The Thing About Grief

some thoughts on grief ten years after losing my dad

The thing about grief is it sneaks up on you in ordinary moments. Like when your dad’s team plays in the Super Bowl, but you don’t watch it because he should be there right next to you screaming at the TV. Like when you hear the word cancer, and you remember the pit in your stomach when you found out that your dad had it too. Like when you are baking banana bread for your kids with your dad’s recipe and the mixing of sugar and bananas is both cathartic and terribly painful.

The thing about grief is some people are scared of it. They try to pray it away, offer trite platitudes, and say things like “You should have moved on by now. It’s been 1/5/10 years since they died.”

But there is no moving on. There is just moving. 

Because you don’t move on from wanting to call your dad when you need help with your taxes. And you don’t move on from picturing your three boys with him blowing bubbles in the backyard. And you don’t move on from wishing he could take your mom on the trip to Hawaii he had planned before he died. 

There’s no moving on. There is just moving.

The thing about grief is that you’ll wake up on the tenth anniversary of the day your dad died and put on his Oregon State University sweatshirt and your son says, “I like your orange sweater, Mommy.”

“Do you remember whose sweater this is?” I ask.

“Your dad’s” he says without skipping a beat. 

The thing about grief is that it still takes your breath away. Like when you are getting your kid ready for a 50's dress up day at school and you tell him all about how Papa grew up in the 50s. He asks to see pictures and you promise to dig through your dad’s childhood photos you keep tucked away on the top shelf of your bedroom closet. 

The thing about grief is you’ll hold in your tears until after you drop the kids off at school.

The thing about grief is it must be lived through. Because when you watch the man who saw you take your first breath, breathe his last, the only question that seems fitting to ask God is “why.” And in your anger and in your deep lament in the sadness, you don’t get an answer but you come to know the Man of Sorrows who was well acquainted with grief in only the way sorrow can teach you.

The thing about grief is that when you learn to welcome it as a part of your story, you realize that the cost of grief is love. The price of grief is a lifetime—or just a few years, or even a handful of weeks— of loving someone so much it feels impossible to live in a world where they no longer do.

The thing about grief is that it leaves an indelible mark on your life. There was a before, and now there is an after and there’s no moving on from a lifetime of befores. There’s only learning how to live in the after.

The thing about grief is that you’ll still wake up ten years after he is gone, wishing he were still here.

And I guess, maybe that is the power and strength and fortitude of love.