The Patreon Letters - 20th January, 2018

Content warning: death, grieving.

I really don't want to write about the obvious but I'm not sure anything else makes sense to write about. 

It's been two weeks to the day since my father died and everything is still very much in disarray. Jackson outlined some of my troubles two weeks ago in a letter (you can find it here) but I'm left now trying to come back to our normal pattern of letters and podcasts with something pithy and poignant to say about what I've been doing engaging with media the last two weeks and friends? I've got very little to talk to you about.

Grief is a funny thing. I've barely cried during this whole ordeal, instead finding myself confronting a yawning abyss of responsibility. My father was very old and not well for a long time. I have had time to gird my heart against this inevitability. By all accounts my family expected me to be inconsolable, though I've always been prone to shutting down over explosions of emotion in these difficult situations. I would love to just run away from it all and throw myself into media and let the storm pass me by unattended.

This isn't an option for me. Like many, I lived at home well beyond the 'normal' age of moving out, whatever that means anymore. My brother was a primary caregiver for years now, which means he had no job other than to make sure my dad was okay. It was a working if precarious situation. Now it's over, and we're left with an apartment I suddenly own in a rush and so many questions about how things will land in the future. Everyone is being very reasonable and flexible. It's going as smoothly as one could expect. And yet it feels like a crushing weight, the great collapse of a mountain of displaced responsibility that I was able to avoid because of the situation. A decade and more of this phantom 'adulthood' we are supposed to all someday be born into showed up on my doorstep and it did not knock but kicked and screamed and tore its way in, and I cannot be rid of it without real consequence.

We have been cleaning out my father's things. So many things, a lifetime of accumulation that filled all of the rooms of this small apartment, tendrils of an invasive vine that choked itself around every firm surface. There are collections I didn't know he had tucked away in careful keepsake boxes. There are old books and the same copies of books on even older shelves, their pages yellowed and careworn. There are photos, so many photos, of family members I have never met and friends who are all gone now. None of them are labelled, so none of them will be saved to be passed along to whoever remains. Nobody in this house knows any of those people anyway.

The service was yesterday, a cold windy day after a spat of winter where the sky and the old snow were the same awful dingy grey. It was a military burial, which means guns and taps and a lot of very police-faced men very earnestly telling me that they are sorry for my loss. I believe them, but the seriousness and validity of their professional sorrow makes my spiraling anxiety seem so childish by comparison. I should be mourning, not worked up about a trip to the bank coming up. I know I should not be measuring myself against these yardsticks, and I mostly don't, but the knowledge that I'm actively refusing to judge myself is its own kind of judgement. It is strange to pity yourself from a distance more strongly than you suffer in the moment, but this is the fogged mirror by which I see my situation most clearly in these strange days.

And over all of this, the world keeps turning. It warmed up, the snow melted, we're getting more supposedly on Monday. I took time off of work, I'm back to work, I'm looking forward to the next weekend already and here it is only halfway through Saturday. We're emptying out so many things to be filled with the potential of a new life we figure out together as a new strange family going forward, and while that's good and proper and feels spiritually fulfilling to be doing in these moments ... I can't help but be sad at how easily we all rebound and adjust from the loss. 

My reaction, two weeks into this, is not to be sad and bereft at how big this loss was, but to be sad and scared at how much we all heal and remain and continue so quickly. In a few months, there will be a new normal, and I'll just be another person who only has one parent. Lots of them in the world. More every day. It's not such a big thing, from far enough away.

That's all I have to talk about today. My apologies. Next time I will do my best to make it something more suited to this space.

Until then, I remain,

Em