How Grief Changes One Person

WARNING: This post is completely depressing and will ruin your mood.

People have this generalized misconception that grief is like what it is in the movies. No one falls over each other or has a epiphany within the first month of said death. No. When I found out my father died at 2:25PM on November 21, 2012, I was stunned. The first thing I did was look at my family. My "grandparents," my cousins, my aunt (who watched her brother die), and my cousin who I think of as an Uncle (who also held my father as he took his last breath). My mom put her hands over her mouth and my sister's face turned so red that I didn't think she was breathing.

Someone said, "Oh God, oh no," and I continued to listen to the awkward nurse who was training someone that day. The someone silently stood behind him, with such a blank face that she could've been mistaken for a mannequin.

My father was a strong man who never believed in hospitals. They always treated him with utmost care since he was born with a heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. He didn't like the attention where they gathered every intern to hear his heart. It sounded so strained. I remember as a little girl seeing his chest vibrate with each heartbeat, or hearing it in a quiet room. He always said to not worry about it, that he would live to be an old man and escape from the home I would put him in and be at my breakfast table, ready to eat. Even the page said most people die around the age of twenty. My father lived to be 42-years-old. His whole life the doctors said he wouldn't live until he was five, or seventeen, or twenty-six. He made it to my twenty-third year.

And we waited. We waited for up to an hour so the coroner could, by tradition and law, tell the hospital that he was definitely dead. During that hour I took to being out of my family's sight. I went to the empty rooms around our quiet, little area. I picked up streets of different problems that the ER uses (I thought about stealing some). I looked through the see-through fridge that held medicine. I spun around in nearby chairs. My aunt came out once and said I didn't have to be like my father, I didn't have to be the strong one. I couldn't cry. I refused (which causes major sinus problems for the next month and headaches that crippled me some nights). I couldn't let my mother worry about one more thing. She, too, was holding herself together, trying to calm my sister whose face was still blood red.

My uncle came to sit next to me to tell me, too, that I didn't have to be strong like my father -- that no one would care if I cried. He cried. My entire family cried. I didn't. Sure, a few tears fell, but I cursed myself for them. In some strange way I felt my dad and I didn't want him to think I was weak, despite the death. My dad had always been on me for crying, just me. I guess I was the closest thing to a son he had. He always tried for me to fish, play chess, card games, work on cars, or weed eat as he mowed. I always said no. I didn't want to spend time with him. I was a spoiled little bitch who never got what real love was, or what it means to a person to be there for them. I never got my dad was trying later in life. We didn't get along for some of my life, but he was trying in his last few years and I couldn't pull myself together to see it. I regret that. I don't even remember the last "I love you," we said to each other. Not at all. I try to remember, but I just end up crying.

We were still waiting. All I did was wait at the hospital. They give you so much time to think which is horrible. Simple things are torture. I waited for the ambulance to arrive when I heard the news, with no information where the fucking thing was. No one knew. They all thought I was crazy trying to rush out words, but being calmly polite at the same time. All the nurses did was stare at me as I took a seat in the waiting room, hearing cars and other ambulances. I waited for ten minutes alone, watching fat fucks stuff their faces with more candy than their stomachs could hold, Ricki Lake in the background with more white trash. All of this was staring at me, wondering what I was doing there.

Not until my "grandparents" showed up did someone wait for me. But we said nothing to each other. I knew he was dead the moment my mom called me crying that he collapsed at work. I couldn't get anything from my aunt. Her phone was either busy or she was crying too hard to understand.

When the ambulance finally arrived with my father's already dead body, did the nurses start to care for me, and their stares turned to pity.

We were all still quiet and still thinking as I tinkered around the small place, trying to pull myself together for my family in case my mom couldn't handle it all. But she did. She spoke about his heart condition, she talked to the coroner, and she took care of all the paperwork, despite her husband of twenty-three years being dead. I've never been more proud of my mother than I have ever been in my life.

The walk to the room where his body laid was long and the stares of all our red faces were being judged it felt like. Every single person looked up. Every single person turned their normally happy expressions to the mannequin look the in-training nurse had. I walked ahead of everyone, to see the blow first in case I needed to warn my mother. And I had to too. I walked to the room and the awkward nurse pulled back the blue curtain and there was my father. Slightly reclined on an unpleasant table with the tissue paper, with the table, and stainless still glinting in the poor lighting surrounding him. He was pale, his lips a stronger blue than they normally were. His hands were over the cover they had on him, palm facing up to the sky. He was limp and slightly slack-jawed, since he couldn't keep his mouth closed anymore.

I stepped back and told my mother in a very serious tone, "Prepare yourself."

Everyone stopped walking at my words, hesitating for the worst. But then my mom and sister stepped up and my sister took one look and had to sit outside of the room. The mannequin nurse got her a chair. I held her head against my stomach until she stopped shaking. Then we both went inside the room, my father's body still waiting and she cried against mom.

Mom had a brown bag, breathing into it as she stared down at him. Around his mouth was bruised from the breathing tubes and mask. He didn't have on his shirt (they ripped it off, trying to save him at the job site). I saw my mom put a hand where his heart should be and the words slip from her mouth very quietly, "I don't know what I'm gonna do; I've been with him for so long."

I glanced at her and moved to the other side of the bed, spotting all his personal items in a plastic bag on the counter. I took it. Just grabbed it. Didn't ask if I should. His boots, belt, nasal spray, knife, wallet, keys, and his hat. He always loved hats. I have his dark green fedora now. I still don't know where his straw hat he used for mowing is. I think my mother packed it away with the rest of his clothes. I sat down on the bench to his right. I sat there awkwardly with my bag of his things, the last of what he wore. His boots were so heavy. He always complained about his feet hurting.

I stared at him, trying to not look at my mom and sister who were crying and holding one another, so I took his hand. I thought it would be the right thing to do, to touch him like I never did when he was alive. I was always afraid of my father. Although he was only a couple of inches taller than I, he was still a very strong man. He was intimidating. I guess I was afraid of him in some ways. But whenever I had touched him, cuddling against him as a child, or sitting next to him at home, I could feel his body heat. It would make me sweat or move seats. He always just said, "I run hot." But his hand, as soon as I touched it, was cold. Like he was out shoveling snow without gloves.

I didn't let go, but looked at his face, wondering if he'd open his eyes or close his mouth. Nothing happened. I adjusted the bag of his items on my lap and took my other hand to his wrist. Cold. I moved it up to his elbow, and it was slightly warm. His heat was receding. I could almost see it start to retreat from his hands, trying to keep, maybe, his heart still warm.

That moment changed my life. I think about it when I'm alone. I think about it at night before I go to sleep. I think about it at work, on the toilet, in the shower, fixing food. My father's dead body just slackened in the reclined seat. It was traumatizing in a sense that's hard to explain. Yes, I can still function, but it sparked something in my head. It told me to grow up; it told me to live life; and it told me that, one day, that will be me.

I did tell my father that I loved him that day, when my mom and sister left the room and I was finally alone. I told him I was sorry. What else could I say? I wanted him to hear, in some atheist way, that he was my father, despite what we had been through.

Since he died I've had trouble sleeping alone. I think of everything I never got to do. I think of the tiny box his ashes are in. That strong man that intimidated me, who scared me, was in a small white box. Nothing else in my life mattered at that point. Still doesn't. I try to have anything that bothers put in that box. Sometimes it works, but I still can't stop caring about being alone, about not saying "I love you," about now showing how much I care for a person.

I tried putting my control issues in that box, but it just keeps getting worse.
I tried putting past relationships in that box, but they're like a slap in the fucking face.
I tried putting friends who don't understand in that box, but they're so fucking loud.
Although he changed me, even in his death, I am still the same. His death disarrayed who I was. Now, four months later, I'm trying to put myself back together, one piece at a time. I don't know who I am now. My identity has changed. My moods fluctuate at a tortuous level. I just see things in a more enlightened view. That girl that I was on the twentieth of November died with my father. Now I'm a woman and I'm trying to find my niche in life just so I can function again.

And figuring out who you are again takes patience, not only from myself, but others. I'm shifting through my childhood, through his stories, and through adulthood. He always tried to make me the person I am now, so I'm shifting through that guilt too.

All I want to conclude is that I'm no longer the same.
I'm sure everyone has seen the slightest difference in me although I try not to show it.

That's all I want to say. I could say more about how I missed him, now I miss his body, but this is too long already. I just want people to know that four months isn't enough. Four months is nothing on that life scale.