Grief holiday
I’m coming up on six months since my father died, and about a month after that, we’ll finally be doing a memorial for him. His family and friends will converge — to the extent we can find them all and tell them — on a pizza place in Red Bank, NJ, where he spent a lot of time hanging out, befriending the owners, and eating (I imagine, often for free). He was always a strange bird, and in the last years of his life, seemed to become a kind of mascot for the town. Everybody knew Big John, the six-foot-seven-or-so rapidly aging man with the easy laugh, freckled arms, and omnipresent ball cap. (He collected them: by the end I think he had hundreds.) Yet it was awfully hard, as his daughter, to actually know him.
Back in the late fall when I was still dealing with it afresh, I wrote the below, and am reproducing it here. I’m looking at moving a lot of my more locked-down writings into the memoir space; I hope it speaks to some of you.
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The day I learned my father died, it was the Monday after my birthday weekend, during which I’d been decadent as I pleased. I’d gotten into the habit of drinking too much again, too, and I was looking to put the brakes on that as I tend to when I slide that way. Monday was the first day of the period between my birthday weekend and Thanksgiving where I was planning to not drink, and ease off on the desserts for a bit, too. Then, the phone call came.
After a couple hours of shocked tears, phone calls to everyone, snuggles with some of my favorite human and non-human people, and a comforting pile of Japanese curry, I drove to the little Stop & Shop on the corner of 16 and Broadway and bought two pints of Ben & Jerry’s (New York Super Fudge Chunk and Peanut Butter Fudge Core), then went home to eat some of it and wait for my boy to get back from teaching class. It took me a few long seconds of his wondering what was wrong before I was able to tell him. He held me while I cried a little more. I ate my ice cream.
Since then, I’ve been surprised by how textbook my reaction to this grief seems to be, even as I’ve been surprised by how some of those textbook things manifest themselves. The feeling of unrealness — I suppose the Denial stage — is stronger than I expected. Rather than denial, though, I might call it dissociation, though I imagine when those stages were supposed, most people didn’t really know what that meant. On Thanksgiving, thinking that I should really call my dad and see what he’s doing. The sense of numbness, where I don’t feel much of anything about it except the sense that maybe I should. And the moments, here and there, though less now after almost two weeks, of floating off from reality — feeling my mind go elsewhere for a bit, rather than deal with what’s here, in my body.
Meanwhile, in my body, I’ve been unapologetically decadent, even self-abusive, in the past couple weeks. I put the alcohol fast on hold and have been allowing myself to eat and drink whatever I want, whenever. I sleptwalked through a couple of days of work — Wednesday after it happened, then Monday and Tuesday the week of Thanksgiving — and took the other days off after my boss, who is awesome and kind, said I should take the bereavement benefit even though I don’t technically have it as a part-time employee. I’ve spent my time at home sleeping, writing, and cooking and cleaning like a crazy person. I abandoned the idea of completing NaNoWriMo this month, but I have been working on it, focusing on writing the backstory of my Mary Sue character and exploring a lot of childhood stuff that this has brought up. It’s been surprisingly cathartic and soothing to write about the details of my own early life in the third person, and I’ve also been tripping memories of things I haven’t thought of in years: the actual name of the little girl whose house I went over to one time but then never again, probably because I was so shy and awkward that we didn’t really connect or become friends. The fact that people on my mother’s side of my family never ever shared food off each other’s plates. The guitar-playing nun I loved in second grade, when I was in a choir for the first time and got to dress in a little white robe with gold garland around my waist and head and sing “Angels We Have Heard On High” from the rear gallery of a grand church.
Working, too, in the writing, on the Anger stage: reimagining my father’s death as a mixture of what actually happened and what he tried to do, around twenty years ago now, which was unsuccessful and landed him on a locked ward. Imagining what it would be like for this character, very like me, if her father had been successful in the short game of suicide, rather than the long game, when she was 22 instead of 42. Realizing suddenly that this book may in fact be about missing fathers.
Maybe the part that surprises me most is the clarity of the boundaries part. The self-care part. The part where I’m saying, it’s fine if I eat too much and drink too much for a couple weeks after this. And the part that follows up and says, this coming week, I’ll stop that and get back to some healthier habits to transition back into more normal life. The part that got overwhelmed by condolences on Facebook and cancelled everything, that has been saying “no” to pretty much anything that involves planning more than a few hours ahead. I’ve been spending all the time I want in bed, reading, writing, hanging out playing Dixit with people I really like, and not spending time with other people I really like when I perceive that that would be work in any way. Not feeling guilt, FOMO, or anything other than relief about any of this has perhaps been the most surprising thing of all.
Today, I said no to climbing, but I think I’ll go outside and pick some of the last fruits of our garden while the sun is still up. This late afternoon and evening I’ll eat and drink more things, talk house business with people, maybe game. Tomorrow I will begin the process of not drinking on school nights and putting more fresh vegetables into my body, and going back to taekwondo class, and maybe talking to people who don’t live in my house. It feels like taking this time has prepared me to reenter life, in the way the opposite process — a detox — generally doesn’t. I’ve taken a grief holiday: abnegated all responsibilities, pretended my body doesn’t need anything but sugar and fat and alcohol, lain around and navel-gazed and told everybody to fuck off. I haven’t put shoes on in two days. It feels like a 21st century version of a mortification of the flesh, in a way. Doing things that feel temporarily good but are ultimately bad for you stops feeling great after a few days, starts to feel like something you’re doing to yourself, and that will feel better when you stop and take better care. But the purging of social obligations, the fuck-offs to “should” I’ve been doing, feel like a practice I could keep, in another form, going forward. It’s whittling me down, this grief, paring me to essentials, closing loops that have been leaking energy for years. Writing my Mary Sue character in my novel, I wrote this week, “Grief clouds everything and yet brings a kind of brutal clarity, too: all at once, you know what is really important, what can wait indefinitely, what you know you will return to as soon as you are able, and what you wish to discard forever. You know, with a sharpness that threatens to cut you apart, what you must do to make it so that your own life will have been worth something.”
