Two years ago I experienced the first death that had a real impact on my life. Almost all my family flew in the same day to be there for my mom. That night as my mother cried, screamed and mourned the loss of her high school sweetheart, I was nowhere to be found. Why? I was throwing my friend a five thousand dollar birthday party. When confronted about it, I presented a half hearted excuse- something about not wanting to lose the money. I can since confess my absence wasn’t about the money at all, it was my crippling fear of discomfort. I couldn’t face my notoriously animated happy-go-lucky family in their rawest realest state, stripped of all jokes and joy. Ironically in the most sinister of ways, I find it quite funny that we’re all so unequipped to handle life’s only guarantee.
I can’t remember the sequence of events from the day my father died but I do remember what it felt like. My senses were heightened; everyone’s words felt slow and careful. My head spun filled with questions and later that night with bourbon. Bourbon and the sounds of a night in a world that somehow continued on without him. That was the end of my grief.
My sadness quickly melted into the high highs and low lows one regularly experiences in their twenties. The truth was, I was miraculously fine. As far as I was concerned I had moved on. Until one day months later I saw my dad’s face in a crowd walking up 5th Avenue. My heart stopped and again, my head spun. Then I saw him the second time on Broadway. Triggered only by time he was suddenly everywhere, always, even in my dreams and I couldn’t escape. It was this omnipresence that after the passing of so much time lead me to realize he was actually gone and I was no longer fine. I have not been fine since.
Grief is one troubled little son of a bitch, it never makes things easy. It either swallows us whole or repeatedly chews us up and spits us out, leaving us to reassemble ourselves and await its return over and over again. This is the age of immediacy and having time to sit with my feelings and mull in them is a luxury I never provided myself. My large range of emotions have always found refuge in art but this time was different. Art was lenient to me and allowed me denial that I shouldn’t have accepted. As they say, “the only way out is through.”
I know as anyone with an education and a streak of atheism knows that we are born alone and die alone. The ebbs and flows of life are experienced within the boundaries of our own skin no matter how connected we feel to others. There are hundreds of manuals on love and sex and ‘how to succeed in business without really trying’ but yet so few on how to really confront and accept that it’s actually all meaningless. A visit from death isn’t welcomed, its inevitable and as I glean on what I have learnt I can only hope that everyone else shows up to do the same.
