i tell myself to keep writing, to keep recording the feelings and thoughts and events that have come to surround me and my father’s death. so much of this is surreal though. i know it and understand that the old man has gone on, that he was tired, it was *his time* and i get that there is some semblance of peace surrounding those truths, but for the life of me, for the very life of me, i can’t understand this – not in the way i understand and trust gravity or water or alcohol or dust, or weather or my own thoughts or changing a diaper or boiling an egg – i can’t understand the sudden absence of the man i know (knew?) as my father. to speak of, and to think of him only in the past tense, presently and permanently, is traumatic for me, but in a dull coping-with-a-headache kind of way. i recognize the presence of the thing, its unyielding discomfort and truth, but i can’t wrap my head completely around his sudden status as dead.
typing this is causing a tightness, a strange feeling in my chest, like i am on to something, but rather nervous about getting to it. simultaneously, i sit here and think about him, lying neatly in a casket, with a black suit on, a white shirt, a blue tie, and he doesn’t have shoes on. he is in a grave, lying permanently in the soil of louisiana, without shoes on…
i dreamt about him a few nights back. we were in a bingo hall, or a cafeteria, or a nursing home in which he was never a resident, and he was his calm and normal self and we were making plans to do something. to be somewhere, some thing to come we’d agreed upon, and while he sat there looking up at me, perhaps awaiting a response, all i could do is wonder to myself, doesn’t he know he died last week?
will my father come to exist in my new world (that is, the one without him in it…) as the ghost of my dreams? and what if my mother goes too? i will join the legions (legions?) of adult children who exist without their parents…an adult orphan. how can i be alive when the ones who created me are not?
my father must know this as a reality quite well himself–i mean, he must have known this. in 1982, when i guess my dad would have been 43 years old, his father died. and then, in 2002, his mother died when he was 63. i envy him! i turned 33 and the following thursday, he died!
i don’t understand myself mourning…the ebb and flow of this beast. things can feel totally ok one minute and in the next, i’ll look down and find my own hand shaking like death itself suddenly. when has that happened to me? what of these rattling nerves of mine? and too, when have i been so touched by so many humans who showed such a deep and genuine generosity as to seek me out to comfort me and assist me with things i didn’t even realize i’d need assistance with. i am impressed by my capacity for pain and resilience as well as by the power of certain condolences.
i could go on. and i will. in fact, i can’t stop with these thoughts. i just feel unsteady right now. need to go walk or eat or look in the mirror or out the window or into the past. my father left behind so much. so very much to think about….
Nonfiction Woman 