My Dad died back in September. Four days before my birthday.
It was still hot, well over 100 degrees most days. I don’t know why it seems important to mention the heat during that time but I think there must be a metaphor floating around in there somewhere about being uncomfortable and unable to escape the suffocation of it all.
Ashlee and I cried through it together. Processed a lot. Rolled it over in our hands between us, trying to make sense of it. The few takeaways we had were “this sucks”, “this is awful”, and “now what?” The occasional “Goddammit” peppered conversations between us and more “Jesus Christ”‘s than I’d like to admit.
Dad and I had time alone together there at the end and we were able to get right with one another. He said he loved us…and I think that might have been the first time he’s ever said it. He said, “Y’all are my babies…” and his voice cracked and I think that, in that moment, it might have broken my spine in about a million places.
I’ve never understood that hard exterior. The sheer assholishness of it. Protecting ego and fragility and pretending as if nothing penetrates and yet, I look at my sister, with her hard and cool exterior that barely contains a river of tears and I see her coping with shit the best way she can. Dad was the same. Both of them damaged and hurt and in need of love they did not get. The fixer in me standing by wanting to give everything I have to make them feel loved and feel better and feel whole and yet knowing that I can’t fix what is not healed.
His death brought up a lot of things for me and yet, I am not broken. I grieved a long time ago. Got angry. Raged. Therapied all of it for years.
I am mostly ok…and I feel guilty for being ok.
I’ve been driving without a windshield for so long that I no longer think it odd when boulders crash through the space where my protective shield would have been. You just keep batting shit aside and checking yourself for bloody spots and nodding when you find that you are “mostly ok”. And then you lean into the road, press the gas harder, and…just keep going.
What else is there to do?
Surviving is the one thing I am good at. Getting through it. Being the last ember in the fire. The zombie girl who just…will…not…die. Some people would call that stubbornness – the kind of chin-jerking grit that comes from Gaelic folks who have lived through fighting and famine for hundreds of years – but what looks like stubbornness on an ordinary day is a sheer, burning engine of life. Life that refuses to be anything else until it is done living. Life that does not understand giving up or giving in. The animal nature of fight and flight and faun and freeze all rolled into a redheaded, gnashing, partially insane creature who really just has no other way to exist.
They call it stubbornness…I call it permanence.