Fighting the Air: Three Things You Accept Long After Watching a Parent Die.
By: Rick Stapel
Tags: Sad, Acceptance, Loss, Death, Parenting

Photo: Via Pixabay.

My dad died in 2000, when I was a 14 year old kid and believed every thing he told me. He had me convinced that at 12:00 a.m. on January 1, 2000 all of the electronics in our house were going to blow up, the entire power grid was going to fail, banks were going to lose count of their money and prison doors were going to fall off their hinges because of confused mainframe systems, or something like that. He said we’d have to live in bomb shelters and ration old MREs until somebody smarter than us built creation a second time.

I remember the front room, end table lights flickering on and off the instant our wall clock struck midnight. The best thing I remember about the year 2000 was my dad laughing his ass off from the kitchen as he shook the light switches up and down, controlling the limits of my belief in him, of which there were none. I loved him. He was my best friend.

The worst thing I remember about the year 2000 was standing by his grave side and watching his mother sob so hard I believed she was going to melt into the ground with him. I remember my mom’s thousand yard stare and the black tie she tied around my neck the morning of his wake because he and I hadn’t had enough practice with shit like that. I remember asking her if I should stay around until every one had left his grave site. And I remember her telling me that it didn’t really matter. I remember standing up straight as they lowered him into the ground and wishing I hadn’t seen the casket close on him earlier. Not before I had a chance to tell him one last time how I hated him for dying and how I’d try my best to take care of my mom. Not before I could lie down beside him and lower the cap on the both of us.

She was right. It didn’t really matter. I can’t remember much more of that day, or that year. Reformed theologian Charles Spurgeon has said that depression, as suffocating as it is, is like fighting the air. I think that’s the best way of describing fresh traumatic sorrow too. The kind of sorrow that is both a state and a process; the kind of sorrow that accompanies losing something you’d never let go of yourself.

That kind of sorrow can kill you. But if you make it past that kind, past what C.S. Lewis calls a grief so overwhelming that it is like the sky because it hangs over everything, there’s a chance you’ll learn from it. You might even learn to weaponize it against some things you’ll never be able to fix. But please understand me: there is no moral to this story.

There are no truly worthwhile receipts to any of this. I like to think of life after such a loss as a giant protest song. A sometimes beautiful but necessary thing.

That’s what progress looks like for a lot of people: moving from a loud chorus of hell and into an old hymnal written in the key of absurdity — learning to march into the steady ache of loss again, and again and again and again. Here are the hardest things I’ve learned along the way.

The person you lost will never see your kids.

When I think about it long enough, their casual oblivion toward a person I loved so much, a person they’ll never meet, I sometimes lose my breath. Folks will tell you that time makes things better, but looking at parental loss through this prism, as a crack in time — one in which The Grandparent They Never Meet fell through, you understand that time isn’t undefeated. When you frame loss like this, time does not win. The air wins. It makes a terrible noise. This vacuum of loss the worst part of it all.

A word of advice: talk about the people you’ve lost, and don’t be apologetic about it. Try not to forget what their voice sounded like. More than that, take care of yourself in such a way that you’ll see your kids’ kids.

2. You’ll never know the full extent of their humanity.

Why was my dad so mad at bullshit Will Purdue for bringing the basketball down into bullshit traffic that one time the Bulls lost a tightly contested home game? 13 year old me thought my dad was dealing with a really hard Post-Jordan hangover and couldn’t bear the thought of a losing record. I figured he must’ve really cared about Will Purdue playing fundamental basketball.

33 year old me wonders how hard he ate his bet slip against the point spread and how hard he worked to conceal a problem. Wagering on regular season NBA basketball suggests a problem. That’s bad action, and no one cares that much about Will Purdue.

That’s a lesson I would’ve learned from him. Betting on regular season basketball is shit. He would’ve told me that. I think. But I’m left guessing at the subtext or the lesson most of the time.

A word of advice: extend the benefit of every doubt you have to the people you’ve lost. Not in a naïve, baptism-for-the-dead kind of way, but in a way that extends grace for outstanding debts that you’ll probably leave when you’re gone too — to the extent that we all make some bad bets.

3. They’ll never know the full extent of your humanity either.

This might be a controversial opinion, but there’s no replacing a dad’s approval. There’s just no replacing it. I remember the dreams that followed his death. I’d wait for them; I looked forward to them. They became less frequent over time. Year after year, when we met in my sleep he became less talkative, and I would see his image distort in-front of me, almost pixel by pixel. As it happened, and I could see him disappear with accelerating pace, I’d talk faster and faster and faster. I’d tell him about all the shit I wanted him to hear — and say nothing of the rest of it. He never said a word, because I never stopped talking. I’d talk faster and faster and faster. I wanted to throw my whole world onto him before he left me again. I wanted to tell him everything he was never going to hear.

I have a girlfriend. She’s so pretty. Oh my god. She’s tan all over. Big brown eyes. I love her. I outkicked the whole coverage. Whole thing. I keep playing piano for Mom, yeah. She’s worried sick about almost everything. My friends are cool, we stick together.

I learned the guitar too. You won’t believe the Bears this year, you were right, Urlacher is good. Really good! Like, he ran down Emmitt Smith in a game this year.

The Bulls are so bad — and, well. I’m reading a lot of books and school is so boring. But, Dad — you wouldn’t believe …

A word of advice: If you have a family, maybe a wife and kids, make them proud. If your mom is around make her proud too.