I have always been a transparent person. All of my emotions, thoughts, feelings...I’m very free with them. What you see is what you get, and as I get older and older I care less and less about what people think about that.
I am always either too much or not enough. The truth is I am just Me. I like Just Me.
Just me grieves loudly. I have to talk about it. I just have to. I have to write about it and I can’t ignore it. I walk it and breathe it in. I cry at my desk and in the van and sometimes at three AM. It loud and invasive. It soaks into my art and my mothering. My children talk about Death and Heaven. Ellie asks me, every time I start crying again, if Grumpy is dead.
We read books about life...and death. We talk about being sad and how to remember. I quietly put pictures up all over my house of my Dad with the kids, my Dad with my mom, my Dad with me on my wedding day, our awkward slow shuffle while he pretended to dance with me. I find shows that teach kids about Death. Daniel Tigers blue fish dies.
When something or someone dies, they don’t come back.
My vibrant, opinionated, goofball Dad has one foot here and one foot in Eternity. My family waits with baited breathe.
How do you grieve and move on when the body of the person you love is still here, but their soul is gone? My Dad was loud and big. He filled a room. He had a fierce scowl when he was mad. The man loved History and we took a lot of day trips to have picnics at various abandoned places. He loved old houses. He told me once he wanted to start a website where you posted pictures of an abandoned houses to see if anyone recognized them. He said “I wonder who was born there...who lived there or died there. I wonder about the history of that house.”
I think of him when I see houses that are abandoned. I think of him when I use the color blue and when I use gold. I think of him when Ellie tells me she has a noodle arm and when Dean prays about Chuckie Cheese. I think about him when I take back roads instead of the highway. When Ellie comes out of Sunday School after an Answers in Genesis study...
Life feels surreal. Day to day life just keeps plodding along. We pay our bills, Blair works hard, I paint, change the diapers, teach my kids, order groceries, do the dishes over and over and over. Every day bleeds into the next. I wake up thinking two things, “Is today the day” and “Please Lord let him make until I can say goodbye...”
Yesterday I was talking with Deano about counting his blessings. Last night as I laid in bed around two AM, awake, again, I had a hard time counting mine. Good things *have* happened this year. I know that. They are pushed so far back in the fog of grief I have a hard time cutting through to see them.
Truth be told, some days I don’t want to. I don’t want to fight or feel or think. I want to completely zone out and forget for one small second that this hurts. I want to pretend my heart isn’t constantly aching. I want to pretend I can pick up the phone and call my Daddy. I want him to send me thirty billion texts until I respond. I want to hear him ask me when I’m bringing his grandkids to see him. I want to hear him tell me that all he needs is to see them to make him all better and I wish to God that was true. I want him to call up Blair and say “I need your help. I miss my boys. Your my boy here.”
Being a mother and grieving is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
I can’t zone out, more importantly, my Dad would HATE me zoning out. He loved seeing me as a Mama. He loved seeing me as an Artist. He loved seeing Blair and I work and struggle and thrive together. He wouldn’t want me to be so bogged down in grief that I couldn’t function.
So. I carry on. I wake up and Mother and Love and Encourage. I have conversations about Heaven and WHY Grumpy is going there and how Ellie can make sure she goes too. I make breakfast and do school and sometimes I yell because I’m tired and kids are intense. We go to the Library (which makes me think of my Dad...my mom hates the Library). We go to our co-op. The kids take turns going to Mimi’s house...I love the time they spend with her. I love the way Grandpa J has started to really play with Ellie and Dean. I love seeing them know...soon, he will be their only Grandpa...
And I wait. Impatiently. Anxiously. Sometimes angerly. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes loudly. Some nights I put the kids to bed and make my way down to my art space and I just sit there.
Sometimes I hate making art I know my Dad will never see...
I worry about my baby sisters. I want to carry the grief for them. I know their grief is their own and so so so much different than mine. I worry my brothers will be annoyed with my openness and the way I speak about my grief, constantly, openly, loudly. I worry about my mom being far away from me. I hate not being able to see her face or cry with her. Or take her shopping at the mall because while we all know Retail Therapy isn’t healthy GOSH DARN SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED A NEW DRESS. I worry about my sisters in law who are more like sisters. Who each hold a special place in my heart and who are walking with my brothers through this hell...I worry what Thanksgiving and Christmas will be like.
I wonder if I will ever feel less snappy at people. If my compassion will ever return. If I will ever feel like a good friend again. I don’t feel like I can have a compassionate conversation about much of anything right now. Everything is marred by this awful terminal cancer that has slowly taken my Daddy from me.
My oldest brother said earlier this year, “It’s hard to remember Heaven, when you’re going through Hell.”
Right now my Dad has one foot here and one foot in Eternity.
And it is hell waiting for him to take the next step. Because I know when he does, I’m here. On this side. Waiting.
Right now our lives are put into a weird limbo of waiting. Where we move forward every day knowing soon we will be stopped in our tracks.
And quite frankly, it’s exhausting.
Grief is really just exhausting.
No comments:
Post a Comment