You think there is always a tomorrow. We don’t get to choose the storm or when it will hit. None of us asks for it, either—loss, change, heartbreak. The moments that split your life into “before” and “after.”
I knew if I could hold it together for thirty days, until the last day of school, I would get the entire Summer to get my shit together. I wouldn’t have to hide behind the forced smiles and “I’m fine” lies. I would be able to take off the mask I wore for the last month of school, so my students, co-workers, and the world wouldn’t have to see how heavy I felt, because they don’t want to know, and because I didn’t want to talk about it. I genuinely thought I would take a month to go through the process of grieving the loss of my Dad, recharge, and enjoy some vacation time with family. I’m not naive, I knew I would always miss my Dad, but there are stages of grief. That’s a known fact. I would follow the steps, and I should get “over it” after a certain amount of time. Life broke me, but I had a plan to put everything back together.
Wrong.
I took off the mask, my strength and stability shattered along with it. My energy plummeted. The simple act of walking up the stairs felt like climbing a mountain. Sleep came with waking up drenched in sweat from nightmares. Intrusive thoughts bombarded my brain, suffocating me until nausea and trembling took hold of my nervous system. During the afternoons when I couldn’t fathom leaving the house, I would cuddle Marlow into my lap, put on a movie, hide my face, and let the tears fall silently. Physically, I was existing, but behind my eyes, I spent the days trying to piece together events and understand suicide, like suicide can be understood. The few times I went out in public, it was easy to perform because everything seemed to be functioning on the outside. “You’re doing so well,” so many would say, but it is impossible to see a broken heart, the constant lump in your throat, or the knots in your stomach.
Missing someone after they are gone is the simple part. The hard part is everything else. The loss of every version of your life where they were supposed to be. The milestones I assumed we’d share, and the ordinary moments that felt guaranteed, like my Dad meeting his new grandbaby in September. I never considered that my Dad wouldn’t meet this baby when I sent him a picture of Marlow in a Big Sis t-shirt back in April. Grief doesn’t just take your present. It steals your future, too. It rewrites your story without permission, ripping entire chapters from the book you drafted.
By mid-July, I had the realization that I wasn’t going to get my life together in the way I thought. My soul had been damaged, and even if I took the time to heal, there will always be a scar. I started to accept that I will never be the same, and maybe that’s a good thing.
(This should be a paragraph about how I’ve changed, how I view life differently now. But I can’t write about that, at least not right now, because I can’t put those changes and thoughts into words yet. It’s too new.)
What I do know is that I took my pre-grief life for granted. I took for granted the way the overall spectrum of my life wasn’t tainted by grief. The way I could experience a joyful moment without pain coexisting in my heart. I took for granted my regulated nervous system and mind that didn’t race constantly. I took for granted my sharp memory and the way I could focus on tasks for hours on end without it feeling like a million tabs are open in my head. I took for granted not feeling in survival mode. I took for granted not having intrusive thoughts. I took for granted that only bad things happened to other people, and I held a naive belief that my world would always remain intact. I don’t wish to go backwards because I believe life happens for us, not to us. Mostly, I trust that I will be a better person, wife, mom, sister, daughter, and friend because of my Dad’s story.
I am still learning, and I have a long road ahead of me. Grief isn’t a set of steps to be completed so that you can move on; it’s also not meant to be confined. So, I will let the tears fall when they come. I will let laughter rise when memories bring warmth. I will let sorrow and joy coexist, because they are not opposites. They are just love in different forms. Grief doesn’t just break you. It rebuilds you into someone forever changed.