A Road for One: Finding Love After Loss

I can tell you exactly where my father is buried. 9 rows up, four headstones to the left at the north end of Riverside National Cemetery. I can tell you everything inscribed on that headstone. After all, I was the one who chose what was written. I can tell you about every second of his last day. I’ve spent every day going through it in my head. I can tell you all the sounds of that moment. The labored breathing. The beeping of the machines. The worried voices, hushed and shaking. And I can tell you the sounds that were taken away. The silence. The stillness of everything.

But I can’t tell you what a family dinner was like before the cancer, or what a quiet Sunday night in was like. After my father’s long 4 year battle with pancreatic cancer, I can’t remember much from before then. Memories can be tricky things, and at times they don’t even seem like my own. But the bad ones, they persist and linger — like cancer. Welcome to the theme of life: The bad times seem to drag on endlessly, while the good times never seem to last long enough.

It’s been more than a year now since my dad’s passing, and even now I’m picking up the pieces, trying to figure out what parts of me are missing and what parts of me I still have left. And as every day passes, I’m starting to think there are pieces that will just never be found.

Someone, something has to be blamed. You search for something tangible, something real and solid that you can punch and beat all the pent up despair and anger onto. And when you spend most of your time alone in grief, it’s not difficult to find that something. You blame yourself. All the things you could of done. All the things you should have. The things you did. The things you didn’t do.

You think you hate yourself so much that you can never forgive yourself. Never knowing that the reason you can’t forgive yourself is that it was never your fault to begin with. There is really nothing to forgive.

There’s this misconception when you are dating someone who has lost someone that the only helpful thing to do is listen. But at times, we don’t want to talk about these things. We don’t want to think about our grief all the time. Sometimes, we just want to listen to your day, no matter how boring or inconsequential it feels to you. As much as I love the sound of my own voice, I’d like to listen to other people’s stories. I’d like to know about their lives. The various, simple happenings of their everyday being that might seem meaningless to them, but are wonderfully beautiful to me.

It is impossible for many people to understand this. And it should be. No one can understand the complexity of grief, the numerous shades of pain and ache, unless they have experienced it. No one deserves to experience it. Sadly, one day, everyone will.

Because of this, finding love after loss is difficult. How could we bring someone into that dark, loathing world? We make for terrible lovers. We do not easily love, and we are not easy to love. If people warn others about dating someone with a lot of baggage, we are a moving company with a full household of grief.

But think about it. Write letters to twenty friends of yours. Or even emails. Only one or two will probably write back. We live in a world today where when we reach out, most of our friends will not make the effort to reach back. We are all guilty of this. How many times could I have said the right things? How many times did I say nothing? If we cannot trust the deepest and truest parts of us with our friends, how could we trust anyone else?

So we make do with what we can. We find ourselves becoming more and more connected, only to discover many connections that are frayed and unstable. And we are okay with it. We think that’s how love is supposed to be so we become content with this world of gray ambiguity, and satisfied with half-measures and promises of sweet nothings. I’ll text a girl that I care deeply for her. She’ll text back only when she wants to fuck me. And I used to be fine with this. It was something at least. But not anymore.

Because everything has changed. The stakes have changed. This world of reckless lust and cautious non-commitment is just a veil of the real world that lies underneath. One that we all try to ignore. Where losing someone isn’t a break up or cutting off all contact. Losing someone is real. It is permanent, and forever.

And so is love. Not the sort of love from cheesy, romantic novels/movies. I’m talking about the sort of love that seems to bring everything back in place. It takes your grief and softly embraces it. It stays with you. It stays with you even after the very end. It’s terrifying. We’ll meet people one day who will know the very core of us and we will love them. We will love them deeply and in ways we never knew possible. So much so that we will be afraid of losing them. But that’s the beauty, isn’t it? Loving someone despite knowing the incredible pain you will feel one day. That’s the love we’re looking for. And that’s the way I’ll love someone. I know this.

After all, it’s the love that’s watched over me for 28 years.

Thanks, Dad. I love you.

-Michael