My dad died eleven months ago

Grief has existed for as long as people lived enough to die, so I don’t think that I have anything new I can add to the conversation. It feels like drowning not to try, anyway.

Grief feels like selfishness. It’s not there for the dead to benefit from, only the living. I grieve not that a person has died but that I have suffered a loss, that I am deprived of them. That there was something this person was able to do and that I am unable to do it in their absence. Between us existed a connection and that’s gone now, and everything they passed through that connection onto me is just trapped in me, now, unable to go anywhere. It will die with me. You needed to know my dad to have seen it for yourself.

If you were to picture it, my grief would look like a great big gray cloud looming behind me. If I ignore it, if I keep moving forward, I can outpace it. Go to work, write, edit, TV, read a book, go to work, again, again. If I stop it consumes me. It’s never not there. When it washes over me I am left in a fog. I can’t see where to go and so I cannot move, not safely, not until there is a break in the water vapor and I can start working to outpace it again.

At first, I didn’t cry much. Oh, I cried a lot, but not as much as I do now. I thought the first stage of grief was denial, as in denying what was happening. I never denied that my dad was dead. The moment I heard he was in the hospital I knew he was dying. I knew he wasn’t coming back from this one. Instead, I think I was denying my own sorrow. I was sad, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I felt sad and then I moved on. I didn’t know that grief would be a permanent part of me. That the cloud would always loom over me. I thought, eventually I will be OK. I don’t know if I will ever be OK.

Today, my grief tastes like something that defines me to my very core. Meet Kenna, person who is grieving. I write, I read books, and I cry. Shake my hand; did you know that I am sad? Everything reminds me of him. These cookies I made, did you know this is my dad’s recipe? I think I am now the only person alive who knows how to make them the right way. Every other attempt is a failure. When I die, my dad’s cookies die with me.

I go to work and I pretend I am not grieving. My boss doesn’t know my dad is dead. I never told her. I don’t know how to talk about myself. My dad talked too much, I used to think. He told long, meandering stories about his long, meandering life. I only remember a few of those stories now.

He used to be in the army, and he was stationed in Korea for a time. Just a clerk, my mom told me later; he was a clerk when he died, too. When I was in high school and obsessed with anime, I thought I wanted to learn Japanese, and my dad told me a story about his time in Korea. Showed me the Korean characters, how their writing system worked. I wanted to learn Korean, it feels like I always have. His VA gravestone was mis-engraved; it says ‘Vietnam‘.

He showed me how the irrigation system at our house worked. These pipes are here, and water those plants there, and this is how I fix a leak. It was always the middle of a hot day and I hated it, but after he died a sprinkler head burst and I drove myself to the hardware store, found a replacement, and fixed it. The first time I fixed a leak my dad asked me how I did it, and I told him, ‘Just like you showed me.’

My dad always dreamed of being a writer, but he never finished the book he was working on. I wanted to be a copyeditor. My dad used to whistle and it annoyed me, so he stopped whistling so much. Now hearing whistling makes me want to cry. I’m named after my dad, did you know? The last of five kids and the first he agreed to be named after him, because I’m a different sex and so I wouldn’t be ‘the second’. I never told him about me being queer. He wouldn’t have disowned me, but he wouldn’t have understood, and there was so much misunderstood between us that it didn’t seem worth it to add another.

I want to stop thinking about him all the time and I want him back. I want there to be someone I trust to give me his honest opinion. I want to be able to ask him all the questions I have about the stories I don’t remember anymore. I want not to have had my life upended in his absence. I want to stop tearing up whenever I hear someone whistling. But I don’t know that I want that big, gray cloud looming over me to disappear. I just want to be able to see.