On my dad’s death – Gratitude, some regrets, and grieving in public

It’s been a little more than two weeks since my dad’s heart stopped beating, in his sleep, on his first night home after three weeks in a hospital and then a rehab facility. It happened in the hours when Thursday night became Friday morning. I had spoken with him on Wednesday (by phone - a thousand miles separated us) and he was in good spirits. He didn’t complain – he never complained, actually, in those last three weeks – at least not to me. He praised the nurses and doctors, even the food, and talked about his ailments like they weren’t a big deal. He was a little slower than usual but still sharp. He laughed at my jokes. 

Now I'm slowly getting back to my normal routine. But I have less control over where my mind goes. It'll wander in and out of details of him, his life and our life. I see us in a rowboat, fishing, in jeans and hats, when I was a kid. It’s early and cool and quiet. He spends much more time helping me than fishing. When I catch a fish he is intensely happy, much happier than when he catches something. There is no one else in the world who has felt or will ever feel that exact way about me. The look on his face and the tone of his voice are perfectly clear in my memory and fill me with joy and sadness. 

The thing that has positively wrecked me, oddly enough, is other people’s kindness. They call, and text, and send public or private messages over social media. They don’t just express their condolences; they ask how they can help or tell me what I mean to them and say it proves that my father must’ve been a good man. This connection, from him to me to them and back to me, traces a path of so many moments and so much meaning that it’s what finally pulled the weight of his death down onto me. And while I kind of hate to admit it, social media has been an important part of this. Lots of people I'd otherwise see rarely or not at all got in touch. After feeling some dread about the whole Facebook angle of grieving, I ended up being grateful for what it made possible.  

Other moments have been smaller but no less meaningful. Looking at a picture of my dad and I together I say aloud to an empty room, “I’ll never see you again,” and think that that belief is a choice. I choose to believe that there is no afterlife recognizable enough for me to think of it as another meeting with people I’ve known. This is not so different from others choosing to believe they’ll see their loved ones again. Like their belief is for them, mine is a form of comfort that works for me. The time that my father and I had together was finite, and now it’s over. We did our best and it wasn’t good enough, and yet it has to be good enough, and so I go about the business of redefining what ‘good’ is. Things move. They were one way, and now they’re another.  

One among a small number of regrets is that I didn’t say more to him about our relationship and my feelings toward him. There’s the obvious regret of not saying quite clearly enough just how much I loved him, and why I loved him. But there’s also the regret of not saying what made me angry and sad. Over the last couple of years we found ourselves, like many others, on opposite sides of a particularly bitter political divide, and at one point he cautioned me to think hard about what I said to him because I might regret it once he was gone. So I did think hard, and I decided that allowing politics to fuck up our relationship would fill me with the same amount of regret as not telling him how gullible and hypocritical his choices were showing him to be. I told him this, with only slightly more caution than I’m showing here, and while I’m glad that I did I wish I had said more, on both the good and the bad. At some point I’ll try to apply this insight to other relationships, but I have no illusions that it will be easy or even that I’ll succeed, or what success would mean. 

All of this has changed my idea of grief as a private thing. It’s private in the sense that it’s internal, but it’s not at all private – it’s public, in fact – in the sense that what I’m feeling has everything to do with my connections to others. I’m mourning one profoundly important relationship abruptly ending, but the thing that brings the intensity of that ending home is other relationships, and the fact that they are very much not ending, and that they’re more meaningful, for everyone involved, than I knew.