i keep running into this picture. mostly on tumblr, but not mine, as i will explain.
now, i don’t mean for this blog to turn into one about the grieving process, but quite frankly, it’s been consuming my life and i can’t pretend that it hasn’t been. therefore the above picture irritates me for a few reasons.
i have wished for it. i have prayed for a thing dramatic and big and life-changing to occur. and life did make a strange sort of chaotic sense for awhile. retrospectively, it was nice.
my dad died. he wasn’t supposed to. [disclaimer: do NOT tell me any of that “he’s in a better place now, he’s not in pain” blahblahblah bullshit, because i KNOW. just don’t.] he was actually doing better than he had been, despite still being in the nursing home. the last time i saw him alive he was feeding himself pudding, saying that he’d been having more of an appetite so he needed to eat to keep his strength up. i needed to get back to tulsa, i needed to meet my friends i was leaving KC with, i needed to go get through dead week [ha.] and finals and come back for a proper break from school, so i walked away, the whirring and clicks of hospital-esque machinery and the sounds of my dad eating slow and slowly behind me.
i walked away with no premonition of it being the last time i’d see him alive. there was an unopened pumpkin pie on my right, left by a family friend so he could have a bit of thanksgiving, and i hoped that he’d eat it before it didn’t taste good anymore. it was tippins, his favorite (homemade notwithstanding).
two days later i was at the movies with some good friends, back in oklahoma, when i got a call from my native area code but with a number i didn’t recognized. i was watching a movie. i rejected the phone call. my sister called. i rejected it too. she sent a text saying something close to CALL ME RIGHT NOW. i left the theater, exasperated, called, she told me that they’d found dad unresponsive and were trying to resuscitate him. that unknown call i hadn’t answered was from the nursing home. i stood outside the theater, not moving, feeling fuzzy pricks of pain at the edges of my vision that i did not know were going to come true or not. and then my sister called, hysterical, saying that they couldn’t bring him back. i fell to the floor. it felt like my life and my happiness had been cut down the middle, sharp and irreparable. it still feels like that sometimes.
i’m 21 years old. my life up until this point has felt largely out of my control. as a child with books for best friends and then an adolescent with divorcing parents, i’ve been a piece of cork on ocean waves until around the college years began. then it was me. this was MY life. and then it didn’t feel like my life anymore. perhaps even less so, because it’s well-documented and advised that grief is something that you HAVE to go through. you have no choice in the matter. if you manage to suppress it now, it will come and bite you in the ass later. so i’ve been yanked around by my emotions for a little over two months now, but that doesn’t mean i have to like it.
i’ll never stop missing him. it will hurt less and it will hurt less often, but it won’t stop hurting. when someone close dies, it’s like having one of those injuries in your leg or foot or whatever where doctors can do all the fixing they want, but you’ll still always walk with a limp. i walk with a limp. some days it’s hard just to crawl. i have a friend [eh, friend might be kind of a strong word here…] who lost a sibling when they were both young who can attest to this, and for some reason quite a few friends my age who have also lost their fathers in the past few years.
look at your boredom, your routine, your normal, and give thanks, because it can all be pulled out from under you faster than you can say “lolwut?”
the things that change your life aren’t always the things you WANT to change your life. i can’t send this message to the thousands of tumblr folk who have reblogged that photo, so i shall send it to the internet at large.
be thankful for the mundane.
free. 