Year 1

On the eve of the first year, I feel I still cannot talk to you. Rationally, I know that you’re gone, but I still can’t quite accept or understand it. If I can’t believe that you’re gone, how can I accept that it’s been a while year?

While I lay here trying to come with grips that it has been 365 days since you’ve been gone, I’m reading your eulogy. I’m wondering how I keep you alive to my children, who are so young. I’m trying to figure out how come my children have more ghosts as family members than they do flesh and blood. And it makes me really sad. Because none of this is fair.

But to try to imagine you alive during a pandemic isn’t really fair either. You never were very good at following the rules or doing what you were told. You were stubborn and a royal pain in the ass. It would have been pretty awful.

You could be pretty awful. And how we could fight. But it doesn’t change the fact that I miss your voice on the other end of the phone. I miss your ridiculously crude jokes. Hell, I even miss arguing politics. ‘Opinions are like assholes,’ you’d say, everybody has one.’

You were flawed and broken. And at times you failed me. But I still loved you. And I still have so many great memories with you.

I think I’m so tired of all of the loss sometimes that’s it’s just easier to put it away for awhile. I wrap it up in a box and leave it on the shelf with all of the others, as I decide which one to unwrap. Well, it’s been long enough. And so much has happened since you’ve been gone. This year has been HARD. And I’m tired.

When you died, it wasn’t just me losing my dad. It was the nail in the coffin that made me an adult orphan. I’m parentless. My kids won’t grow up with either grandparent. And that’s fucking hard. This empty feeling inside of me grows bigger with this statement. Because I’m so tired of loss. I’m tired of sadness and pain.

It’s been a year. And there is a lot to unpack from my life as I wrap my head around how your loss defines me now. And I probably won’t know what that even means for a very long time.