everything down the aisle

When your dad dies, you miss him. You sob for months on end, you feel sick most days, you can hardly get out of bed. Being miserable in the wake of death is well documented. It’s the natural path. But what of the secondary grief? The abandonment waiting for you at every corner, as your needs become larger than an “I’m sorry for your loss.” What of that dreaded feeling sitting in between you and everyone you used to trust, the suffocating weight obfuscating your normalcy, keeping who you once were trapped in a glass box. Then you are spectacle. You are a grotesque spill on the ground where others walk, the mess they sidestep to avoid. Death comes for us all, but in your circumstances you become an emblem of it. You are death. You are a reminder of mortality, of suffering, of confronting something deeper.

Nobody wants that. You of all people never wanted it. And so you become peripheral. In this loneliness, the secondary grief becomes louder. You miss your dad, but you miss the past even more, in its most ephemeral. The essence of a time where you weren’t seen as a bubbling wart waiting to spread. There becomes “the times when you laughed” and the present. The times when you were loved and the present. Let’s call grief “sludge in a tub.” There’s sludge in a tub, in a stasis. At one point or another, everyone has come to dump mud into the tub. It’s filled to the brim, but the surface is still, until you are plummeted into it. Let’s say the sludge in the tub is in everyone’s living room, all at once. Your flailing body pushes it over the edge, and now you’re responsible for pouring the swamp onto everyone else. 

It’s hard to recognize what of the slime is yours, but it doesn’t matter. You’re covered in it all the same, even when you climb out.

You are me. You thought you’d have time to reconcile with your dad. You thought you’d finally tell him how you felt on his death bed. Thought you’d ask him why. You are a woman; you’re often seen as too much. Too loud, too emotional, too big, too vulgar, too honest, too forward, too wanting, too excited, too sloppy. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. You are the sludge in the tub come to life, and everyone wishes you’d just get away from them. They don’t want to look at you and catch a glimpse of something they once dumped into the tub. You are a woman; too pretty, too cutting, too smart, too mature, too sexual, too multifaceted. 

I am you. I lie in bed for hours being held by a man that everyone hates me for choosing, but he’s the only one who makes sure I eat. I take dramamine just to sleep, and then I have dreams of my dad, and I wake up crying, and the man everyone hates cradles me until I can close my eyes again. I am texting and calling everyone I know in a panic, some of them respond – many of them don’t. I am tired, I am angry. I want to scream. I don’t talk to that man anymore, the last emblem of the person who saw it all.

Your dad died 10 months ago and he continues to burn a hole through your heart. You’re trying to make amends with all those who ignored you, who dismissed you, who left you. Amends are fine, but they don’t turn cowards into the people you once needed to support you. 

I am my dad. I cry to strangers about the father I wanted to be, the father I will never be. I text my daughter every couple of months, she often ignores me. I know what I’ve done to end up here, but I refuse to talk about it. I play video games and think of my daughter as a child. I only see my daughter once or twice a year. I give her money for textbooks – I don’t give her much else. I hear bits and pieces about her schoolwork, her publishings, her relationships, her friends. I die without knowing about her cat, her roadtrips, her new apartment, her ziti recipe, her research, and finally overcoming her lifelong phobia.

You and I are the space between life and death. We hold the memories that I, as a daughter, will never get to know about my father. We hold love, resentment, and rage. We carry the wind across people’s shoulders and we push the sun below the sea. People grab onto us and try to mix us into lacquer, paint to exorcise what we keep.

I’m trying to forgive: you, my father, the others, the man.

I am a girl, only four. My dad is pushing me down the grocery aisle; he lets go, and the space between life and death carries me past the cereal boxes. I squeal, I know my dad will catch me. I am a woman, only 21. I thought we’d be here together, Dad, in this beautiful horror known as life, but you’ve shoved me into it alone.