The Things We Carry

My father died two years ago today. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

My father and I were estranged. We hadn't spoken in years. I don't know what I expected this event to mean to me, or to feel like, but I didn't expect this numbness that has settled over me.

Grief is strange, it's personal, and it's different for every person, every relationship. I feel like I'm still waiting for the grief to start. I cried on the day, mostly from the shock of the news. This thing that was always out there as a possibility had finally arrived. Absence expected became absence confirmed.

But since then, I keep waiting for the grief to come through.

I feel like no matter what I'm doing, there is this fog around me: damp, wet, gray. I don't feel any strong emotions, just this sort of confusion, a stumbly awkwardness while I'm waiting for some sort of wave of emotion to come along and hurtle me through whatever it is I'm supposed to feel.

I'm carrying this constant tension, this weight on my heart, but it doesn't feel like anything. It's heavy, but not specific.

There have been moments over the years where I have felt a surge of emotion around my father, both before and after his death.

When I first reconnected with my aunt, his youngest half-sister, we sat at a coffee shop and caught up, as people do. She was talking about her life, but other members of my family filtered in. She told me about my father, how he would come to my grandparents' house to help fix some damaged gutters or take care of some yard work. About how he had started sewing a little and would help my grandmother put together quilts.

My half-sister has posted on her Facebook about her grief, about missing his voice, his humor, his advice. She's able to say what it was that this relationship meant to her, what is missing now that he's gone.

Those are the times when I feel something; mostly, I feel angry. I didn't get the crafty quilting father, or the good advice father, or the joking father. I didn't get the help around the yard father. I got the confusion and the absence. I got years of wondering what it was about me that made it possible for my own father to just walk away and act like I didn't exist.

At some point, he added me on Facebook. There wasn't any anger over that, just an amused surprise. We hadn't spoken in years, and then after I accepted his "friend request" (what a strange term for that fraught moment; the language we have to describe the bewildering strangeness of social media is so fucking limited!) he never sent me a single direct message. Never tried to bridge the gap, not a single word of anything personal. Never offered up even an explanation, let alone any sort of apology. No accountability.

One year he posted something generic on my wall for my birthday. I unfriended him.

And it's not just that I don't feel anything. It's how I feel about not feeling anything.

What does that say about me? What does that mean for who I thought I was, who I imagine myself to be?

My father died and I don't feel anything.

Am I a monster?

Am I a hypocrite?

Am I unlovable?

And again, that's when the emotion finally sneaks in. How does this man, this absence of a father, continue to destroy my sense of self? How does this person who couldn't be bothered to send a single dm, couldn't manage one personal communication, not even one small gesture in more than two fucking decades still get to completely obliterate my ability to believe that I am worthy, deserving of love?

He destroys, not with his words or his actions, but by his inaction.

Because if there is one image that I come back to over and over again, it's me trudging through the January snow with my mother to the post office, day after day, opening the mailbox to look for birthday cards that were promised that never arrived. There were other slights and other broken promises, but that's the one I can't escape. It started when I wasn't even in school yet. January in North Dakota can be nasty with frigid winds ready to cut you to the bone. And every day leading up to my birthday and for several days after that, I insisted on going to the post office with my mother, all bundled up in my winter gear. Small hand struggling with the key to the box. The emptiness inside, or the sting of bills and letters for others, but never what I was hoping for. What I was sure, the way that only a child can be absolutely sure, should be waiting there.

I loved him. I loved my father. I was a stupid child who believed everything he told me, and that love made me blind and trusting, and it broke me.

I could go into some long rant about how this has shaped the trajectory of my life: how I've let men mistreat me, blah blah blah, or I've stayed in situations that weren't healthy for me, blah, blah, blah, and it's all because of him, blah, blah, blah.

But I just said that I hated that he wouldn't take any accountability, and if I pass all the blame to him, then I really am just a hypocrite. He's not to blame for my terrible choices. I mean, he is, sort of, but he isn't.

That kid stumbling through the snow toward the inevitable disappointment is a core memory. It's what makes some part of me believe that I'm not worthy of love, and it certainly has guided some of my more questionable decisions. But they were my decisions. The history provides context, not absolution.

And they're not the whole story. There is another part of me, a larger part, a part that gets stronger little by little as I unlearn all of the hateful things I believe about myself, that knows that I was not unworthy, I was not undeserving, I was not unlovable. I was a child. I was a fucking child!

I was a child who loved his father, and had that love answered with nothing more than indifference. Erasure. Forgetting.

And maybe that's why I'm having trouble processing this grief, this crushing fog of nothingness. Because somewhere deep down I'm still that child who loves his father. But how do you love someone who treats you like that? Someone who not only never offered any sort of an apology or an explanation, but who never even understood that how they treated you warranted an apology or an explanation?

And why should you love them? Why should they get to live rent free in your mind for years after you dropped out of theirs?

Why does his presence, or his absence, still get to poke at the softest, most vulnerable parts of me?

I still carry all of this because I don't know how to set it down.

I wrote in my original post, (E)Strange(d), about how the song "Requiem" from Dear Evan Hansen became a sort of anthem, a tether that I needed on the day my father died. As I'm working through this, a song that is speaking to me is this song by Leanna Firestone - "You Just Didn't Like Me That Much." Obviously the circumstances are different - this song is about a situationship, not a parental bond. But for me, it's hitting on something I need to hear: that the breakdown of my relationship with my father wasn't some nefarious plot on his part to destroy me. Get a grip, girl! It helps me to think that his neglect wasn't malicious. He was just putting his life together a certain way, and I didn't fit into that design.

That doesn't excuse it, and while I don't really have any firm beliefs about the afterlife, I do hope that if there is one, it includes him having to finally acknowledge the harm that he did in this life. I'm sure I'll have plenty to explain when my own time comes.

Anyway, I don't usually do these sorts of "Dear Diary" postscript things, but I process through a lot of shit by writing. And sometimes I write some very dramatic things and then just release them into the world, and people worry. Please don't. All the crying already happened when I was hammering this thing out. I'm not saying that everything is healed and all is right with the world, but I'm in a better place. Writing helps put me in that better place.

So instead of stressing about this piece, try sharing it! Or liking it! Or commenting! Maybe subscribe to my YouTube channel! Sure, I'm a sad sack on the internet, but I'm also a whore to the algorithm trying to build a platform in this capitalist hellscape, and I've never been above a little shameless self-promotion! If baring my trauma through the written word helps me accomplish this, then so be it.

Too soon? Eh, I gave it a shot.

XOXO