Grieving is messy. It follows no definitive trajectory, no tried and true path. It defies scheduled and plans and organized everything. Those stages the everyone talks about – they overlap and bleed into one another, sometimes doubling back and repeating, and just when you think you’ve gotten over the anger or the denial or the simple sadness of missing someone, it comes back stronger than before, made worse by the sustained absence of a loved one, which sometimes feels like it’s building on itself.
And you know no one wants to hear about it anymore, so you don’t bother to let anyone know what’s happening. Part of you wants to keep it to yourself anyway, the way I used to simply sit with my Dad at family functions – the two of us quietly there, but on the periphery – not unhappy about it, and never wholly part of it either. Once in a while he’d make a quip about something that was going on – always surprisingly perceptive, often quite cutting – and sometimes I’d say the thing we were both thinking and he would smile.
No one else could understand.
As summer approaches, I’ve been trying to get into the seasonal sunniness, but I fear losing him at the height of summer last year has tainted the season for me – just for a bit. And so I seek out ways of making this summer a little sweeter than usual – silly pink frills and party ideas – and slip into the pool when I can, because I avoided it so much last year. I still feel the push and pull of mourning and grieving, feel myself on the verge of joy then feeling guilty about it, then missing him again, not in any debilitating way, just in a dull, aching worry, like something has been misplaced, but I’ve forgotten what it is, the abstract pang of a phantom pain.
And summer approaches again…
