A shift in grief

Day 20 — #writeingrief

I get angry when I don’t feel the keen edge of grief when I think of my Dad.

Those blank moments are rare right now, but when they happen, I’m not terrified that I’m forgetting him but that I’m not honoring him. I correlate the intensity of my grief as proof that I loved my Dad so much.

It’s odd that I’d pair excruciating grief with the memory of my Dad because he was such a gentle and reasonable man. He never would have wanted this crippling grief for me. He never would have wanted this screaming anxiety that keeps coming back.

I’m sure he wants only peace for me. I feel like I might disappoint him if the grief recedes but also that I might disappoint him if it doesn’t.

Tucked away in my mind is a forbidden thought that I’ll drag out right now to spread another layer of complexity over this grief:

I think he wanted the hell of his dying to be over. I think he didn’t want to burden us with having to deal with the wreckage of his body or to deal with his slow death. I think he had someone at the hospital help him along to spare us.

So in a way, I don’t want to lose the pain of losing my Dad because I’m holding his pain along with mine. I worry he wasn’t strong enough to hold his own so I take it upon myself to carry all of it.