Life Happens

This post has been a long time coming... there's really no other way to save it.  But as I sit here, contemplative, on the six-month 'anniversary' of my father's death, it only seems fitting to recap the profound changes the last half year has brought me.

I don't often think about whether December 21 and June 21 fall on the same day of this week, but this year I am.  And they do, for the record.  On a Tuesday just like any other day, I lost one of my best friends.  It's taken a lot of time to notice how profound of an effect my father's departure has had on me.  After all, how do you notice when something is slightly less there than it was?  We would only talk to each other over the phone, but we hadn't seen each other since December 2009... because I'd been off pursuing a degree that was making me miserable, living each day of the darkest portion of my life, just trying to muddle through and make it out the other end.

We didn't just talk occasionally.  It was every day, every spare second; if ever I were in the car driving alone, I'd call him just to chat.  If there were some random detail that reminded me of a conversation we'd once had - inside joke or not - it was his voice on the other line.

So I was buying a new jacket, called my mom to tell her, and instead found out Dad was dead - not immediately, of course, because where's the drama in that?  But my fiance and I hopped a plane to Oregon the next day.

And it was right then that something in me changed.  I'd spent the last two years of my life hideously depressed, feeling trapped and hopeless, like nothing in the world would ever be right.  Suddenly it wasn't, and my skewed perspective reset.  The quibbles and the trials were dwarfed in comparison; I sprang into action, an agent of change now myself.

It was profoundly moving to hear how he had impacted others' lives at the funeral.  Still, I didn't cry - everyone treated me like I was crazy or calloused, insensitive, unfeeling... but he wouldn't have wanted sadness over his departure, not really.  So I wrote his obituary and composed a 'eulogy' of sorts, infused it with the humor he so often incorporated into his life.  I coordinated arrangements to help Mom through it all, hacked e-mail accounts, tried to get all the proverbial ducks in a row - Dad had always taken care of finances and utilities and the like, but that would now need to be shifted into Mom's name.

Less than a month had passed when Mom informed me she'd be in a car accident in which her car was totaled; it was then I realized that ... someday, she too would pass on, that this would not be my only experience with a parental death.  It wasn't that I was morbidly obsessed with it - though genuinely a bit shaken - but rather a calm acceptance or realization of what was to come.  In many ways, I could empathize... yes, I'd lost my father, but she'd lost her soulmate, something I find utterly unthinkable.  She was now living alone in a life they'd built together, surrounded by reminders always taunting her about what she'd lost.  I began to make a more conscious effort to be there for her, to try to fill some of the companionship my father had provided: to listen to her vent when she'd had a bad day or at least to ask how her day had been.

The wedding was August 12 and we had scheduled a trip to meet with vendors toward the end of February.  It was bittersweet; we got much accomplished and were able to hone our ideas of what a wedding was to each of us, but with each new decision, Mom's wound was torn anew.  Then came March: a blitzkrieg tour of European universities for continuing education, me toward my Ph.D. and Andy toward a post-doc position.  The trip did not go nearly as planned, to say the least; there were myriad bumps on the road, and it was here that I first truly started to fear that the wedding shouldn't go through as planned.

I finally came to accept this shortly after we'd sent out invitations to all of our friends and loved ones.  We each had the exquisite pleasure of contacting them all to say, "No, we're really not going to get married so please don't show up."  Along with this decision, I decided not to go to Europe, not to continue toward a Ph.D.  In a matter of days, I had derailed my entire life plan and severed contact with one of my best friends, in the process inflicting great pain upon him.  And yet I was calm and self-assured that - difficult as it was - it was the right decision.

Oh, and one of my cats ran away.  People keep saying cats come back - he's not going to come back.

...so in the last six months, my life has changed more than I ever could have conceived... somewhat unexpectedly, a major part of this change is that I have gained a greater capacity for coping with life's little stresses and as such am no longer in counseling.  In fact, we have been tapering me off my crazy meds so that I am now relying on me for me...

I'm not the same girl I was six months ago when my father passed away, and it's largely because of him that I've been able to regain control of my life, to set it back on a path that is fitting for me.  The world did not end when my father died; it didn't even end on May 21, at least not the world as I perceive it.  In many ways, his death provided me the strength I needed to form a new life - for that I will always be grateful.

But I just wanted to take the time to say:

Daddy, I miss you.