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Grieving here or there or just everywhere?

Here at home I’m not surrounded by memories of Dad, so I can keep plugging along and get stuff done without thinking alot about it.  But when I’m trying to go to sleep, or when I’m alone in the car,  the memories flood in and so do the tears. I don’t know that the healing happens any “faster” by my being at Mom’s house where there are so many memories of Dad. I guess healing just comes in time no matter where you are.  I know that grieving is different for everyone, it depends a lot on the quality of the relationship you had with the person. You feel the loss more keenly when you lose someone you’ve been very close to. When you’ve invested a lot of time and energy into the relationship, having them gone leaves a big empty space in your heart.

I just feel drawn to go to Mom’s and spend time because we know how both of us are feeling and we can talk about Dad in between talking about life, and if we cry, we cry. We have these odd conversations where we talk about current stuff and make plans and laugh over things, and then suddenly the conversation changes to something about Dad and we kind of exhaust ourselves talking about that topic, and change back to current stuff. We even talk about how weird it is that we swing back and forth in our conversations like that. And yet it’s part of the “processing” we have to do in order to sort out the feelings and keep going. Sometimes it feels like doing laundry. We pull out these memories of Dad, and we wash (cry) and iron (talk) and fold or hang them up in the closet (put them away). And maybe one day we’ll find the laundry is done and everything is done and we don’t have to sort anymore.  And from time to time we will go through that closet and pull out a memory, but it won’t be painful, only sweet and sad. At least I hope that’s how it turns out.

I have to say that I think this is a lot of how Dad handled things as well. He was a no-nonsense man in a lot of ways. Like that last weekend, when I hugged him and told him I loved him and wished I could just keep him forever, he looked me in the eye and said, “But you can’t, and that’s a fact.”  Like he was telling me how to fix my car or do the dishes.  it’s just the way it is, he would tell me. People live, and they die, and you just have to go on.  And we will, we are going on.  But that Dad-shaped hole in our hearts willl take a lot of filling.

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