The Waves of Grief

Two weeks ago my dad passed away. It was after receiving a cancer diagnosis just over a year ago and after a hospital stay since the end of March. It’s been quite the few months. There were many moments of togetherness but also difficult times too.

There were many parts of it that felt unexpected, likely because we expected the cancer to be held back for a couple more years. Time is never guaranteed I suppose.

This means we’ve been grieving. My mom and his four kids miss him, but also his 10 grandkids which is where much of his heart was.

Telling my kids was hard. As a child, losing your parent is difficult. Pair that with sharing the news to your own children and it’s a mess of emotion.

While I’ve always shared snippets of my life on this blog, I have never gone into too many specific details or stories and even though it’s a personal blog, I’ve still always held back a bit. That’s just how I want to live, and to write.

But this space is special to me and I did want it to hold place for someone who was so dear to me. So I needed to post. When we went through the photos for his celebration of life the stories reflected on were held dear by all of us. There is a lot of oral history of our family.

As a writer, I keep feeling like I should be able to wax poetic about our memories but I find myself reflecting only to myself or family, and maybe even more in my heart. There’s nothing wrong with this. My space has no expectations. Maybe in time I’ll share more stories.

Grief is an odd thing. If you watch Succession this season, as our family has, you may remember that Roman Roy felt like he was handling things well, that he had ‘pre-grieved’. Part of me felt like maybe that could be a thing given how the last few months had been. And yet in the moments after, I’m discovering that grief comes as a series of waves. Sometimes hard and rushing, crashing along the shore and almost knocking your feet right out from under you. Other times they are smaller, but still have the ability to wash over you. Like Roman, the wave breaks at times. It’s inevitable. And that’s ok.

There’s nothing wrong with grief, and we’ve shared that with the kids. None of us shy away from talking about my dad or reflecting on how we miss him at moments when he would normally have joined us. But it’s a hard emotion to understand since it’s not linear.

This post has no real conclusion I think.

It’s a statement of fact maybe. A post to commemorate a signifigant moment in my life. A post to remind me that even if I type it out into the world, expecting something cathartic to come through with these words, it won’t stop the way I feel. Grief will show up and I will ride the wave as needed.