My Dad, my first hero, died six months ago yesterday. Six months. At times, it’s felt like a blur. At others, it’s been an exercise in holding my breath, bracing for the pain, working out the cramps when I can.
Sometimes I click on his Spotify icon, just to see if “daveflynn425” has listened to anything of note lately. To see if maybe there’s any record of those daily playlists we listened to during his chemo and hospice time. Like somewhere across the internet there’s going to be an updated profile picture. There isn’t. There never is. But the action of clicking a button to see what he saw and we both saw and listened to and heard together and apart…it makes me feel good for a moment. Only for a moment, though.
The other day as I was driving, a man in a truck turned left in front of me. I waved him on and then promptly burst into tears. Because his answering wave and smile looked like my Dad. I mean, not really. To be honest, the guy looked nothing like my Dad. But the casual, Sunday afternoon pleasantry coming from a guy around my Dad’s age pretty much broke me; why won’t my father get to be a sixty-something guy waving at another car on a weekend?
Which brings me ‘round quickly to the Anger portion of our program. I have a temper. I have a pretty bad temper. But I’ve never known rage like the ineffectual screamfests I’ve known since my Dad died last March. And I’ve been mad at everyone, too: deadbeat Dads I’ve heard of via secondhand stories, dipsh*ts who post offensive, meaningless, why the hell are you calling this a life kinda status updates, people I’ve never even met, folks I used to know but have zero in common with now, and other humans who remain completely unaffected by my misplaced anger.
I’ve been angry with God. I’ve been really angry with God. Either the God of my childhood looked down on the suffering of my father- a truly good man- and saw that it was a-ok to watch him cling to life like that…or He just wasn’t there for that part, period. And I know, I know. There’s a gray area to everything. And God can’t personally ease or cause the suffering of any individual at the whim of some random person. There’s so much awfulness in the world- I know that, too. But sometimes, in my dark, sad, ugly kinda days, I don’t care. There’s too much anger to care.
“God can take your anger,” people tell me.
Well, great. That, too, is ridiculously vague and ineffectual. I don’t want God to take my anger, thankyouverymuch. I want to keep my cancer-anger wrapped around me like a cloak of porcupine quills. I want to occasionally poke those quills, just to make sure that they’re still there and they’re tangible and yes, it still frickin’ hurts.
Remember that part of The Princess Bride? Where Inigo Montoya finally is about to avenge his father’s death and Count Rugen pleads for his life?
“Offer me money. Power, too, promise me that. Offer me everything I ask for.”
“Anything you want.”
“I want my father back, you son of a bitch.”
Except I’m Inigo and cancer is Rugen and I have neither the power to kill it nor the ability to bargain with it in any way. So a good part of me doesn’t really care who’s “cool” with my anger- God, my priest, my therapist, my husband, myself- because it doesn’t change a damn thing.
But I’m not mad all of the time. How can I be? I have my youngest daughter telling me that she sees my Dad waving to her through the car windows on the highway. My toddler son requesting the cowboy lullaby my Dad wrote as his bedtime song- pausing me during the refrain to point at the ceiling and cheerfully exclaim, “Hi, Pop!” And messages coming through, loud n’ clear, at all points of the day and night; cloud word bubbles, heart-shaped gasoline smears, his guitar picks showing up underneath places he never had the chance to sit, and the definite feel of his outstretched hand against the back of my neck- the way he used to guide me through crowds when I was a little kid. I know those feelings, I get those messages. There’s not a doubt in my mind that it’s my Dad and he loves me every bit as much as he did on Earth for my 34 years.
So how much of a jerk am I to decide it’s not enough? Messages from beyond aren’t enough, your majesty? But sometimes…it just isn’t. Sometimes I want to smell sawdust and know that he’s just around the corner, building something great. Sometimes I want to sit in quietude with him, holding a drink and acknowledging how flipping wonderful this all is.
Sometimes I want those things all the time.
So that’s what grief looks like, six months out. For me. Today. It’s a strange mixture of rage and melancholy and gratitude so profound it’s a wonder I don’t implode with light. He was so wonderful. He is so wonderful. His legacy is incredible and he accepted the hand he was dealt with unfathomable grace and we were exceptionally fortunate to have had him for as long as we did. It isn’t enough. But it has to be.
And soon, maybe I’ll believe it.
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