The Price We Pay
A couple of months ago, I was talking with my friend, K. I was listing off how many parallels there are between death and break ups. Explaining how the timeline of grief in losing the best man I’ll ever know, my dad, was being mimicked in losing the man I thought I’d know forever, my (ex) husband. We were discussing the patterns – the ebbs and flows, the loss and heartache. Mostly the heartache. How excruciating it is to lose people you love.
“Obviously death is worse,” I justified. “I mean, of course it’s worse.”
K responded with, “Yeah, but it’s not like your dad is going to walk through the door, is it?”
She was right, of course. Her astute, and kind of funny, observation was entirely accurate. I am not going to run into someone who died at a café. I do not have to face someone who has departed at my door every week. I cannot co-parent with the deceased.
The tragedy of death is in the permanency. In the finality. In the things unsaid, and the time robbed.
A couple of days before Christmas in 2017, the year my father passed away, I wrote this:
I felt a lump swell in the base of my throat yesterday.
I instantly knew what it was.
I’ve felt it a couple of times this year already; in the days leading up to my birthday, and Father’s Day, and his birthday.
It’s unmistakable – a sharp bulge, that intensifies the more I try to quash it.
Gulp.
Gulp.
Gulp.