Next Friday marks three months since my Dad died but it feels like it was both years ago and just yesterday. Time becomes an entirely new entity when you’re trying to occupy each minute that passes with the intent to make every second more valuable. I can’t imagine this will feel any better in months or years from now, or that it won’t ever stop feeling like it was yesterday. I had a dream last night that he was still alive. I’ve had many, many dreams like that since November 19th. I’ve been told it means that he’s visiting. I grasp onto believing that’s true. 

Getting hold of myself the last few months has been difficult. Grieving has been projected to be this wild, emotional, tear-jerking experience but it is so much less hollywood than that. Grieving has been a slow, stagnant process. I honestly don’t even feel as though I’ve stuck my foot in the door to grief yet which is ironically the “first step” to bereavement. It’s been a flip-flop of denial, anger, and sadness but mostly silence.

 Oh, Timehop, never letting a past moment slip by us in this digital age. I checked it when I woke up this morning to find a video from my last birthday of my family singing to me– my Dad’s voice overpowering everybody’s. I cried and all I could think was, he should be here right now.

I guess there are seven stages of grief. It appears as though I’m lurking around stage one– disbelief, shock, denial. 

Seems accurate.

I’m slowly trickling through disbelief– I can feel it. I can feel my body resisting it. I can feel my body shuddering through fear– my abdomen is stiff, my hands are shaky, my eyes are swelling. I am physically aching for some balance between this hollowness and heaviness. 

Dad, it’s been eight days since you’ve spread your wings and flown above the earth. These eight days have felt like a blur— I feel like I’m waiting for you to come home, for you to walk through the door any minute now from a long vacation… It feels like I’m just waiting. Except one day I’m going to realize you won’t be coming home soon, and it’s going to be a very devastating moment.

“Remember that hearing continues.” 

I read it in the book. We were given a “hospice book,” as I’ve been calling it, that I’ve read repetitively. So when the nurse came over last Friday and sat me down to tell me they’re increasing my Dad’s medication, so he’ll become less responsive, I said, “okay, thank you.” When she asked if I had any questions, I said, “no, I don't think so. I’ve read the book.”

I’m trying really hard to not be bitter but I’m only human. With the upcoming holidays literally harassing me every place outside of my bedroom, I’m filled with equal amounts of excitement and anxiety. 

This is supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year but what if it is god awful? I’m starting to feel like I’m walking a tightrope except if you know me, I have no balance whatsoever and trying to figure out how to carry this weight is increasingly difficult. 

Every year, the second weekend of December, both sides of my family get together to pick out our Christmas trees. All twenty-two or so of us meet for breakfast at 8 am. We’d take up about half the diner and have two waitresses. Since my family is full of December birthdays, it’d usually fall on my Dad’s, my brother’s, my cousin’s, or my own, and we’d celebrate that with a candle-topped blueberry muffin. 

“You can be a bright thing in the midst of this darkness,” Hannah Brencher wrote to me in an email. I’ve obsessively replayed those words in my head and reflected on them the last two weeks. Perfectly timed and stated, they were the words I needed to hear, that I didn’t know I needed to hear.

You're right, Sister Catherine Mary. 

What could be more frustrating than constantly searching for answers that logically and tangibly do not exist? Nothing, I say, nothing. 

I know I wrote a whole post (Stages of Grieving a Diagnosis) a few months back about accepting this unknown world, which still stands entirely true but I failed to explicitly expand on the fact that step 5 is basically the trump card of all steps.

I make a place to write about my feelings, and then I overthink my way out of writing anything. I so easily fall into the question of: "what do people want to hear about?" Obviously not cancer. Duh... Even though this place is a safe house– my safe house– for writing about things we don't nonchalantly speak about.

Cancer leaves you with a lot of questions that will unfortunately go unanswered. I've noticed the biggest game-changer is accepting that those questions become considerations, and eventually confirmations. "How did this happen?" transforms to, "This is happening and I really don't know why." Suddenly it's more sensible because things happen and most of us can't figure out why, and I think that's a commonality we can rely on. Life is weird. So after you allow yourself to cry until you don't recognize yourself in the mirror, drink too much wine, and laugh too loudly at jokes that aren't funny... You have officially entered the stages of grieving a diagnosis.