Soften the Edges
“You don’t have time for that; get your shoes, get in the car, and get here. Now”.
Panic.
Frantic scrambling. Where are my damn keys??
How did I get on this freeway? Am I even in my body at this point? The phone rings and snaps me back into reality. I press the bluetooth on the screen to answer it. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Graham. You are too late. We’ll be here with him when you get here”.
Wait, what?
I slow down on the empty freeway. It hasn’t sunk in yet. Surely they are wrong, and I can get there in time. I park and walk into the hospital like a zombie. The security guard sees my face and immediately recognizes pain that I don’t yet feel. He buzzes me in, and I somehow make it to the elevator and up to his floor. I’ve walked into this room several times over the past few days; he was never really conscious, but I said hi anyway, hoping he would hear my voice and come back to our reality. Almost by habit, I say hi again. My dad had no recognition or answer tonight. He was gone.
This story doesn’t have a happy ending. My dad and I were not close, and we had a complicated relationship exacerbated by a messy divorce from my mom. We didn’t have any understandings at the end. The apology I wanted for his absence throughout my life never came. A chapter closed with a wholly unsatisfying ending. How do you get closure when one side is just gone?
I return home, dadless. As the days and weeks go on, I go from utter sadness to anger. How could he leave me before he could actually see me? How could this hole just be there forever? I try, desperately, to pull up good memories. I look through photos and go through all of his things. Like a robot, I check things off an itemized list as his executor. Why had he chosen me, his youngest, to finalize all of this? Was this some sort of last punishment for the “oops” kid?
Grief is a strange thing. It can start off with sadness and even denial. But what they tell you about the steps of grief is a lie; it’s not a process. It’s a constant wave of emotions, and they differ each time they hit. Sometimes they are like a riptide; you can’t get out of them, and they swirl you around. Up is down; down is up. There is no getting out of it. Sometimes, though, they come as smaller waves. They splash over you and cover you, but you don’t drown. The biggest problem with grief is you never know how to prepare for that next wave.
My anger grew; it was a constant presence in my life for months. It was sharp and unyielding. I never knew when it would cut me, but I always knew it was there like an embedded piece of glass. A song would come on the radio, and I would fall back into a dark hole. I would see photos of people with their dads and get irrationally mad. I began to write down those feelings just to get them out of me. Father’s Day came and went, and I found myself crying in the card aisle of Target.
As I wrote, I found that I felt better. Talking to friends and family didn’t help me as much because they didn’t seem to fully understand the pain of losing someone that was such a complicated presence. But my journal didn’t judge me; it fully understood. I wrote pages of angry letters I would never send. I wrote song lyrics that stood out to me as particularly poignant. I found that the sharp edges of my grief started to dull a bit.
My kids and I went on a beach trip in July after Dad’s death in January. I stood on the beach taking in the view when I noticed something glistening in the sand. It was a piece of sea glass. I picked it up and noticed how soft and cloudy it was. It had clearly been a beer bottle in another life, the discarded trash of a beach party. At some point, it had broken. Those sharp edges were ever-present, dangerous, and ready to cut. But the pieces swirled around in those waves; they hit the bottom and were embraced by the exfoliating sand. Those pieces separated and found their way to beaches; they delighted sea glass hunters. As I held it in my hand, I realized there were no edges left. That whirling and discombobulating ride had softened all of the razor and bite away from the glass. I slipped it into my pocket as a reminder of the grief that would always be there with me. But perhaps those softened edges would stop opening old wounds.
Perhaps the healing could begin.
