My father died 19 years ago.
A lot of things have happened in that length of time. Births and deaths, cancer and meningitis. I’ve lost two brothers to those last two, and there are days I think Da got the easy way out, even though he fought a quick and dirty fight with lung cancer.
But being here means dealing with grief and the results of it. Or shoving it down, and ten years later realizing you’ve shoved it down so much it’s killing you. My mother understands the truth that no parent should outlive their children—it’s cruelty, to take away the child you raised and leave you here to figure out how to live without them.
So Da missed out on all that. He had to deal with the physical pain, but not the emotional. Sometimes—on my more optimistic days—I think the Universe had a plan, and this was part of it. My mother is tough as nails, housed in a warm exterior; my father, the blue-collar worker with massive hands and the ability to use his voice to stop a full grown man in their tracks, was the weaker one.
I don’t say that to disparage him. I loved my father, and to me, even though he was about 5’5”, he was a giant. Larger than life and someone whose love I constantly strove for as a child of divorced parents.
But I can’t imagine how he would have held up under the loss of not one, but two children. My father grew up in a time when men weren’t allowed to show emotion, where they were encouraged to only show outward strength. While he kissed his children on the lips and was not embarrassed to show happy emotion, I can only remember seeing him cry once.
When my Dad was really sick, before we knew he was dying, I visited him at his house. I hadn’t been in a few weeks (growing up, I’d been there every Sunday.) He had gone into the hospital, and his wife yelled at me in the kitchen, angry that I hadn’t called. In my defense, she hadn’t told me he was in the hospital. I’d have been there if I knew. But she continued yelling, telling me he thought we didn’t give a damn about him.
I ran into the other room, where my Da was in his recliner, swollen and sick, and I fell at his knees, telling him he must know that I love him, that I care about him. His eyes filled with fluid, and he told me not to listen to his wife, that she was wrong. It always stuck with me, because my father didn’t cry, and he cried that day.
It’s no surprise that I spent a great deal of my adult life avoiding tears and avoiding emotion. When my youngest brother (two years my senior) died of meningitis, it nearly broke me. Da had passed the year before, and Jay had been the one who shared a wealth of memories with me. Some of those memories, with the loss of my brother and my Da, are mine alone, now.
But raised by a strong woman and a man like Da, I powered through. I wouldn’t give in, I’d go on. Life goes on.
Or so we like to tell ourselves.
Life did go on. I worked, ate, slept, raised my baby and did all of the things normal humans do. Inside, I suffered a break—we’ll say post-partum depression, but I’m not sure it was that anymore. Between my brother dying—and not dealing with that, but instead stifling it with this mantra of “I’m fine”—and my child’s first Halloween, I started having paranoia. One day at a faire I thought my mom stole my baby, “because they say it’s always the ones closest to you who steal your baby.” I started seeing images of running a pair of scissors down my arm, and it took hours of telling myself “your baby will be alone” to keep me from doing so. Paranoia convinced me my spouse wanted to divorce me.
That’s the trap of depression, though. It seduces you and wants you to think it’s the only one who can understand. A good doctor and better medication got me back on track. But I still didn’t cry.
You can only skip out on the crying for so long before it pours out of you like spoiled wine. Your threshold for holding everything inside becomes smaller and smaller, the walls between your emotions and the world thinner and thinner. And your body feels that pressure, causing everything from joint pain to migraine headaches.
I started crying when I lost my eldest brother to colon cancer in 2015. The tears wouldn’t stop coming. And I needed that. Years of holding all that emotion inside had built up a fountain inside that kept gushing until there was nothing left. I raged at my father, for taking my brothers and leaving me behind, the same way he did when I was little and he’d take them all on a hike and leave me, the smallest, back with mom. Raged at my brother, who left behind two beautiful daughters who were without a Dad. I raged at myself, for not being a good enough replacement for my brother’s guiding hand.
One day it was gone.
Whether I had talked it all out with my therapist, or I had reached the bottom of the geyser doesn’t matter. I came to the realization that letting all of that anger and sorrow out had been cathartic. And it could have been more so if I had let it all out all along. My body started to feel better.
My Da died 19 years ago, but it took me that long to figure out how to grieve for him. I hope this story helps you learn quicker than I did.
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— The Good Men Project (@GoodMenProject) March 11, 2019
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo Credit: Anemone123 on Pixabay
