Fragments of Grief
Incomplete musings on death and sorrow and how much you're allowed to grieve.
I know there’s not a right way to grieve. But since my step-father died I keep thinking about how much I’m allowed to grieve. I know this is dumb. I know that I am allowed to feel my feelings at whatever size they are. But there’s this thing - and it’s rooted in language and titles and names. Tom was my step-father, and that phrase implies he was less than, not as important a figure in my life as my biological father. So my grief should be handled differently - it can’t possibly be as big as my half brothers and sister who had him as a biological father, right? But that’s wrong. Tom raised me, he was there for me more hours of the day, more days of the year, more years in my lifetime than my biological father. I feel both guilt and shame writing that, but I didn’t chose for it to be that way, it just was. It’s a fact. And so my grief, my loss, my ache, is that of losing a father.
I don’t know why I have been turning this around in my head so much since he died in December of last year, or even before then — since he went into the hospital in October. But I have been, I have been struggling with what it means to lose him, with who he was in my life, and maybe I have been hiding the full picture of my grief because I didn’t think, as his step-daughter, I was allowed to grieve as loudly.
It always feels off when I text my step siblings or half brothers and say ‘your father’ as if he wasn’t mine too, but it’s shorthand, and I guess it’s weird to all of a sudden call him my father when I have a living father and have referred to Tom my whole life as my step-dad, calling him always by his first name. But you see how this trips me up? How even just that makes me feel separate in my grief? Makes me question how much I am allowed to grieve.
I’ve noticed how grief can bring us so much closer but also pull us further apart. Each of us retreating to our own grief islands with different memories, different topography, different issues we’re grappling with post-death. We all go off into our separate rooms to process that grief, meeting sometimes in the hallway or around the kitchen table to talk about our feelings, to show the weight of our sorrow, to feel less alone with it. But some of us choose to stay on the island, locked away in that room, holding our feelings tight to the chest. Grief can be the great unifier or the splintered wedge of old wood that finally divides us completely. And how much can I grieve when I have already lived so far away for so long?
What still surprises me — and it shouldn’t, I have had other people close to me die, but never a parent, never someone so consistently present in my life — but what still surprises me, is how grief just hits you at random times. Completely unaware, there you are, just doing some normal every day act, like pouring a cup of coffee or listening to a song you love, and then all of a sudden you’re a puddle of tears on the floor. There you were just getting on with your day but that sorrow will not let you forget, it is living inside of you now and it will wake up at times you don’t want to see it, and all you can do is give in to it, let it pass over you, because fighting with it will only prolong the pain. And so you accept that death is like an annoying new friend you don’t want to hang out with. They will not go away. And so you learn to live with them, this brooding over eager presence who does not want you to forget, who will not let you sleep some nights. And eventually, slowly, the grief becomes a comfort. It floods you with memories like a fucking cheesy montage and you see images in your brain of your loved one flashing by - laughing, hugging you, making a giant entrance in an ordinary room and leaving light there in all the cracks and shadows.
my sister passed away this year so I feel you on the grief coming out of nowhere 💛
Earlier this year I was cleaning her old computer keyboard and just started balling crying - like I was mourning the dirt marks on the keys - like it was another part of her that was now gone.
Big hugs. My father passed on Christmas Eve and I echo the strangeness of how and when the grief hits you ... and how that shifts over time although I still feel so young in this journey. When my newest book came out, I was thrilled to take it on a virtual book tour and excited about so much ... and then it randomly hit me in the middle of a day that this will be the first book of mine that my dad will not sit down at a coffee shop and read. It threw me for days.
Last week, I began graduate school again and someone confused about whether I was student or faculty sparked a memory of something only my dad would understand and I almost texted him until I remembered. But this time, there was something sweet about the way that I knew what he would say even though he wasn't here to say it.
I can't speak to the stepdad thing and just empathize with how that adds another layer. I can say that my dad and I had a complicated relationship and that factors in for me. And also when you mentioned the "your dad" thing, it made me think of a friend's family who is four (adult) kids with the same mom and dad but from a different culture so they always say "your mom" or "my dad" in their conversations with each other even though in our language/experience we would say "our mom" or just "Dad." The language both matters and doesn't ... and I'm so sorry that this is a hard part for you to work through in an already hard time.