question

I’m just a few days out from the second anniversary of my dad’s death.

The year after he died was a whirlwind of taking care of the estate, moving from my apartment in Seattle into his old apartment in a nearby town, then setting up his old apartment as my new home. There was no time to grieve, but my body let me know everything was not okay by plaguing me with flare-ups of chronic health problems that hadn’t bothered me for years, as well as introducing a few new ones. Nothing serious, just enough to keep life perpetually irritating and exhausting. Chronic insomnia was in the mix, so I was always tired.

In July last year, I told my boss I needed some time off. I took three weeks without pay, and spent a lot of time sleeping. Finally. Then, just before the one-year anniversary of Dad’s death, I made the decision to go to grad school.

Over the past year, grad school has meant a shift in my schedule. Less time commuting, more time at home, more time to hear myself think. So this summer, two years out from Dad’s death, I’m feeling his loss much more than I did one year out from his death. I have the space inside my head, and in my life, to feel it.

This is the part where I feel compelled to launch into “what I’ve learned since Dad died.” But I don’t know if I’ve learned anything, other than that grief is not something you go through in predictable stages, then “get over.” For me, it comes and goes. I’m enjoying   my current schedule of part-time work and school; personally, I’m much happier than I’ve been in a long time. But the grief is always there, weaving in and out of my life in not always predictable ways.

It’s not only grief, either. Death itself, especially of someone close to you, brings up all these weird questions. My first and most persistent question was: “Where the fuck did he go?”

There was a time in my life when I thought I had this question answered. For awhile, I tried to be a Christian. When I was trying to do the Christian thing, I believed God took people to “be with Him” after they died, which meant their spirits lived on in the presence of God’s love. I was never able to conceive of “heaven” as a physical place. I thought of it as a realm where there was just love, and like: no bullshit.

Of course in Christian circles there was a lot of talk about who might go to heaven and who would be doomed to hell, but I was never really able to believe in hell, even though I was surrounded by people who did. I figured God would take the necessary time with everyone. That God, being Omni-everything, had a command of time that encompassed before, inside, and after an individual’s mortal life span. I believed if God truly loved the people he created, God would bring everyone around eventually. This belief gave me a lot of comfort for many years.

Dad didn’t believe any of this. Dad believed in nature. He believed that when you die, you become fertilizer, so to speak, and that this is as it should be. Near the end, when the hospital chaplain came around to Dad’s bedside to ask if he needed prayer, I was able to say, with complete confidence: “No, I don’t think he’d like that.”

So when Dad died, I found myself wondering: which one of us was right? And, by this time, my own belief had already faded. It continues to fade, not because anyone has “turned me off” to Christianity, but because, the older I get, the more absurd (and often cruel) it seems.

Still. I saw that moment, the moment I had before only read about in books (or only experienced with pets, the moment they were put to sleep.) I was sitting in the room with Dad when he went. He’d had a massive stroke, he was unresponsive, and the doctors expected him to die. They just weren’t sure when it would happen. Dad had signed a “do not resuscitate” order. It had been his wish, if he were in this state, to be allowed to die. He was terminally ill; he’d been managing it well for years, but had gone into rapid decline over the past month. He did not want to be kept alive in a hospital or a nursing facility, spending his last months unable to take care of himself.

So I was there in the hospital, waiting. Waiting for that moment. And when it came, I watched Dad stop breathing. I saw how one minute, a person is there, and the next minute, as they stop breathing, they just aren’t. The essence of whoever Dad was–that was just gone. His body was there, but he was gone. And despite the fact that I have a hard time believing in God these days, I have just as hard a time believing that there wasn’t a soul? a spirit? a something that was my dad. A something that was there, when he was breathing, and that was no longer there, when he stopped. And I can’t shake the feeling that the essence of Dad must have gone somewhere. That he must exist somewhere.

If he were here right now, Dad would say this feeling I have is complete bullshit. And all I know is that I miss him like hell.