Previously on this blog series: At 9:30PM on then night of August 31st, 2019, my dad died at the age of forty nine...
I almost wanted to be surprised. I almost wanted to be taken off guard and forget that the last year and a half had happened. I wanted to wake up from this fucked up nightmare. But, it was all too real.
*Early 2000, my dad holding me as a baby*
My mom and I grab onto each other and just sob. After a brief few minutes of crying, we both look at each other, split up, and start making the phones we never wanted to make. She called a bunch of our family members while I called a bunch of my friends and my fiancé (now husband) who was away in Washington, DC for the semester.
After about twenty minutes of making phone calls, people started coming over. My aunt and uncle came home, some my cousins came over, more aunts and uncles, and I'm sure there were other people there, but I don't remember. There was silence, there were stories about my dad being told, there were tears, and there was alcohol (At least on my part. Don't drink underage, guys. It's not worth it).
This is where things got... confusing. Let's jump ahead a little bit.
About a week goes by. My mom has told the president of my college and all of my professors that my dad has died and that I won't be on campus for a little while. We had the conversation of if I even wanted to go back, and my mom and I both agreed that I would take about two weeks away from college. I really wanted to go back, but not immediately. So, I took my time. My best friend flew in from out of state to stay for a few days and my fiancé came back for DC for a few days as well. I hung out with them and tried to navigate around my new life.
Another week goes by, and I am going back to campus. Lots of questions start being asked from my friends on campus and from some other staff that didn't know what was going on and I had to tell them about the worst experience I had ever had happened about 2 weeks ago. I got the usual consolations and sympathies followed by the "Is there anything I can do for you?"s and the "If you want to talk, you have my number/you know where I am/here's my email"s. It was these moments that made me realize that I now understood what it is like to be in both positions of an experience like this. On one hand, you give sympathy to someone and you don't know what else to say. On the other hand, you say "Thank you" to that person because you still don't know what else to say.
Those were the pretty normal interactions I had with people. Here are some of the interactions that weren't so normal:
The week I got back, I went to one of my lecture classes. The professor was talking about how there was going to be a test on Monday about the previous material the class had gone over. After class, I walked up to the professor and asked about when I could schedule a make-up date for the test since I had been gone. The professor looks at me and says, "You don't need a make-up date, you'll be taking the test on Monday". Very confused and a little stunned, I told asked them if they had read their email from the president about why I was gone. And she said, "Yes, but I would assume that you still would have looked over the material to keep up with the class". I didn't know what to say, so I walked away.
During this same week, I was in one of my studio classes, and I was asking the professor about how I should go about catching up with the class and if I could have some extra time one a due date for the most recent project. They asked me why they should give me an extension. I then asked this professor if they had read their email, and they said they had, but that didn't mean that I needed the "hand holding". Again, confused, I left.
A few more things started happening along the way that didn't make sense to me. People asked when I was going to drop out, many of them were surprised that I wasn't a blubbering, sobbing mess all the time, people said I will "just have to get over it", and some people actually stopped talking to me for a little while after I told them what I was going through. I started seeing the college counselor once week when I got back, and at first it was a lot about how I was going through my grief. It then became a lot about how I didn't understand why people where reacting the way that they were to me.
While talking to the counselor, these are a few of the things I realized:
1) Death and grief are pretty damn taboo in the US.
2) Death education for adults and kids isn't very accessible.
3) Some people don't know what to say simply because they haven't experienced something like this before.
4) People think that grief ends. It doesn't. It changes.
5) People think that grief looks the same way on everyone. It doesn't.
In October of that year, we had a memorial service for my dad at my local firehouse. Family came in from out of town, friends of his came that we hadn't seen in a while, and even some of his coworkers came to share the day withy us. While it was really nice to see everyone, I still got a good amount of the previous comments said to me at the service. I also noticed that not a lot of people where giving me condolences for losing my dad. They were mostly giving the sympathies just to my mom. I asked my mom later about why that was and we noticed two things that many people said to me:
"You're too young to lose someone".
and
"I'm really surprised. He didn't look sick."
I didn't know just how much society had created these expectations until it happened to me. I spent the next few months really letting that get underneath my skin. I was frustrated and not because people were being rude when they said those things, but because that might have been all they knew what to say in the moment. I didn't want people telling me I was too young, I didn't want them telling me that they were sorry, I didn't want people assuming that this was something I was going to "get over", I didn't want any of it.
When COVID hit and we had to leave campus in March of 2020, it was really difficult being back home. I didn't realize how hard it would be. I was once again surrounded by the world my dad had once lived in and I was surrounded by his clothes, his shoes, his pictures, his notebooks from work, you name it. I had nightmares where he would walk back in to our apartment and acted like nothing ever happened. I would be awake at late hours of the night and swear that I saw him getting up and walking into the bathroom. I don't really believe in ghosts, but I had never felt so haunted.
*My dad in high school in his football uniform - circa 1987*
Fast forwarding a little bit to the end of my junior year of college. It was the time of year where the juniors had to really start thinking about what they wanted to spend their last year of college making and researching for their Capstone project. We could write our research paper about anything we wanted, but we had to make creative work to support our thesis and our paper. A lot of my other classmates had really intriguing ideas and were coming up with beautiful ideas for their creative work. One of our first assignments was to brainstorm over the summer about what we wanted our project to be about, jot down some ideas, and make some mock-ups of what we wanted our work to look like.
I looked around the apartment, still covered in Dad's things, trying to figure out what to write for my Capstone. I was still very much living in the echoes of all the things people would tell me about losing my dad and hearing their odd expectations of how "it will pass with time" and "at least he's in a better place now". All with good intention, but still not making sense to me. How did people come to think grief is something someone gets over? Where do these ideas come from? What makes me too young? Why did people not believe he dying just because he didn't look like it? Why won't anyone talk to me about this?
So, I started writing...
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