So dad passed a week ago Tuesday, 2 days after my 28th birthday, yaaaay. Funeral is tomorrow. I have done absolutely 0 work since the days leading up to his death, and I’m super unapologetic about it. But today I woke up thinking about the future, and wondering what job prospects I have after my PhD. I am also thinking that this long, exhausting, overbearing weight of my father’s health has been lifted from my life. Nothing will change the gaping hole in my psyche where he used to reside, knowing that I can’t call him at any moment for his thoughts and opinions on anything, school and career options included. As much as I am mourning the loss of my father, who was always there for me, I am also mourning the loss of his knowledge, understanding, and insight into oncology, where I believe my future lies as well.
Anyways, I’ve been home with my husband, visiting family for almost a month, and I am very ready to be back in my own space again. After taking another month and a half off earlier this year to come home and visit and spend time with my dad while my research was on a natural hiatus, I feel like this has been a lost year. I do not know what I have accomplished since last fall, it’s all a blur.
I do know that the month before I came here to spend time with my dad when his time was running short, I was given two more projects to work on, one which has been in progress for a year, another which shouldn’t take too long, and that it will be three complete chapters for my thesis, and I was effectively handed the light at the end of this graduate program tunnel. Never mind the fact that my thesis will now cover more topics than I care to think about, and that I will be grilled and drilled on cancer, metabolism, diabetes, pharmaceuticals, microbiome, and radiation. But I’ve got a big strong brain, and I know I can get into that. I just need to get though the science.
I am looking forward to closing this chapter in my life, the chapter of the constant stress, anxiety, and waiting for that final moment when my dad’s life ended. I think that I haven’t been totally crushed by his death for two reasons: 1) his struggle and pain is over, and I was able to see the final decline where the cancer took away the last pieces of him, the version of him that he lived and that we knew, and that it was better for him and all of us that he let go, and 2) frankly I haven’t lived back here with my family for almost a decade, so his day to day absence is one that I have lived with for a long time. Immediately after his passing, I held on to the gratefulness of the end of his suffering, and suffer he did by the end. My brain kept repeating “it’s over, it’s over” and I held on to that sentiment.
In the week and a half since his passing, I can’t recall the ebb and flow of my own pain, I tended to fight it back, not let myself succumb to the feeling of loss. I did let it in one night, as my husband held me, after three days of keeping my shit together. But I am scared of the funeral tomorrow, because seeing people, hearing condolences, thoughts, memories, and stories, preventing me from hiding from the truth and the loss of him.
I am giving a small speech at the funeral. My brother is giving the eulogy, the classic attempt at summarizing the life of my dad, and who he was as a man. I will meekly go up the stairs to the podium, and inadvertently say that I am not strong enough to recount those things, but also that I can not write a memoir like my brother can, which is 100% true! I have chosen instead to talk about this thing that ruled my dad’s life, even before he developed it himself. I found an academic article, which is fitting given my dad’s any my own academic trajectories, talking about how we view cancer as a fight or a battle, and how we should not see it as such.
Frankly, I am continuing to hide from my own loss, hiding behind the curtain of an academic writing on the topic.
Husband says I shouldn’t worry about it, and that it’s fine, and the article excerpts I chose are really good (my mom agreed) but my emotional, well written brother seemed disappointed in my choices.
Anyways. May the Lord lift me so that tomorrow I don’t dissolve in front of the hundreds of people we expect to come, because my dad was a big deal locally, nationally, and even internationally.
And may He help me not fill his shoes, but make my own equally large boots that make as big of an impact on our world.
