that my friend Pip wrote about death and grieving. Pip lost their dad about a year before I did. Pip’s also Jewish, and they wrote about conceptualizing grief. I copied the text of the post and have kept it in my phone notes for the last four years. I’ve lost the link to the original post, but what they wrote struck such a chord with me.
todays my dads yahrzeit … the actual gregorian calendar anniversary is on monday tho
his ghost is 3 years old!!! Wtf.
sometimes that feels like a good way to conceptualize it though bc… …it’s sort of like, the trauma& grief of having someone you love die is a little like having to take care of an infant, constantly… 24/7. IT JUST STARTS SCREAMING SOMETIMES AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHY. you have to schedule your whole life around it and it ruins a lot of your plans and it takes so much ENERGY to look after … it’s like you have no time whatsoever for ANYTHING ELSE. you have to carry it everywhere so you never have both hands free to do anything
but then it gets weaned and learns to walk on its own a little and its still following you around, you gotta drag it behind u in a little wagon, and maybe it bites you bc its teething and sometimes it has tantrums but it very rarely wakes you up at 3 am screaming anymore
eventually it gets big enough that you can kind of just leave it to its own devices for the most part & check in on it every so often to see how it’s doing
like it doesn’t go away but… …… it gets less. overwhelming.
Grief is such a strange beast, but Pip is right. It has gotten less overwhelming.
Anyway. Six years. I don’t feel like I have a lot to talk through this year, not in the way I’ve talked through other anxieties. But I would like to share something that my friend Pip wrote about death and grieving. Pip lost their dad about a year before I did. Pip’s also Jewish, and they wrote about conceptualizing grief. I copied the text of the post and have kept it in my phone notes for the last four years. I’ve lost the link to the original post, but what they wrote struck such a chord with me.
todays my dads yahrzeit … the actual gregorian calendar anniversary is on monday tho
his ghost is 3 years old!!! Wtf.
sometimes that feels like a good way to conceptualize it though bc… …it’s sort of like, the trauma& grief of having someone you love die is a little like having to take care of an infant, constantly… 24/7. IT JUST STARTS SCREAMING SOMETIMES AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHY. you have to schedule your whole life around it and it ruins a lot of your plans and it takes so much ENERGY to look after … it’s like you have no time whatsoever for ANYTHING ELSE. you have to carry it everywhere so you never have both hands free to do anything
but then it gets weaned and learns to walk on its own a little and its still following you around, you gotta drag it behind u in a little wagon, and maybe it bites you bc its teething and sometimes it has tantrums but it very rarely wakes you up at 3 am screaming anymore
eventually it gets big enough that you can kind of just leave it to its own devices for the most part & check in on it every so often to see how it’s doing
like it doesn’t go away but… …… it gets less. overwhelming.
Grief is such a strange beast, but Pip is right. It has gotten less overwhelming.
