A Grieving Girl's Blog

One year. One year since I watched my father, the light of my life, take his final breath, and with it mark the end of a chapter in our lives. A new chapter began, that day, one that has since been defined by immeasurable pain, longing, and irremediable regret. 

Yet it has also been a chapter of love, with some moments of joy, and gratitude.

When I think back on this year, I feel confused. The one-year marker is a useful tool to remember birthday parties and to plan vacations, but it is hardly attuned to grief. While calendars structure our lives into a linear time frame, grief shatters all of that, and trying to measure the amount of love felt or pain experienced in a matter of numbers is a futile attempt.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. Yet those words don’t ignite within me the fire of rage I felt just two weeks ago when thinking about my beloved parent; they don’t ignite the screams and sobs of a child who lost their net of safety, which at some points in the past year represented a daily routine in my life; those words don’t make my stomach clench.

Today, I am not even sure as to what I should write. Or if I should at all.

My father was a beautiful soul whose presence lit up any room he was in. He embodied the perfect synthesis of passion and lightheartedness, brilliance and humility, generosity and dedication. To this day, my father remains the person I have met closest to perfection. He was my father, my best friend, and my greatest source of guidance.

My father should not have died. We all know this, though it is hard to pronounce. That is the taboo of death. He should never have gotten cancer, and I should never have lost a parent at 22. And everyone knows this — one merely has to look in the eyes of those to whom I tell my story to know just how horrific it all is. 

And now, my task as a grieving child is to transform what was once the physical presence of my mentor into a spiritual one that I cultivate in my everyday life, a presence that I carry with me wherever I go and wherever I may be in need. No child should have to do this, but that is the tragedy of it all. We must if we are to survive and find happiness once again.

Already I am running out of things to write.

Perhaps my writing block is testimony of the start of a new phase of grief, or perhaps even a new chapter of life, one in which the loss of my father and my grief have become such an integral part of my being, of my life, that I can no longer abstract myself away from it. I can no longer write about these things from a birds-eye view: for that, I would need to remember what it was like to exist without the grief.

In this way, my father’s life persists within our own. It persists in our ability to carry on with life with and through the pain, to create new bonds and memories, to find moments when the lightness one can find in life relieves some of the terrible weight of grief.

This is not to romanticize grief in any way, as in the end it all just hurts, and no one will ever console the inconsolable feeling that things could, and should, have been radically different. But that inconsolability is what we have to constantly swallow and keep down until, one day, we don’t even notice it’s there.

Pierre-François was like no other and those who had the fortune of meeting him know this. I still hear his voice and his laughter, see his beautiful brown eyes open wide at the wonders of the world. In some ways, I am getting used to a life without him, and in others, my life has never been so densely filled with his being as it has this past year.

This might all seem paradoxical, but alas, I think most of what makes up grief is.

I send my heart out to those grieving and experiencing the inevitable pain that at times feels like an internal acid bath. Seriously, that’s how it feels at times. Yet some day we will find some semblance of peace again. In honor of the love.

He would be so proud, so, so unconditionally proud of where I am today. Some days I wish it were enough to know that.

Tu me manques, Papa. Je t’ai trouvé dans les étoiles hier, beau et brillant, illuminant la nuit.

With love

Soline