Grief

The last few days I've been unmotivated and somewhat short-tempered. It took me until yesterday to realize that the out-of-sorts feeling that I had was actually grief. This time, grief has felt like an extra layer of clothing, something that gets too warm at times but otherwise you don't notice it even though you carry it with you everywhere. 

When we went through the death of my Mom more than 12 years ago, I wrote about how grief shows up in different forms. I don't why, but I expected this time to be different with the loss of my Dad. With my Mom everything felt so sudden, and the grief felt raw. With my Dad, he'd been in the ICU multiple times in the last five months. I'd become a semi-expert in his health conditions and had re-arranged my life on an almost bi-weekly basis so that I could visit him and help out where possible. I'd been prepared to say good-bye to him several times and so had already begun grieving the possibility of his death. I'd also started grieving my Dad's growing inability to live life as robustly as he'd like, including and especially gallavanting around and 'stopping by for a chat.' And yet, some of the grief of my Dad's death has been tempered by a relief that he's not struggling anymore and that we, his children, made it through this season of caring for him as well as we could with our relationships remaining as healthy as they have been. 

But grief is still grief. I'm feeling the loss of someone I care about, a loss of new memories to be made, and an emptiness when I think of how I'd like to turn to him. Not just about that funny sound my car is (still) making, but also to remember things, like the box spring he pretty much took apart to fit into one of our houses when we moved. We managed to get the other boxspring in with enough shoving. But with the most recent move into a new house, shoving wouldn't have worked. So we cut some boards and folded it in half. And Matthijs used the staple gun my Dad made us buy for the last boxspring adventure to get everything back to almost new. And the memory, which reminded me of how much my Dad desired to care for us, going the extra mile, made me feel his absence.