Woke up thinking of my Dad today. I knew I would.
He's been gone 14 years now. You can call it a death anniversary because that's what it is.
I think the first time I wrote about my Dad's death in this blog was one year, one month, and one day later. Reading those words back I can't help but feel like a poser. Trying to be so strong after what was more than likely the most surreal and difficult year of my life was a stretch. Even if the challenges we face in life are what build our true characters, death of a parent when you are a child fucking sucks. Still, I consider myself lucky to have had the support of one extraordinary mother and an incredible family during that dark time. Friends were there but if they didn't know what I was going through it became awkward to talk about Dad's death and grief itself.
Less than a week after we found out Dad was suddenly gone, my celebrity crush was found dead too. I remember standing in line at the Safeway when I came across the breaking news, scrolling through Twitter. Heath Ledger was only 28 years old. Dad was 41. I grieved both men for very different reasons. One whose love I knew yet didn't think I needed. The other's love I'd so dearly wanted and never known.
The second time I wrote about Dad's death in this blog was a year and a half after he passed. Years later I wrote very bluntly, 'sometimes life isn't all that beautiful but to make up for that, there's death'. As I sit here typing away on the 14th death anniversary I can't quite make out where my head was at in that moment. Being a 17 year old is especially difficult for anybody. A 17 year old experiencing the death of a parent has an extra layer of darkness that makes seeing clearly almost impossible. Year after year passes and you don't celebrate your milestones together. There's no way I would have recognized myself from all those years ago if I ran into me on the street.
As a young woman I was yet a child. I craved the recklessness that goes along with youth; had expectations of myself that were hard to keep up with. I'm 29 and a half years old today and there's no chance I'd pretend to know what it is I want besides good health. Back then in my mind I'd had it all figured out. Thought I was going to be an anchor on the news at 17. Admittedly I had my own car; a job in marketing; respectable grades; a solid group of friends; full-time hobbies. I was arrogant or proud or whatever I thought I was. Dad's death hadn't hit me yet and those words were written shortly after Swine Flu (H1N1) was declared a global pandemic... after Michael Jackson died. Written back when I didn't really know what grief even was. It was mostly just denial, or kidding myself, or shock.
Grief is a weird thing to go through. I grieved Dad in my own way as a 15-year-old and it's as if I'm grieving him in new ways as the years go by. Relearning grief or really learning grief, perhaps.
If grief is the response to loss, when you lose someone at a formative age you don't get to choose how that loss affects you in a behavioural or social sense. At a time when you are meant to find yourself it's as if you've lost the only parts of you that were understood. Rather than looking for your next place in the world, you fumble around with bits and pieces of what you knew -pieces that have been changed forever.
My way through the unexpected death of a parent is still ongoing. The good news is I am finding a way through it all. Today I am a happy young woman in a healthy relationship and I wouldn't change a damn thing. At some point in the next 10 or 12 weeks I'll become someone's Mother. And I know I have some issues that cause me to react very quickly and sometimes too negatively, based on my experience as a young person who had to deal with the loss of a parent. Some might call it cynical: my way of thinking nowadays. It isn't so much I don't trust things could be better than anticipated. My character flaw is more of an inner struggle to avoid thinking of the worst possible outcomes before anything even happens. Am I waiting for the bad news? No. I just know that it can (and will) come at any time.
Till my own death I take great comfort knowing Dad would not be falling for a lot of this shit. Not saying he'd be against a vaccine for COVID-19, or that the coronavirus is a hoax because he wasn't oblivious but there would absolutely be some way he'd make light of today and the global "situation". And it gives me hope one day I will know exactly where I need to be with my grief. For now I'll work on getting there. And I'll keep writing.
