Grief/relief

Days after my father's memorial service, I keep waiting for that intense feeling of loss I experienced when my mother died--the sense that the world had suddenly gone dim, the nightmares about misplacing something important, the sudden urge to call her on the phone and the grief when I realized it would never happen again. 

None of this has happened since Dad's death. Even the memorial service, which was moving and very well done, left me dry-eyed. I enjoyed chatting with family and old friends, visiting places that were meaningful to me once and that I won't have any good reason to visit again, but instead of loss, I'm ashamed to find myself experiencing an immense sense of relief.

I'm relieved, of course, that his suffering is over, that the lifelong workaholic will finally have a chance to rest. But I'm also relieved that I'll no longer need to make those awkward phone calls, yelling down the phone line in hopes that he'd understand a fraction of what I was trying to say. 

I'm relieved that we won't ever again have to re-litigate every stupid thing I've ever done in my whole entire life. Once when I was a kid I lost a shoe, and for the rest of his life my father characterized me as the kind of person who's always losing things, a person no one else in my life would recognize. But the shoe-losing version of me died with Dad, and I am relieved to let her go.

Since my father died, I've been telling people that I intend to honor his death by forgetting every horrible thing he ever said or did, but it's not easy because so many of the happy times have horrible bits attached to them like leeches. Last week my brothers and I were comparing notes and realized that we had all recently vastly over-tipped a server in memory of all the times we'd had to go back into a restaurant and add to the tip after one of our father's epic public tantrums. If nothing else, his temper made us all generous tippers.

Well your father couldn't have been all bad--look how great all of you turned out! I heard this from several people last week and they're right: my father was not all bad, and toward the end of his life he was trying to be very, very good. He endowed us with an appreciation for hard work, independence, and humor, and our complicated upbringing made us resilient and self-sufficient, able to compartmentalize our feelings so we could act rationally.

So that's what I'm doing now. I've been sick for the entire month of July, still struggling with a lingering sinus infection, still getting negative results on Covid tests but feeling guilty every time I cough in public, still trying to power my way through all kinds of estate-related details even though all I really want to do is sleep. I don't have room in my life right now for loss, so I think I'll set it aside for later. Which is a huge relief.