It's been over three years since my father died, and tonight I'm grieving. He died on July 15, and today is the 21st, so I'm a few days overdue. But hell, last summer I was somewhere in Brittany surrounded by francophones, and as a result all of July almost slipped by unnoticed, a fact which shocked me. I hadn't thought that anniversary would ever become something small enough to come close to forgetting. And yet it did.
Tonight, feeling real grief is deep relief. Cracking the carapace that's grown over it and dipping down into the deep, cool well of bottomless sadness is something I don't do often, though I did it almost continuously the year after he died. Then July 15, 2004 rolled around, and I stopped, as if a kitchen timer had gone off. One Year of Grieving. Ding.
Now it takes some effort, or some extraordinary situation such as an anniversary, to drop into a state of mind I still think of as much more important than the nattering of everyday thoughts about work, life, and dinner. Death. It's waiting there, always, a still pool to be contemplated. During that Year of Grieving, I was perpetually furious at the world for continuing to live, for being able to ignore It. I wished evil upon others, idly hoping their parents would die, so that they would be jolted out of their apparent oblivousness to it, the Topic of Supreme Importance. Now I ignore it for most of the time, too, and don't wish death on anybody.
Tonight, I'm reading his obituaries, and realizing that I'm reading them for the first time, because I could never bear to look at them in the early days. Things I never knew about my dad--that he wrote a book about DC appellate law, for example--are unspooling on my computer screen. That his staff of ten people experienced almost no turnover for the twenty years he was their boss, because he was a good one. I already knew these things, but only dimly, like looking through a telescope backwards...all myopic and fuzzy through my own grief.
Now, I'm reading about a person who happened to be my father, rather than my-father-who-happened-to-be-a-person who was squeezed in a deathgrip close to my chest in those days close to his death. And I'm realizing how much I would have liked to have known him this way, as an adult, in his world outside me. And it's a whole new grief, grasping the adult relationship we'll never have. It's sweet grief, as always, because it fills me with love for him and releases me quiet, with nothing roiling under the surface. But you know it's love when you feel an ache like supernatural heartburn smolder in a straight line from your throat to your heart.
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