Dear Dad

Someone compared grief to being hit by a semi-truck over and over again...and I think that about sums it up. For the most part I'm fine, good actually..sometimes even great and then someone will look at me or I'll see a picture and it makes me want to cry. I know crying is good, but I hate crying in front of people, especially people I don't know that well. Crying is something I like to do in private, preferably with some sad music playing. I used to cry at everything, I had no control...and then somewhere along the way I figured out how to stuff it down..how "to be strong". So now even when I want to cry, sometimes I can't. And sometimes this complete lack of emotion makes me worry, because if I don't cry now, somewhere down the line am I just going to fall off the cliff and be a complete mess??? Not that I haven't cried at all, I have done my fair share of crying, but at certain key moments when I felt like I should be hysterical...I felt nothing. Like when I saw my Dad's body, it was so strange. I was terrified of having to see him, but as soon as I stepped into the room it was so obvious to me that it wasn't him. He was completely gone. I felt this extreme peace in knowing that. I kept looking at the body, because it was so strange to see...it looked like him, but there was no life there, the very essence of my Dad was gone.

I know that everyone handles grief differently, so perhaps how much I cry or when I cry is not a sign of me accepting the loss and trying to move forward. They say there are multiple stages of grief, but I couldn't tell you which one I'm in...sometimes I feel like I'm in all the stages at once. Perhaps I'm still in denial...because no matter how many times I look at his picture I still can't believe he's really gone. Life without my Dad seems like a foreign country. Like something other people have to deal with, but not something I have to deal with.