“That’s the thing that is so appalling and unsettling about death I’m finding. It’s the moment when something happens, a sound or an experience that makes you feel like they’re there and then you realize they are so incredibly absent and your brain short circuits a little. That moment is awful. It doesn’t get better over time there’s just less of them… And that doesn’t feel better either.”
This is the message that I sent my mom a few days ago. She responded that I should write and write and write. It seemed like ironic validation of the feeling that has been nagging in the back of my brain to do just that. It seems like ages since I have written even though it used to be an integral part of how I identified myself. I usually just put it in the same column as reading books. In that bucket where I put the things that I sacrificed when I became a father before I had even really figured out who I was.
I started this post because I heard a country song talking about losing someone important and referring to the peace of knowing they were in God’s hands. The thought that kit must be nice to have that comfort and confidence that your dearest loved one is in some warm embrace of a deity that feels like pure bullshit to me. Yet as writing gives me a glimpse of something new. I am realizing that through processing great loss, maybe I am finding me.
In memory of the best Dad a son ever had and the best friend and fellow life traveler of the last 11 years.
