A Grieving Girl's Blog

Two years. Two years since I watched my father die from brain cancer. His cells had eaten him up, had destroyed increment by increment the body which held his beautiful and loving soul.

These two years have been marked by pain and a deep sense of un-rootedness. In losing my father I lost not only a parent but a foundation, a source of love, and the family that I once knew. Death creeps in like the water of a flood and always threatens to crumble all that you stand on. It brings with it a terrifying sense of vertigo, one which I am still learning to cope with today.

For the past two weeks, I have had great difficulty sleeping. This is often the case (and not just for myself, but for many who have gone through traumatic losses) whenever I near the anniversary of my father’s death or his birthday. Somehow, my bodily calendar anticipates the nearing of this moment, and everything becomes more difficult.

Every morning, I wake up way too early – at around 5 or 6AM – and struggle to fall back asleep, if I manage to at all. Today was no different. At six I was wide awake, peering through my skylight and looking at the still dark sky dotted with stars and a glimmering moon. I always like to think my father is somewhere on the moon, sending his good wishes and love.

In these early morning moments, it seems the stillness of my body still emerging from a deep sleep makes my mind spin twice as fast. It is in these moments that the darkest thoughts and regrets arise, that I try to imagine how life would be if he were still here, how much easier and more beautiful and enriching life would be, how my family life would be as it once was, how I wouldn’t spend my days living through flashbacks of the cancer which ate him alive.

Yet things are easier, somehow, than they were a year ago. I recently moved to Belgium to begin my master’s in Philosophy, something which I would not have had the strength to do last fall when I was still learning to adapt to this new life of grief. (I also couldn’t have done this without my loving boyfriend, who has supported me throughout this journey, and with whom we have created our own little family, just the two of us).

This move has been particularly triggering, still. So much of what I live in all its newness seems to remind me all the more that I cannot share it with my father, who would have best understood everything I was living. My anxieties regarding my future, or my love for this Harry Potter atmosphere that my 15th-century school offers, or all that I am learning of phenomenology and Spinoza which I know he would have been so passionate about.

Therein lies the double-edged sword of grief. The moments of joy we feel after losing a cherished one are at once precious achievements, but precious achievements that feel somehow wrong, as they are lived without the we love so dearly to share the joy. So the grief comes again and we wonder if we may ever feel joy without the ensuing guilt and sadness and anger at all.

I still can’t wrap my head around the fact of his death. It feels at times like a foreign idea, an impossibility, like remembering something from a vivid dream which appears to be real but its absurdity reminds you that it was just a dream, nonsense, a figment of your imagination. But now all that is a figment of my imagination and memory is my father, whose body no longer dwells on this Earth. Such a strange presence it is to carry the remnants of your loved one in your mind, everywhere you go.

Something has changed, however. This dream-like feeling, when I realize that it is true, that he is truly dead, no longer comes as the visceral shock it once did, as if my body was slammed against a wall. As time goes on, the transition is smoother. There is still the pain but it is part of me now, it is just at times reawakened, in those rare moments where I forget I am in grief.

The effects of death don’t only manifest in the worst moments of grief. There are other things which are lost, transformed, replaced. Since losing my father, I have lost a source of love and a source of self-esteem, and perhaps worst of all, I have lost a trust in life I didn’t know I had. The trust that things will go their path, the way they should. Life ripped away the rock of my life, despite the endless love and optimism I offered to it.

That brings me to where I am now: trying to figure out how to move on in life and make it my own. To try and reconnect to my passions in life, to what brings me joy, to what brings me meaning. Trying to find grounding activities that bring me back to the present, lived reality. Grief can bring us very quickly and very far out in the abstract world of memories, ‘what ifs,’ and flashbacks. While it is necessary to be vulnerable to this world, one cannot move on if one stays stuck in it.

When living with grief, it really starts to be all about the little things. Finding pleasure in a warm cup of tea after sobbing for an hour; preparing one’s favorite meal with a dear friend on a dark day; walking I nature despite the weight of the pain dragging you down. Every minute task completed is an accomplishment in the face of tragedy.

Two years is not enough time to heal. Two years is a blind of an eye. Yet everyday is an opportunity to better understand how your life has changed with the loss, and what kind of state you want to achieve. Grief has been by far the most enlightening, albeit torturous, experience of life I have had. The veil of naiveté is ripped away and you suddenly have bare life in front of you.

What will you now do with it?