I saw my Dad in a dream last night, but all I remember is that he was there. No details beyond that.
In my waking life, I remember details. Phone calls, for example. I wish very much that I could dial the numbers and he would pick up and I could hear the sweetness in his voice. I miss him, and there’s a lot I’d like to discuss.
It’s been well over two years now. Two of my birthdays and three of his. Three Father’s Days. Very soon, it will have been three Thanksgivings and three Christmases.
The space I’m talking about can also be measured in some untold number of warm days when I can picture him out in the garden;
or in instances of flavor and scent catching me off guard, reminding me that time travel is real;
or in blips of forgetfulness where I see his name on an envelope or a screen and think, just for a second, that things are as they were.
It has been a process, this moving forward thing. It is light on some days and heavy on others.
Two key insights have held me up in my walk with death. Time and again, they serve as my guides, showing me the way in the forest of loss.
A person is not a body
The first is a principle I picked up from Buddhism called interbeing. What it essentially says is that none of us is separate from anything else, so our human forms don’t define us.
Consider a vegetable, for example. Are you looking at a tomato? Or is it just a momentary arrangement of sunshine and water and soil and the gardener’s care that you’re seeing?
Or maybe think of the gardener themself. What are they physically made of if not the food they grow? Does that food exist if not for their knowledge of plants? And wasn’t that handed down to them from their grandparents, who got it from somewhere else?
We call ourselves individuals, but nobody can show you exactly where one of us ends and another begins.
We are life energy, bouncing off of itself. “Death” is just a word for “rearrange.”
Dad’s as here now as he ever was because Dad was music; Dad was humor and curiosity and laughter; Dad was out-of-control eccentricity; Dad was faults and mistakes. I look around and I can see him. He’s just changed shapes.
Back in those first few months after his transition, a trusted friend stressed to me that Dad’s and my work together would be ongoing. Interbeing has helped me understand what she told me: that death ends a life, not a relationship.
Loss sure does hurt, though
And yet. About that word, “change.” Something was here one moment and not the next.
The other pillar of this path I’m talking about is grief. I suppose you could say I learned this one from Buddhism too, as meditating is what taught me how to be present to what simply is.
Grief is the vastness of loss. It’s a wave on a dark sea that completely wrecks you, with no assurance of what will happen next. Grief is hurt itself.
We spend so much energy holding grief back, and with good reason. Grieving means facing a devastating reality.
Grief’s energy needs to run its course, though. You can keep it at bay, but won’t leave. It will linger on life’s edges until you look it in the eye.
The grace is in what happens when we do.
Grief is demanding, but it is also willing to share. Let it have its moments in the spotlight and you’ll find there are plenty of days where it’s happy to step into the backdrop. It can co-exist just fine alongside joy, humor, and gratitude. It can transform, too, fading in a way that reveals its true nature: love.
Grief has taken me to places where I am helpless and meek. Accepting myself in that state rather than trying to escape it has been essential to feeling whole and alive.
As far as the actual act of grieving goes, there are a million ways to do it. Sometimes I go on a run where I allow every step to be a sad thought. Sometimes I write out my memories or my dashed hopes; sometimes I tell them to others. Sometimes I lay down and sob.
If I were to define grieving, I’d say it just means being with the pain when it’s there.
I’ll note that my dad’s death is not what first taught me this lesson. That came as I woke up to the full weight of my childhood and the home that raised me, the sorrow of which I didn’t feel at the time because I was a little boy keeping himself from drowning. When the sadness inside of me cracked open, I knew that I had found my way forward. That this happened about six months before he died was a blessing, as it prepared me in ways I didn’t know I needed.
Whatever its cause, this is what I know about our heartache: it is not here to destroy us. It’s here to carry us to our entirety.
“The unexpressed love”
In this video, Andrew Garfield (Spiderman, Tick Tick Boom, etc.) talks to Stephen Colbert about losing his mother. A friend sent it my way a couple years ago, and I come back to it from time to time because I feel a lot of love coming from it. The part I’m talking about starts at 4:00.
Related posts
I’ve written a good amount about death over the last two years. Here are some of those pieces if you’d like to read more:
Much love,
Jonathan
A beautiful piece. Sending love to you and your Dad.
So tender and beautiful and timely, Jonathan. Thank you.