I am not sure I am at the alright part yet, but today felt a little bit like normal, or a new normal. Last night found me crying on the bus on the way home thinking about being without parents, which seems like you are without anyone worry about you (which is silly, since obviously friends and partners care about your safety and well-being, but perhaps never so fervently as parents.) The hole left by the death of my dad is maybe a smaller hole than the gaping chasm left by my mother, but is still a hole and still bottomless, or at least it seems so at the moment.
Last week was doozy, with both the funeral and Thanksgiving happening right next to each other and not really feeling like I had my bearings at all. I cried last night crawling into my own bed the first time since Thursday and being so fucking glad to be home after a chaotic weekend. I need stability and quiet and cats and all the familiar things. Today, getting up and starting my writing day, I was feeling a little bit better moving evenly paced through work without the crunch of the past month of trying to finish things in half the usual time. I looked at the calendar and realized it had been a month on Saturday since my dad wound up in the hospital, a month of this particular slow-burn horror. I intend not to leave my apartment for at least a week.
I am getting used to fatherlessness much as I struggled to get used to motherlessness. I was at the house this weekend, which is a kind of excavation but also a kind of erasure. In my dad's office that used to be my sister's bedroom, I found an entire drawer of remotes to appliances we no longer owned. Books on birds, fishing, and casinos, probably most of which I'd bought him. A stash of golf tees in a cup with something about fathers and golfing that I tossed in the trash. The house has been hollowing out steadily, but already, there are rooms that feel not at all inhabited by us. I once wondered why my mother and aunt threw my grandmother's glorious costume jewelry into a fire, but I kind of get it. Some stuff will be donated, of course, or given away, trashed, or maybe burned. Since my apartment is already full of too much stuff I want very little. Last week, I took a book on bird lore and some photos of my mom as a kid not in the albums. This week, a watercolor I gave her as a gift that has been on the wall above my dad's chair for over a decade. Everything there seems too heavy, to both carry back on the bus and to carry just in general. I have to be selective or die under the weight of it.
So much stuff, even despite several thinning outs. My mom threw out or passed on a lot of our stuff when they re-carpeted a couple decades ago, and my dad cleared out much after her death. But still, several decades of decor and thrifted stuff and hand-me-downs were still there. Cupboards full of platters and dishes for parties that were never going to happen again. Broken appliances and random cables. Its a well-used house, cheaply built in the 80s, so who knows if or what it can be sold for. Particle wood cabinets and baseboards, mismatched tile and stained carpeting. Busted doors and broken fixtures. The most valuable thing is the land its on no doubt, but its also unruly land, which we saw this summer when nature overtook the carefully plotted gardens and patches carefully tended by my dad in better days. The trees keep falling...one the last summer my mom was alive. Then a large part of another just narrowly missing the house in October before my dad's hospitalization. Like an omen. Or the birds that weirdly kept inexplicably getting in the house, four of them, this past year. None of it good.
Thanksgiving, like it did five years ago, felt off kilter and a little like ripping off a bandaid too soon, so I don't know about Christmas or what we'll be doing if anything at all since the old structures and traditions, will need revising into a new shape around the holes that are left. Maybe that means entirely new traditions, or revisions of old ones, I'm not sure. It's hard to believe its December even at all since mentally I am stuck somewhere back in October before everything slid sideways. I intend to unpack some new Amazon holiday things and the tree from my entryway closet tonight and attempt to fake it til I make it anyway.
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