6/18

Which, for me, was a month and a day after I left unexpectedly. And while I am not going “back”, I’ve been working in some capacity almost the entire last month, I went back to the office. I have no idea who knows and who doesn’t, who will say something and who won’t, what changed and what hasn’t. 

I know a lot of people who take month long vacations, but I’ve never been gone from any job more than 10 days at a time, so I honestly didn’t know what I was going back to. As it turns out, things are exactly the same. It’s (larger, but) a similar feeling as when I went through big break ups, or got a cat, or put a dog down, or moved across the county. Your life completely stops for a while, but no one else’s has. So I walked into the office today and everyone said “welcome back!” and then went on about their day. I encountered a few people who didn’t even notice I was gone (a humbling realization), or who knew I was gone but were too aware of the privacy around family leave to ask any follow up questions. Those were my favorite people.

I stopped to talk to K at the end of the day; she’s the only one I made an effort to tell. Her dad died a few years ago and so she welcomed me to the Dead Dad Club. We noticed how many people we know, even in our building alone, that are part of the DDC, and how it occupies so much brain space that it feels weird that everyone else is just…working. She pointed out that in time, that’s all that really changes – how much brain space it occupies. She said that right now, it’s normal to have it occupy 99-100%, then slowly it’ll fall to 10% or so, but it’ll never be less than that. It’s always there, in the background, bubbling at the surface (“the amount of times I have to tell myself ‘don’t make it weird! Don’t bring up your dead dad, K, you’ll make everyone uncomfortable!’”). And while that’s horrifying to think that this never ends, it’s also quite…refreshing.

And then, as I got on the elevator to leave, I ran into another colleague who lost both of her parents within a year. She was someone who expressed concern when I had mentioned a few months back that my dad was having health problems, and she talked about how having a parent go through that was so hard. I honestly thought “you and your parents over two decades older than us…don’t compare our situations.”

She she asked about how my dad was doing and when I told her and started to say what I had prepared: “I’m sad, but we were lucky to have…” but she stopped me and said “oh I know the spiel. You don’t have to give it to me.”

And we talked for about 20 minutes, about how even if you could see it coming, nothing prepares you for it. How you make jokes (in her case “I said to my husband ‘at least at the next funeral, I’ll be really prepared!’ and he said ‘next!? Do you have more parents I didn’t know about!?’”) because it’s the only way to get through it but then you sound insensitive. She told me that her mother had had Alzheimers for years, and talked about the horrifying experience of grieving someone who was still technically here; how she thought she had prepared for this, so why was she still so sad? I felt bad for thinking she wouldn’t have had the same experience as I did. It really doesn’t matter how “prepared” one is for someone to leave, it doesn’t make the loss any easier. I hadn’t even stopped to think about how hard it would be to not only lose a parent, but watch a child lose a grandparent. And we’ll probably never have this deep of a conversation again, but man it felt good to be seen. Maybe I should have told some more people at work (probably not).

And as I got on the train I had the overwhelming feeling of how sorry I was that when my dad’s parents died, I hadn’t thought to comfort him. He was so cavalier about all of it. The night my grandma died he was at a basketball game and called me during half time to tell me without even leaving the arena. If I remember correctly, I don’t even think he and his brother left the game. They went back in because (in my mind he said) “well, there’s nothing I can do now, why not at least stay and watch a win?” Now looking back, I think he just didn’t know what to do, and being near his brother was probably the only thing he could think was right in that moment (not discounting the fact that between the two of them, they had the emotional intelligence of a garden snake, so maybe it was just a good game, we’ll never know). I asked how he was doing when I thought to, went to the funeral sad for my own loss, but didn’t grasp just how much that had to have hurt. I didn’t understand why for years, he would call me on the day our Grandma died and talk about her. I never understood how, years later, he could still be sad about a woman who died at an old age, after living a lot of life.

Now I do.