To a girl, her Dad is a superhero.
By: Lisa Gallagher
Tags: Grief, Dads, Losing A Loved One, Love, Father And Daughter

To a girl, her Dad is a superhero. He is the first man who is there to catch her when she falls. The first man to wipe her tears away when she is afraid or hurt. The first man to tell her how beautiful and special she is. To a girl, her Dad is the first man she will ever love. He sets the precedent for any man who walks into her life. He is the strongest person she’ll ever know and completely invincible. At least this was the case for me, until one day, like many others I was forced to learn that my Dad wasn’t so invincible after all. So, you watch him slowly disappear and waste away to nothing in front of your very eyes and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it or make it better for him. You sit there and tell him you love him and promise him that you will somehow be okay. You hold his hand as he takes his last breath, and then it hits you. You have no idea how you are going to be okay.

In the days, weeks, and months that follow the death of your Dad, you will feel heartbreak that you never imagined possible. You will feel anger watching everyone else continue living their lives while your whole world is falling apart. You’ll cry until your head is pounding, your eyes are swollen, your heart is racing and your nose is so stuffy you can’t breathe. Then you’ll cry some more. You might pick up old bad habits, anything to help numb the pain enough to sleep through the night. Sleep won’t come though, you will toss and turn for hours looking at old videos and pictures in a desperate attempt to feel him near, to hear his voice or see his smile. You will feel an overwhelming rush of guilt the moment you smile, or laugh or partake in anything remotely happy, like somehow by doing so you are forgetting what has happened. You will also worry that people will judge you for doing anything but quietly grieving. Your head will be filled with thoughts that you may be ashamed of but you won’t be able to stop. You’ll think things like, “of all the people in my life that I could have lost, why did it have to be the most important one, the one I can’t live without”. One day, just for a second, you’ll forget that he is gone and without thinking you’ll pick up your phone and dial his number only to hear the automated message telling you the number is no longer in use. In that moment your heart is going to sink to the floor and break all over again.

You’ll be so desperate to feel close to him. You’ll go to familiar places that he went to, listen to his music, you’ll even spray his aftershave on something and keep it near you all the time. It won’t help. You’ll find yourself screaming in anger, crying until you’re sick, and begging for him to come back.

People will disappear from your life. You will learn that the people you trusted to be there, won’t be. And people you never expected will be your biggest supporters. It will be tough and sore but the biggest lesson you will learn will be finding out who is there when it really matters. You will be out, see people you know and watch them quickly change their direction to avoid having to speak to you. You will feel let down and alone and you’ll spend hours racking your brain trying to understand people’s reasoning for making no effort. You’ll feel angry for a while and then you’ll put yourself in their position. You’ll realise that at the end of the day, it’s awkward for people. It’s difficult for them to know what to say and it’s easier to say nothing. It hasn’t happened to them, so of course they’re going to carry on living their lives normally. It’s not something that many of them have had to go through, and it’s completely impossible to understand what it’s like until you have. I only realise now what others who have lost parents have been going through. As much as I truly did feel for them and thought I could imagine how painful it must be for them, I had no idea. Your circle will shrink but you’ll be able to be sure in the loyalty of whoever is left.

There are “stages” to grief, or at least that’s what we are told. In my experience however, grief doesn’t know it is supposed to come in stages. Instead it tears you down, wrecks your world, walks out casually, then returns hours later to do it all over again. I wish I could say one day it gets easier, that you wake up and suddenly feel yourself again, but I can’t. People will tell you it gets better with time, but it doesn’t. You will wish you were dead at times, not necessarily because you hate life but because you want so badly to see your Dad again. You will push people away even though you love them dearly. Your mind will constantly be filled with flashes of memories, not always good ones, but you will be so desperate to keep him close and feel such sense of loyalty to him that you’ll be terrified to let those memories go. The thought of loving someone so much, being so in awe of them your whole life only to have them ripped away from you far sooner than they should have been will take its toll on your heart and mind. Realizing you would rather be alone than to ever feel so much heartache again is normal. Everything that’s important to you will change. What was once a big deal will become stupid and pointless. You will become annoyed by peoples materialistic and trivial problems. Your outlook on life changes, let it. You will live differently than before. Take the time to be alone if that’s what you need. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to pull yourself together or that it’s time to move on. It’s important to allow yourself to grieve in whatever way you need to. There is no right or wrong way, and nobody apart from you truly knows the way you are feeling. There will be days you can’t get out of bed. There will be days you don’t want to smile. All of that is okay. Nobody can tell you what to feel, how you should feel, or how to handle your grief.

Confide in someone you know you can truly trust. It’s going to be hard to find people you can openly speak to without feeling as though you’re putting them out or annoying them, especially as more time passes. As time goes on people become less understanding. Not maliciously, but simply because they (mainly those who have never dealt with a loss) think that time is a healer. It’s not. And grief has no expiration date. The truth is, the more time that passes the more you will miss him and the harder it will become. There will always be someone who is willing to simply listen to your thoughts, that’s what you need. Being able to talk about it out loud to someone else will really relieve the pressure of keeping everything trapped in your own head. Most people will tell you that you are strong, and they are there for you but really, they will hope to god that you don’t try to talk to them about it because they have no idea what to say to you. Others will compare how you are feeling to how they have felt or give you scenarios in which people have had it worse to make you feel better, it won’t work. These people all mean well but don’t let anyone make you feel that whatever you’ve been through isn’t bad enough to warrant how shit you feel.

Having to experience the first Christmas without him will be one of the toughest days. And officially going into the first year in which he hasn’t lived will be a strange and deflating feeling. If one day you chose to open up again and find someone to share your life with, you’ll have to walk down the aisle without your Dad by your side. You won’t be able to live out the dreams of that day which you used to act out in the living room with him when you were a little girl. He won’t be there to give you away, he won’t be there to kiss his grandchildren, and he won’t be there to give you the simple life advice you took so much for granted all these years. Missing your Dad is something you will feel every moment of every day, even when you’re happy. You will be having a good time and suddenly wish he was there. All the emotions will flood you with a vengeance. That’s okay too. If your Dad was anything like mine, he deserves to be missed. You will find the thought of moving forward with your life simply impossible when your confidant, best friend, biggest fan, and only defender is gone.

Nothing will make you feel better. People will tell you all sorts of things like he’s in a better place. That they understand what you’re going through. One thing that I wanted to do was quite literally slap people who said that he was in a better place. No, he is not. If he was, he would be here with me. People will keep telling you that he would be proud of you. That he will be ‘’looking down on you’’. You hope that part is true, but you’ll never be sure if he really is proud of you, because you’ll never get to hear him say it. And you’re not sure if he is looking down because from watching how much he suffered in the end, you now question everything you believed or any faith you had. Again, these people mean well. They just don’t know what to say. So just nod and move along. It won’t make anything worse.

It’s taken me a very long time to see that it’s okay to admit to not being okay. It’s okay to be mad and angry. Even at your Dad sometimes. There have been moments when I have suddenly felt spurts of anger that he didn’t prepare me more for life without him. But the truth is, he loved to be the parent. He loved that to a certain extent at 26, I was still very much the child and still relied on him greatly. He loved that he was the first one I called when I was unsure about something. He loved that whenever I had to make any kind of adult decision in life I always ran it by him first to be sure it was the right choice. He loved that I still leaned so heavily on him and to be honest, so did I. But yes, it’s okay. It’s unfair and you feel cheated of him. That’s okay. It could have happened to anyone, but it happened to you. So be mad. Scream. Cry. But know that it’s okay for you to feel like this, and don’t allow anyone to tell you differently.

You aren’t crazy for feeling incomplete.