Growing up grieving

Today is the 20th anniversary of my father's death. [breathes] In the last 20 years I've learned a lot about grief. Grief is a living, breathing organism; one that changes through circumstance and individual and through how our lives transform us. The grief I feel now is not the grief I felt 20 years ago. The loss I live with is not the loss I experienced on that day. I have learned what it is like to not have the childhood people imagine everyone has. Losing a parent. People think of it in terms of the relationship lost. But the loss reaches far beyond that. Livelihood, social interactions, trajectory, even personal ideology and identity can be fundamentally changed. I can only begin to imagine who I would be and what I could have done if my father had lived. It isn't a very productive exercise, but it is interesting to think about. The simple difference of not moving to Florida would change everything. Not all of these changes would be for the better. I had a lot of trouble in school between behavior issues and other things and this had already begun before my father became ill. If we had stayed where we were, I may have been subject to increasing stigma in school and a progression of my reactionary behavior. I experienced some of this after the move, but I don't know how much worse it could have been. Would I have been more influenced by my father's western conservative values? How would I have benefited from more years of the confidence and strength my mother had before his death? How much would my sense of the struggles others endure have suffered from just a bit less exposure to hardship? Children have no idea that their parents are people and only gradually discover this. I have learned what it is to discover that your parent was a person... a person you can never know. I have written about this before. The sharpness does not abate. I have learned how and when isolation and shutting down works and how and when to force yourself to go through the motions. This makes the years easier, and gives me a chance to make my loss useful. Obviously, my father died in the middle of the holiday season. Some years, this meant we didn't have a holiday. But now, as I told a friend of mine who is experiencing her first holiday without her brother, it means my holiday is different. A lot different. It's still absolutely impossible. When the radios switch over; when the decorations go up; when the stupid grocery stores pull out all that cinnamon flavored garbage. I can't walk around in public without being at the very brink. I am constantly in pieces. But when I have tried to ignore it, it makes it worse. It is so painful and so isolating. The whole world is going on. The whole world is sparkly. I'm not. So, I make me sparkly, and then at least I'm not alone. No one gets it. No one wants to hear it. No one cares. No one even looks. But going through the motions helps. It doesn't fix it, but it helps. I have learned what it means to leave faith and, in many ways, when I did, I lost my father all over again. I have learned that grief builds on grief and not having my father to share new pain with compounds the pain and weaves them together. The loss of my grandfather was greater because of the role he had taken in my father's vacancy. The loss of my pregnancy was greater because my father will never tell me it will be okay. I have learned that joy is never without pain and each milestone, each event, each accomplishment is tinged by the empty seat. I have learned, most of all, the long game, and that grief, in a way, becomes a new person in your life. There is a relationship and a person lost, but the role doesn't disappear. That role simply becomes a persistent empty space.