muddle through somehow: thoughts on ten years of grief
My father was a thousand lively things before he was dead. He was a poet and a storyteller. He was an avid reader and at one point, an actor. His authenticity was unmissable. He had an easy warmth. Ten Decembers ago, he died suddenly. Every year since, I’ve made efforts to distill his character into a brief, fitting tribute. But the weight of a decade demands a different reflection. Through our time of grieving, we’ve come to understand the preciousness of a thousand lively things — an understanding deserving of its own tribute.
Understanding was the first thing that felt impossible in the shock of sudden death. Dad spent his last morning shoveling the walk after a winter storm, a dutiful display of his unremarkable selflessness. Then he left. “Dad’s gone,” my mother said on the phone, a sentence that for a brief, hopeful moment confused — where could he possibly go? It was too incomprehensible an erasure. Surely he would appear in the doorway at any moment, snow on his cap, having finally cleared the path. His laughter had been too full, his kindness too natural, for these things and him to be so suddenly gone. My mother, my sister, and I cried together that night, our shared tears an ocean into which anyone could sink.
But we didn’t sink. We made arrangements and somehow made eulogies and welcomed visitors with casserole dishes. My mother’s friend brought over a copy of Mamma Mia! and for the first time in days, we were laughing. Eventually, inevitably, we went back to living. I went back to school and slept constantly in a dormitory bed. Dad came in a dream one morning and said we would be okay. I woke up crying, and certain he was wrong. All spring we waited: for words to form and sense to take shape; for a return that wouldn’t come.
That summer we set out to spread his ashes in Elephant Rocks State Park. We brought them in a plastic margarine tub. Nobody tells you how to spread ashes, that there is technique required. My fingers were wet from reaching the quarry bank, so when I scooped up a handful of Dad, it made a pewter goop. I stretched my arm out and was unsure what gesture would be appropriate to release the heap of Dad. As I opened my fist ceremoniously, a hard wind blew by and whipped a sandstorm of Dad into our faces. Later I would read about how elephants grieve, how the herd will nudge and consider a loved one’s bones, seemingly perplexed, before eventually scattering them. Nobody tells you how to grieve. It was okay to get it wrong.
We found old pictures we’d never seen. We found comfort in odd corners: the unexpected familiarity of a certain scent, the lighting at a particular time of day. The way Diane Keaton sang, as one of Dad’s favorite film characters Annie Hall, “I’ll be seeing you in all the old, familiar places.” If he could no longer be Dad, then he could be everything else: he became furnace heat and Christmas lights; he is gas station coffee and dusk shadow. He is every lively thing that reminds us of him. If you don’t believe in ghosts or angels, you put faith, instead, in memories.
We took new pictures and made new memories, his absence becoming its own presence. Graduations, birthdays, Tuesdays, midnight ice cream — all of them were now heavy with missed opportunity. We learned not to ignore this, to talk about him every time. My sister got engaged to her lovely, loving boyfriend; at their wedding, I walked her down the aisle. Walking with my mother was her brother’s son. Our roles were shifting, realigning, forming unglimpsed constellations in the night sky. Our ties were at once strengthened and more elastic. That night we laughed and danced. We enjoyed our time together.
We got comfortable with getting farther away. I moved to the west coast and pursued writing. My sister moved across the state and became a beloved teacher. My mother bought a home and got back into her first love, newspapers. She was a single woman with a media career, like when she met my Dad, but with a different, wiser independence. Her openness to living, despite what she had lost, was a beacon. She became my hero in grief, an example and a peer. My sister had a daughter, and she has her grandfather’s smile. We tell her how much he would have loved her. We vow to give her as much as he gave us.
As we enter the tenth year since the worst one, the one thing that remains unchanged is loss. Dear friends have been losing their own fathers, their mothers. Our sense of grief is necessarily different; mine has had all this time to age, to breathe. At first this made me guilty. But in the spirit of finding peace, I have been grieving my grief, sending it out like a lantern with a gracious wish.
Dear Grief, I would say, thank you — sincerely — for your unwanted but ultimately illuminating visit. You’ve taught me, Grief, how to live with a fuller heart. You’ve given contour to the shapeless, slippery days we once took for granted. You’ve shown me that in the face of unsettling impermanence, what does persist is love.
I can still feel my father’s still, ten years later, in all the old, familiar places. In every warm scotch sip and carefully chosen word. He had a unique fidelity to saying things the right way. It must be why he always loved to remind us about the altered lyrics to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” They’d changed it, he’d announce, to “hang a shining star…” because Sinatra thought it was too sad. Dad didn’t see it that way. “Through the years we all will be together,” he’d eagerly sing, “if the fates allow. Until then,” he’d emphatically inject, “we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”
Because there’s a promise in the wandering, the hope for shared salvation. Our struggles — our losses — bring us closer, make us stronger. Wherever we’re headed towards, we’re getting there together. Dad was right. We could not have gotten here without the example he led. His was a short life, but a full one, lived with immeasurable wisdom. He was a man of profound intellect, but simple virtues: be good, be curious, use the brief breaths you have to tell the people you love that you love them every day. In the ten years since his last breath, he has helped us see a thousand lively things. It is him who draws the lines between the stars, making brighter constellations. They are ancient beams of navigation. We follow them with trust, and the certainty that, somehow, we’re getting through together.
muddle through somehow: thoughts on ten years of grief
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