happy thanksgiving

I did not write much this week. Thanksgiving was on Thursday, and the holiday season has become difficult since twenty-twenty. I have started to dread it. Those first holidays after you died, I felt like I forgot I was a person in the world. I couldn’t look people in the eye. I wanted it all to be over. I wanted you to be back here. Everyday, something would remind me of where I had been a year before, when it was too much to bear: me living in Washington, you dying in Minnesota - neither of us talking about anything that mattered - a state of denial and overwhelm.

Sometimes, especially during this time of the year, I miss you so much that it feels like the wind has been knocked out of me. I am unconvinced that anyone has known grief like this because if everyone with dead fathers feels this way, how is the world still turning? It’s too much pain, loneliness and longing. Maybe if there is this much grief in the world that means there is that same amount of love. I have learned that they are almost the same those two. I forget how much I love you until I let myself miss you and I realize that I won’t ever again hear your voice in real time. I still cannot talk about this grief with others because I am so scared of being ripped apart with witnesses to see. Where are you now? Are you finally okay? Isn’t my nephew, your grandson, amazing? He looks so much like you that sometimes I forget to breathe when I see his baby blue eyes. I really really really, almost more than anything, hope you are with Bert and your dad and you are playing hockey and barefoot waterskiing with two good knees and listening to my playlist that I made for you and the sun is shining and you have finally found the good in you, the pieces that I knew were there all along. But even more than that, I wish you were here. Sometimes I am still so angry at you for all that you did and for the way you left things. Even still, what I feel in this moment is deeper than missing you. It is cruel, suffocating, terrifying to know that I have the rest of my life without you. I don’t know if I forgive you, but I love you, really I do.