The Second Year Of Grief

The second year of grief has been, unsurprisingly, nothing like the first, other than the sameness of looking at a calendar to find ‘Dad’s Still Dead’ bold and underlined across each page.

How could I even begin to describe the contradictions this year has brought? That I still have no idea my Dad is dead but I’m also so used to it sometimes I even forget.

They sold his house and completely renovated it this year. It’s beautiful and I hate it. I wanted to storm inside and smash it up, break the new french glass double doors, set fire to the new downstairs bathroom. How could they take it when it’s all I had left? Let some other family move in who don’t even know he ever existed.

I hate it mostly because I know he definitely isn’t coming back now. If it were up to me it would stay there, empty, waiting for him.

I keep forgetting dead men don’t need houses.

The shock has mostly subsided, albeit still comes in waves, but has mostly given way to the impossibility of death’s permanence.

I find it impossible to believe this is life now; I struggle to understand how I will never see my Dad again in this lifetime, never hear him laugh, never hear his voice.

Sometimes I think I catch the sound of it on the wind, I try and reach through the fog to catch it, but it slips through my fingers like butter.

My Dad will die a thousand more times whilst I’m alive; every time I forget for a second and then remember, he dies again. Every time it hits me in the car, or at the supermarket, doing the mundane things as he dies over and over and the grief repeats. I will never get used to it, never learn how to heal it, I just learn to put one foot in front of the other, again and again.

I have found the world looks different; my favourite place in the world is Port Patrick in Scotland, however I’m not sure if I can go back now.

My grief has ebbed away to something hollow. I miss climbing the jagged, rocky cliffs, watching the ocean glimmer in the sunlight, feeling like if I stepped on my tiptoes and raised my arms to my side the wind might carry me like a bird. I wonder if the wind carried him like a bird, carried his soul somewhere I have never been.

I don’t want to sit atop the cliffs, on the patches of deep, yellowing green grass, and pick at the indigo flowers whilst I wait for him to reach the top, because I know he isn’t coming. I am scared if I go back I will try and smash the cliffs, I will imagine them giving way and crumbling, that he is waiting inside to rise from the ashes, reborn.

That, like Jesus, he might resurrect.

I am trying to remember that my Dad was only a God to me; that he was just mortal.

I do not miss the horror of waking up every morning and remembering my Dad is dead that came with the first year of grief.

But I hate the peace of the second year, the ease of which I move from day-to-day, the way I carry the pain and longing like I have known it all my life. I hate that I am growing used to living without him. I’m terrified this means I am forgetting him, that he is somehow more dead because of this.

When my Dad first died, it was all I was. I remember thinking that before I was a person, I was a girl with a dead Dad.

Fatherless daughter first, Beth second.

Now, it’s something that comes as an afterthought; it used to be on the tip of my tongue, always. It was all I could think of, now sometimes I don’t think of it at all.

But how could I forget? How could I forget the man who raised me, who made me who I am, how could I forget the grief like sharp claws ripping out my throat every time I held back tears.

I hate that people tell me I talk about it so eloquently, so thoughtfully. That they’re surprised it’s only been two years; the way I carry it seems like it’s been forever.

Am I doing a disservice to his memory? To him?

The second year of grief is confusion. It’s starting again. It’s like I had a plan of where my life was going and now I don’t know anything at all.

My Dad would want me to be happy and successful, in whatever capacity I find success, whether that be just getting out of bed every morning or becoming the CEO of a billion-pound company. I know this. I know all these things. All the questions I wonder, I already have the answers too.

But what I wouldn’t give for five more minutes.

I have nothing profound or meaningful to share; maybe just that I’m not sure why we put so much pressure on finding a lesson or a meaning in everything. The second year of life after losing a parent hasn’t taught me anything I didn’t already know— life is really sad, I really miss my Dad, and death is so hard. Do I have to learn anything from it?

Maybe the second year of grief is just floating along in it, letting myself miss my Dad, letting myself grieve all the life he is missing out on, all the food he’ll never try, things he’ll never do. This is okay too, and if the third year of grief reverts all the way back to square one, I’m okay with that as well.