“One Year”

January 12, 2017

           One year ago exactly, my dad died and in his place was a soar so deeply imbedded it grew legs and crawled around in my chest. It left spaces of hatred and sadness in my nasal passages that pooled at the surface every day, every week, every month, every long road trip. It transformed a year of life into a year of death. It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “dead of winter” and a whole new reflection on what it feels like to miss someone. But one year is one year in which my mother and I breathed steadier and farther away from the fact. We have started reshaping our personal plots and deconstructing the characters we lost. Habits have been created and shattered and formed like ice sickles because let’s keep with the winter theme. And we have not become better people, just different ones. I have learned that the five stages of grief are bullshit and are meant as a blindly intentioned blueprint for the people trying to understand us while we cry. Lemony Snicket had it right, “If you have ever lost a loved one, then you know exactly how it feels. And if you have not, then you cannot possibly imagine it.”

           I’ve mastered hide and seek though my thoughts are often very obvious and sitting just below the bed. There are less jump scares and boogie men playing Bonanza on rerun, and mostly just scents and colors waiting for me to breath them in. I can feel how solid my stiches are these days but sometimes it is necessary to pluck at the first cross hatch just so you don’t forget the beginning notes of Tiny Dancer.

One year starts to create the element of choice. I can choose to remember what it felt like to see him laid up on the couch after knee surgery, and how it felt to see him bring me ice cream as I hid in the dark with a migraine. I can choose to get closer to the moments of life that were his and step away if I can’t quite make the hike. My head has stopped bouncing his name around when I’m alone in my car or in my bed. It has wrapped it away in a soft cloth that is far less threatening and jagged.

           I have been through my own five stages of grief and the sixth one is living with a hole in my lung. At first the hole was shocking and made my breathing disharmonic and shallow, but after a while, the second lung caught up and gave the first some time to repair itself. If I’m not careful sometimes one lung can forget to be kind to other and make breathing just as difficult no matter the years. There will always be a hole buried there, I’ve just gotten better at breathing through it.

-Paige @illanddiseased