Grief and the Great Big Goodbye

I think I was eight years old when I experienced my first real loss. It was my great grandmother. I remember she had one room in her house that was full of stuffed toys she had collective over a lifetime and there at the end she used to let us take one home each time we would visit and I loved her. I still have a small white rabbit in a hula dress that I got from her collection and when she died, I got a necklace that still sits in a drawer with my jewelry. I cried through the entire funeral. I didn’t quite understand the magnitude of that loss but I knew that I missed her and she wasn’t coming back.

When I was ten, my grandpa died. We weren’t close, we didn’t see him often, but that isn’t my story to tell.

It would be another fourteen years before I experienced a loss of someone so close to me again. There were the occasional deaths of a distant relative but no one that shook me to my core until I was twenty-four. I lost my grandma who helped raise me. Who gave me her love for all things sweet and a snarky attitude. I gave my daughter her name and I still cry about her leaving whenever I think about her. It was a kind of grief I felt deep in my bones. The kind that changes you a little bit and makes you never quite feel whole again.

I was thirty-two when it came knocking again to the tune of my aunt, followed by my other grandma four months later. I was older and a little bit wiser, a mother myself by that point but the grief still clings to me like a fresh dew when the memories get stirred up.

That was four years ago. And then there was you.

You spend your entire life knowing that, eventually, you will lose your parents. That’s just life, right? The price we pay to be their sons and daughters.

But I am only thirty-five and you were only sixty-one and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to you. I wasn’t done being daddy’s little girl. I wasn’t done needing you.

But you’re not here now.

I keep thinking you’ll walk up the stairs and crack a joke that sends the whole room into a fit of laughter. Or that we’ll pack up and head back to the hospital and you’ll be awake and they’ll tell us they were wrong and you can go home now. But none of that is real and you are gone and I don’t know what to do.

I’ve kept it together the best that I could all day but now I’m home and the kids are sleeping and I miss you.

Greif is weird. One second we’re laughing and the next we’re all in tears.

Tomorrow, we go to the funeral home to start planning for a service none of us wants to have because you’re not supposed to be gone. You’re supposed to be here.

For lake season and the fourth of July. For birthdays and holidays. For years to come.

Maybe if I had been sixty and you eighty-six, I could have accepted that this is just how life works.

But I was thirty-five and you were sixty-one and I’m not ready to live without you.

With love and a broken heart,

That One Girl Who Writes