Your Courageous Life

Brene Brown reminds us that we can't categorically shut down emotion. You can't just shut down sadness, alone. If you shut down sadness, you are also shutting down joy. If you shut down one thing, you're shutting down all of it.

I have experienced this in many ways in my life but it's particularly stark at this stage in the grieving process. I'm not a shutter-downer (quite the opposite with my emotions) but if I happen to go a day without crying, the next day I end up feeling flattened, numb, meh.

The crying *itself* is profoundly awkward and uncomfortable. I don't like how it feels. But like clockwork in the hours after I have a good cry, the "flat-numb-meh" feelings dissipate and I can reconnect to glimmers of joy, like giving the dogs ice cream (their faces!), a line of poetry, the slant of the sun as it sets.

My father's cremains arrived in the mail today. The shipping box was even marked for it on the outside, which is I suppose a postal regulation of some kind but still it was an odd feeling that the postal carrier doing the delivery knew something intimate and vulnerable about me as he left the box at my door.

I cried when I opened the box. My dad--so much bigger than the whole sky--now what's left of him just ashes in a box.

It's so weird.

But I suppose I share all of this because I think as a society many people are holding their breath around their grief. The past five years in particular have been so very hard. We think that we need to keep it together, to keep on keeping on, that if we really let ourselves feel the full weight of it all that we'll fall apart.

I don't think you'll fall apart. I think it will feel that way in the moment, then the moment will pass, then you will look out a window and feel like the way the wind makes the leaves on a tree dance for you was the world whispering, "You'll be okay."

It'll still be weird. (I don't think that part goes away. Life is fu**in' weird).

But I do think you'll be okay

My dad died on a Monday at 1:11pm Central Time.

I keep thinking about how this time last week I didn’t know, yet, that it would be just 24 hours. Not even.

I keep wondering if Mondays will just always feel weird now. I have been cleaning up his house, getting rid of perishables. I find a list in his house that he made of all his prescriptions. He was having such a hard time keeping them all straight. Multiple times he tried to write them all out and keep them straight, which to have with food, which to take morning vs night.

I look at the videos I have of him from the hospital and I see how very sick he really was. My memory doesn’t remember him being *that* sick but the videos tell me otherwise.

I had all the videos because I was trying to capture evidence of how his breathing was changing. I didn’t want the doctors to think I was just hysterical or reading too much into anything.

I hate thinking about how the hospital really just kind of bailed on us on the weekends—no palliative care, zero, zilch—and how I was using AI and the internet to figure out what his symptoms meant and that he needed morphine, and Zofran, and worrying we didn’t get him what he needed. He couldn’t talk to tell us what he needed in his last few days. What if he suffered and I didn’t know it?

The funeral was yesterday. My dad’s extended family are the most loving bunch of people.

I keep thinking about how I’m glad I got to say goodbye but the price you pay for that is watching someone die. It’s a heavy price. But I am so glad he didn’t go alone.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is walk out of that hospital room the day he died. Every cell in my body screamed NO. The only way I could do it, I think, is that a saner part of my brain knew that it would never feel right to leave his body in that room, not ever.

The only way out is through.

My dad died yesterday afternoon. I watched him take his last breath.

I will never be the same.

It was the most profound and most brutal moment I have ever experienced.

My first thought today was, “It’s the first time I’ve ever woken up in my life and not had my dad.”

I was lucky to have been so blessed with a kind, generous, patient, and unconditionally loving father. The world feels tilted on its axis. I’m not the only one who lost him. The world lost one of the good ones.