A Long Time Coming

I've been avoiding myself lately. It's been easier to keep busy and take care of the people around me, and bury myself in church and motherhood than to face myself in the mirror. But I know that eventually my dad would want me to come up for air, and accept my new life, and move on. It's just hard to do that right now.

I've been so desperate to escape reality that I had to throw myself into another book series, because isn't that the best way to leave everything behind? I've been neglecting my family and my home, and sleep to get outside of my own broken world and into someone else's. Except that Veronica Roth is a jerk as well as all the terrible people that told me to read the series. I was supposed to find hope, and healing, and peace in my escape. Instead I found more death, and the reality that there is no happily ever after, because time doesn't really heal all wounds. It just numbs them long enough to create new wounds. Because with the passage of time I will lose more people I love, until the heartache is all I know. Because when you lose someone the love remains, but it's no longer sweet. It turns bitter and feels like acid in your throat and it squeezes your chest until you suffocate, but it won't kill you. It's torture.

I think in the end, reading that book is supposed to help me work through my own grief, but right now I'm just angry. Angry that Virginia couldn't let these people have a happy ending. That I couldn't find peace in the alternate world I was living either. And that when I was trying to forget she reminded me that I have to keep living my new life with an integral part of it missing. And right now I don't know how to do that, or at least I don't want to.

But what I hate most is that I have no other choice. And I hate feeling this way, helpless, out of control, like a passenger when I want to be the driver. I just miss him too much, and I don't see how that ache can ever go away. Those familiar with loss tell me that it doesn't, not really. But that it becomes less frequent. The fits, the rage, the seizures of tears and screams, they grow farther apart. And part of me is terrified, terrified that I will live with this pain inside of me for the rest of my life; but another part of me doesn't want to be rid of it, because it reminds me of how much I love him, it shows me how much he meant, and how worthy his life was.

But the fizzure in my soul brings it's own confusion and turmoil, and most of the time I can't sort out my true feelings. I just let them wash over me like a wave, ebbing and flowing as they please, powerless to control them or hold them back.

I cried on the way home from a playdate the other day. As I was driving a song came on the radio with a catchy drum line. I started hitting the steering wheel, clumsily beating away like I used to as a child when I wanted to mimic my father's drumming. and of course I thought of him. I thought of him drumming out complicated rhythms and making cylinder noises with his mouth and throwing his shoulders into it. And I thought of how he never did get his drum set for Christmas that he was always working towards (his reward for losing weight). And I sobbed because he never will get it, he never will get all the things in life he should have gotten. He is gone when he should be here, when he wanted so desperately to be here.

And even in the happy moments of my life I will always think of that. That he should be there for it. That I should be able to call and tell him that Tommy peed in the big boy toilet, or that Ollie is in the 99.99% for height and weight, or that I'm growing my own garden, and I got to eat fresh peas the other day and they tasted like candy. It's the everyday phone calls that I miss the most. Ringing him at his office and him always answering with "Well hello there daughter of mine" or "Top a the mornin'" when it was 3:00 in the afternoon.  Every holiday, every family vacation, every moment will forever be tainted with longing and the void he has left behind. Never again in my life will I experience pure happiness. I am forever changed,  I am acquainted with grief like a stain on my hands that no matter how hard I scrub will never be clean. and it isn't fair. Not because other people get to have their dads until they're 90 years old but because no one should have to feel this way.