Twenty years ago today I was standing beside the hospital bed my father was about to die in. He was not awake but he was breathing. And then he wasn’t. I was standing there looking at him. And then I wasn’t. Within moments of his last breath I found myself on the hospital floor, just across the hall from the entrance to his room. I was curled up with my grandfather. We were holding each other, we were crying, we were shaking, we were unable to contain ourselves.
In the shock of losing my father, I reached out towards him and held his father as close as I could. In the shock of losing his son, my grandfather reached out towards him and held his son as close as he could too. We sat there like that, on the hospital floor, holding each other as close as possible until we each stopped shaking, until we had each shed the first round of our tears, until we each could breathe with a little more ease.
That first wave of grief stayed with me for a very long time. For years I could call it up immediately, project myself right back to that hospital floor, call up the exact feelings and bodily sensations that took me over in that moment. Over time those feelings made their way through and eventually out of my body. I am no longer as close to that manifestation of my grief. In the twenty years since my father died my grief has shifted and changed, it has moved through cycles and it has taken many forms.
Sometimes, even to this day, it shows up in that debilitating form, bringing me right back to that moment of loss, calling up the full depth of emotion that overcame me in that moment: flooding my eyes with tears, filling my throat with bile, sending blood rushing up and down my body, speeding up my heart rate, tying my stomach in knots, shortening my breath to the point that I am gasping, that I am shaking, that I am wailing and flailing, until all of the built up energy releases from my body and I collapse as a puddle on the floor.
Other times my grief is somber, a deep sadness, a wave of lethargy washing over me, slowing my movements, dampening my color pallet, adding weight to my limbs and chest and head, as I sink into nothingness. In those moments I have learned to accept the invitation into slowness. I have learned that my body needs to allow the sadness in, that I need to let myself be still, that I need to let myself cry, that I need to let myself just be sad.
There are also are the times that my grief has been motivational, a driving force of desire to live out my life, to not “waste time” perseverating, to get out of my own way, to live up to the person my father knew I could be, the person I see myself as, the version of myself that I aspire towards. In those moments I need to remember to check in with myself, to be sure that the motivation doesn’t turn into obsession, that the drive to be doing isn’t masking an avoidance of feeling.
And then there are days like today - which happens to be the twentieth anniversary of his death - when I wake up feeling clear and solid, missing him but also knowing that he is here with me, sad that he has not been able to enjoy this life with me but grateful for who he was, for what he continues to be for me. On days like today my grief manifests as joy and ease - qualities that my father sometimes had and always aspired towards. On days like today my grief manifests as wholeness, as a sense that I am fully connected, not just to my father, but to everything. On days like today my grief reminds me that I don’t have to force things, that I don’t have to try so hard, that I don’t have to be right, or do better, or even be good, that all I have to do is live and feel connected.
In this way I understand grief to be a kind of time machine, a mechanism through which I can connect not only with the past that my father ties me to, but the future in which the essence of who he was will be remembered not only by those who remember him, but by those who will remember me.
In our grief we remember the people we loved. We remember who they were, we remember what they valued, how they lived, what they taught us. In remembering them we connect ourselves to the past in which they lived, the past that led to their lives and to ours. And in remembering them we also take them in as part of us, we carry them on past the years that they lived into the future that they will continue to influence, through us and through those who will come after.