The Untethering

Grief is tricky.

It can be loud enough to bring you to your knees...other times, it's palpable, visible in puffy eyes and streaming tears.

But right now this is the beginning of the long grief—the kind I sadly know well. The kind that changes us. The kind that quietly settles into the everyday moments that keep arriving.

I remember feeling truly shocked after the sudden death of my mother thirty years ago. I looked around and wondered, How are people still moving?

Today, everything feels heavy.

My sister and nephew have gone home to California. My other sister is back on the Cape. My dad's things are where he left them in the home he shared with his partner. His car sits in my driveway with an open bar of Irish Spring in the glove compartment to keep things smelling fresh.

The celebration of his beautiful life is now over. Cousins have gone home. The flowers are beginning to wilt. No more planning. The phone has gotten quieter.

And now it's just... this.

The loneliness of grief.

It feels deeper than sadness. I feel it in my bones. It requires real effort to do everyday chores, it feels heavy to choose what to make for dinner, and it feels almost impossible to return to my daily schedule.

The truth is, I feel untethered.

I am fully aware that dying is part of life.

At my age, many of my friends have traveled this road. They understand in ways they couldn't have thirty years ago.

My sisters and I spent the last five months caring for our father, understanding that we were walking him home.

Even with all this knowledge, with all this beautiful support, with being able to say the things that needed to be said... the grief remains.

He was the axis we revolved around.

In a family that has struggled with communication, he was the bridge. The gentle guide who kept us coming back to each other. The one who quietly moved us forward. He never even asked for attention, yet somehow he became the center that held us together.

Now we're all trying to figure out where "together" lives without him.

It is disorienting.

And yet, at the same time, I know and deeply feel how incredibly fortunate I am.

I know friends who have buried their husbands and wives far too young. Friends who have lost children—a grief I cannot begin to comprehend. Friends who have lost siblings. Friends who have fought cancer. Friends who survived it. Friends who didn't.

Being human is so wild for so many reasons...the only way to know this type of grief is to know and be lucky enough to experience, the greatest kind of love.

My sisters and I were given the most profound gift a child can receive. Our entire lives, we were offered love in its highest form: love without judgment, love without conditions, the deepest of love..to the very last breath.

One of the greatest privileges of my life was loving my father and being loved by him.

The greatest price is missing him.

To have known a love this steady, this safe, this generous... to have had a father who every single time he called started with "Hi, hon," and ending every conversation with, "Ok dahlin’ I love you"... is a gift beyond words.

The grief is big because the love was big.

Right now, I don't know exactly how to move through this untethering. I don't have a list of lessons or five steps toward healing. I don't even know what healing looks like.

I only know that love doesn't disappear when someone dies.

It changes shape.

It becomes memory.

It becomes gratitude.

It becomes the quiet nudge that will continue to ask, "What would Papa do?"

For now, though, I am simply allowing myself to miss him.

Deeply.