On losing my dad.

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It’s hard to believe my dad has been gone for over a year (he passed away on June 6th last year). In honor of Father’s Day, I’m reblogging this post I wrote three days after he died.

I never really grieved properly, and may never be able to. We hadn’t been close during the last decade or so of his life. Mostly I feel a bittersweet sadness when I think of him. I hope wherever he is, he is happy. Sometimes I talk to him and I feel like he hears me. For all the problems we had and the distance that had grown between us, I never stopped loving him.

Lucky Otters Haven

dadandme1983
Me and my father, Summer 1983, Dallas, Texas.

I’ve experienced a strange array of emotions since my father’s death on Monday, June 6th. To be more accurate, I haven’t felt too much emotion at all. I used this event to take two days off from work, but not really to grieve, just to reminisce and remember the good times my father and I had together. And yes, there were many good times.

I know the things I’ve written about my parents in this blog haven’t been too flattering, but that’s because of the subject matter of this blog. Essentially, I write it for myself and nobody else. I feel no shame in saying the things I have said, none of which were untrue. And I never identified them or used any real names. I can’t deny they simply were were not very good parents, but for this post, I’ll just…

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9 thoughts on “On losing my dad.”

  1. I did a similar thing today – reblogging an article written after my father’s death. Interesting how our fathers live forever in our memories and our hearts, no matter how old we get or how old they were when they died.

    Jumping over to read the rest now.
    xx,
    mgh
    (Madelyn Griffith-Haynie – ADDandSoMuchMORE dot com)
    ADD/EFD Coach Training Field founder; ADD Coaching co-founder
    “It takes a village to transform a world!”

    Liked by 1 person

    • Came back to add a PS. since it seems that comments are closed on the original post.

      FYI – the first stage of grief for a huge number of us is not denial, it’s shock (which is emotionally protective) – so feeling “nothing” in an early stage of bereavement is probably as common as going to pieces. It is always my immediate response, if that helps at all.

      Second stage is frequently ANGER (and rarely “logical”). Kubler-Ross is often cited, but her book was written way back in ’69, after studying a particular demographic sampling and inspired by her work with terminally ill patients.

      Since she was the first to write at length about grief and the grieving process, her model is the most well-known and most quoted, but there are other, more recent, models with more stages, and a different ordering.

      Mostly, grief is what it IS – and no statistical sampling can accurately describe it.
      xx,
      mgh

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  2. I thought I remembered reading this but see I hadn’t given it a like or commented on the original. I still think I read it though. Weird.

    Anyway, now reading it (again?) I noticed something. You wrote that you weren’t feeling anything really and had no urge to cry. (I’m paraphrasing.) And then talked about the stages of grief and the first one being denial.

    You said you weren’t in denial because you knew your dad was gone.

    And my thought was, “Not consciously in denial.”

    But then I read a comment on the original where the person mentioned feeling shock in reference to someone’s death.

    So either and both make sense. I don’t think we always know consciously how our bodies and minds react and respond to news like this.

    Sorry for your loss, even a year later. My father’s been gone for 4 years and I still have not grieved completely.

    I can still feel this weird denial creep in sometimes via just to be thinking about my father and I’ll stop and think, “Wow, he’s actually gone.”

    It just feels weird that it’s reality.

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    • I get those weird feelings of unreality too — the realization he’s been gone more than a year is a bit shocking to me. Maybe that sort of dissociative feeling is part of grieving too.

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  3. My father also took me out to nice restaurants. There was a place in the meat packing district (where Samantha of Sex and the City lived) my father took me to and challenged me to finish my enormous plate. I won! He also liked to enter my enthusiasms. When it was mountain climbing, we went out with ropes to climb the hardest rocks. When it was space, we went to the planetarium. When I wanted to be a doctor, my father gave me a chart with the names of all the bones in the body and I started memorizing them. Even when my interest was Leopold and Loeb, my father took me to see the play, Compulsion, about the case which Clarence Darrow defended. And even when my interest turned to junkies, he took me to see The Connection.

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  4. I am so sorry for your loss. I hope that you have been able to move on for this past year and able to cherish the sweet memories of you both. Much love ❤

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