My father died, so what?

So what now? So what did I learn? The answers to both those questions are surprisingly similar. Not much at all and everything, all at the same time.

I've always accepted the truth of mortality. I found comfort in it the further my father succumbed to his disease. Death was the only constant I had growing up. The guarantee that he wouldn't walk me down the aisle or see me go to middle school. These were never things I had to learn- just silently understood. Like how the sun will rise every morning and the stars will shine every night. They weren't sad truths, but instead a merciful end to a sad story.

I try to write about my father as much as I can. To the point where, ironically, it feels like I'm beating a dead horse. But it's getting harder to write about a fading memory. Even when he was alive being sick made him a ghost of the man he used to be. It took his speech and mobility, trapping him in a broken body. For me, he lives mostly in the impact his death made. A fact I am ashamed of.

I don't remember his voice but I remember my mom’s cries collapsing on the kitchen floor. The color of his eyes evades me but the disparity in my sisters’ is seared in my memory. I don't remember his presence but I feel the lack of it every day when I wake up.

His birthday is lost in a jumble of other dates but I will never forget the day that he died. Feeling the weight of his suffering lifting off my shoulders and then suddenly—all at once—drowning in the suffering of everyone else.

So what is there to learn?

I learned that no one really knows what to say to an eight-year-old who’s just lost her father. Most resort to not talking at all, instead choosing to stare. Their pitiful eyes bore down, begging for you to make them feel better. I never knew what to say so instead, life fell silent.

I learned that it's something that never goes away. Grief ebbs back and forth, subsiding for a time convincing you that it's finally passed. Then it crashes back on to you, coming back all at once.
"It's been 9 years shouldn't you be over it by now?"

You try to be. Try to lie, and say a father was never necessary. But then you smell something or hear something a little too familiar and time just. stops. Your throat burns and tears well in your eyes. You beg the world to be invisible. And once again you're the little eight-year-old girl no one knows how to talk to. And life just falls silent.

So what happens next?

Everything. Life never skips a beat in the face of death. He died and my mind stopped but the world kept spinning. Time kept flying past me as I stood stationary numb to its motion. Christmases happened, my birthdays, homecomings, proms and soon graduation. Realizing this I vowed to live after his death, not just survive.

But sometimes I find myself slipping back into it. Stepping back and letting autopilot take over for a bit. Letting my guilt numb my senses to ignore the part of me he took with him.

Then all of a sudden the autopilot shuts off and I'm falling. I'm falling and it’s scary and it’s sad. But it’s not silent. Rather it's filled with guilt, grief, joy, love— everything I was ignoring. Everything I am meant to live after him. I’m falling but it's worth it. Worth it to live a life he would’ve been proud of. To live a life that he begged God he could have seen.

My father died, and whether I like it or not, everything comes next.