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.

1993 on LBI in Jersey with Tom and my little brother Matty.

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.

My mom and Tom looking like movie stars in Italy in the 90s.

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.

Me and Tom when I was in high school.