Listical Ode to Grief

10 Things I’ve Learned From the Death of My Father. #notamentalhealthexpert

1. It feels bad when people don’t acknowledge your loss. It’s always better to reach out to someone when they are sad than to leave them alone. Most people deliberately checked in on me. However, the times I interacted with someone who pretended nothing had happened to me felt jarring and wrong.
2. Intense grief can and should subside. All the Kübler-Ross stages can occur in any order and then repeat themselves. Eventually, over months and years, they settle into gentle ripples that never really stop, but the big waves should subside. 
3. Your grief makes other people uncomfortable and impatient. You may hear phrases from normally kind people like, “It’s time to get over it,” or “You should stop wallowing,” or “You should be grateful, his illness was such a burden.” They want you to stop existing on the sharp edge of grief because they can’t find a comfortable seat next to you. For the people who agree to stand a couple of feet behind you and wait for you to recover, you will always be grateful.
4. Unexpected grief partners. You may be drawn to people you haven’t relied upon in a long time. In the days before, during, and after my father’s death, I was more enmeshed with my mother than I had been since I was a toddler. This was an unexpected consequence of us both feeling the same way for once in our lives. Normally, we stand at odds with each other in almost every way. For once and only once, we understood each other. The first night after my father died, my sister and I slept on the floor in my mother’s room, and we all talked in the dark for a bit before pretending to sleep.
5. People come out of the fog in different steps at different times. My mother never has. My siblings all poked their heads out at different times. Some resisted the fog completely. We all survived it in our own ways. This means some of us dipped so low we scared ourselves and finally learned to get help. Some of us have learned to seek mental health support on occasion, and I credit the blow of our father’s death with this previously impossible idea.
6. One person does not have to be the glue in a family. We all felt grief for our father but also for what looked like the inevitable collapse of our family unit. Already far flung to the corners of our country and beyond, what was once a close-knit family had continued to return home mostly in duty to our parents and our childhood home. Without my father, many of us expected that the loss of the paternal tidal pull would be the end of our time together. However, over the decade following his death, we each made efforts to connect and be together despite ugly political rifts, financial burdens, and the backbreaking work of raising a dozen grandchildren.
7. You will learn to anticipate moments of grief. You learn to spot moments up ahead in the road and take precautions. Where the loss once hit you on the head, unexpected and breathtaking, you can now see it coming. The first wedding I attended following his death took me entirely by surprise. I found myself sobbing during the father-daughter dance at the reception. I had to leave the venue and walk outside to pull myself together. This was especially surprising because he was at my own wedding. Although he wasn’t really there, his mind was so addled by dementia that he truly didn’t understand who I was or what we were all doing, and I certainly couldn’t have asked him to dance with me. I told myself at the time that we just weren’t the sentimental kind to have had a father-daughter dance anyway. But I wished we had the option. I learned, after that first wedding, to go use the restroom right as the ceremonial dances were about to start. 
8. You and others will try to measure your grief. People will compare your loss to one of their own; this could result in cathartic co-misery if they make an accurate appraisal. It will be hurtful if your friend is comparing the loss of your father to the loss of her distant relative, with whom she had almost no relationship. Or worse, people may claim to understand because they have recently lost a pet.
9. Some people believe in ghosts. Five years after my hyper-intelligent, pragmatic sister told me she was visited by the ghost of my father, I still don’t know what to think. Our family is mostly comprised of cynical, agnostic, cerebral, arms-length, nevertheless real, love. Ghost stories, religion, and beliefs in general did not make their way into our familial dialogue. To hear her recall practicing piano alone in a hall and looking up to find my father sitting in the pews watching her left me bewildered. I felt grateful that she had this experience, as it clearly gave her comfort. I felt surprise, too. Ultimately, I found myself feeling envious. If only the benevolent spirit of my father could visit all his lonely grown-up kids who found him so soothing in life.
10. I’m not as wise as I wish. When I encounter someone who is in the fresh stages of grief, I stumble in finding the “right” way to comfort him or her. I still wish to avoid making the person relive the grief; I still wish to give the person the opportunity to pretend everything is good. I still have the impulse to avoid connecting with someone through grief. But I’m getting better.