My dad doesn't call me anymore

For the most part, people have stopped asking about it. I operate under the general assumption that if I wanted to talk about it, I can and should be the one to bring it up first. But if I’m being completely honest with myself, even as someone who embraces wide-open vulnerability as an act of benevolence, it still feels horrible to talk about.

I want to talk about it. Almost 100% of the time I’m awake, I want to talk about it. And then almost 100% of the time I start, I don’t even know what I want to say. What is left to say?

I keep experiencing the weirdest sensations, like - I will be cleaning my apartment and feeling pretty normal, productive, active, and then it’ll be like a light switch goes off and all the energy drains from my body and I would genuinely be able to sleep for twelve hours. It’s inconvenient and messy and difficult to explain.

We used to have this daily routine. If I wasn’t staying with him, and I was at my own place, he would call me at night. Every night. After Jeopardy. Just to talk about the day, or something he saw online, or to talk about what we had for our respective suppers. Then we would always make the same jokes. Say the same lines about talking tomorrow (we’d still text and send videos later that night anyway). And repeat.

Now 6:30 rolls around and my stomach feels like it is going to fall out of my ass.

I have a hard time doing things I know that he would like too. Eating food I know he would like. Seeing new things or laughing at new jokes that I think he would find funny. That’s what is getting me the most right now - this weird reverse dead dad living daughter fomo.

“But he wouldn’t want you to feel like this! He would want you to be happy and experience life.”

Yeah, no shit. The guilt is immeasurable.

The guilt around that. The guilt that I did not die because cancer betrayed my body. The guilt that maybe there was something more I could have done. Another call I could have made, another up-and-coming surgeon who could have taken another look at his case. The guilt that the month after he dies, the trial for the pancreatic cancer vaccine shows “promising results”.

I feel so guilty that I am so sad.

I don’t want to be changed forever. I don’t want to be a different person. I’m no stranger to loss. To insurmountable grief. To letting time help me grow around the magnitude of it all.

After I led the funeral services, I went and dropped some of the flowers off at my grandparents’ graves in town. I kneeled in the dirt in front of my grandma’s side of the headstone. Not yet grass. Just dry Michigan dust and sand.

In my dress, with my hair pinned back, I laid down in the dirt and wept. I dug my fingers into the earth until my nails burned. The nearby stinging nettles clung to my forearms and left welts. I let them mark me; I let the one green thing sink its teeth into my skin. I cried for my dad and my mom and my brothers. I cried for my grandma. My papa. My aunties and uncles and my family. I wanted so badly for my grandma to magically witness my pain and reassure me that it was all for something.

I cried for myself because I know it is for nothing. It’s just life. It just happened. Pain is just pain.

It’s not fair. It is fair. There is no fair. What difference does it make, exactly? We have to go to work anyway.

There was a time,

Hannah