New Year's, Grieving, and Moving Forward

New Year’s was really tough for me. My dad loved New Year’s. He loved Christmas, too. He loved getting an enormous tree, he loved putting up lights and decorations, he loved the angel that went on top of the tree. But New Year’s was different. There was no holiday stress with New Year’s. We’d made it through, and we had a clean slate coming up, and it was time to celebrate. We had a fancy dinner. My mom got out the good place-mats, and the good plates, and the good glasses. She made black eyes peas. My parents had lobster (which me and my brother hated), and we had something different. My dad always made us eat black eyes peas. My dad always had us recite our resolutions. New Year’s was fun. It’s honestly the only holiday that my family ever celebrated where I don’t remember conflict or yelling.

It’s been difficult since my dad died. Mourning someone who was abusive is hard. Grief is already complicated enough as it is, and I’ve had days where I haven’t known how to function. Because my father had been so sick for so long, not many people have checked in on me. Because he was abusive, people don’t seem to expect me to mourn or be sad. I don’t post a lot of personal stories on Facebook because it’s not a safe place for me. And it tends to be actively detrimental for my mental health. (Although it is kinda funny to watch a bunch of “woke” “friends” blather on about the importance of checking in on people who are suffering. They certainly haven’t checked in on me. But it also hurts. ) Plus, there’s a pandemic. Everyone is more isolated than usual. And doing their best to get through.

But it’s still been hard. And I want to say that. I want to say that these past six months haven’t been easy. I want to say that I miss my dad. That my grief is complicated. That I have a lot of conflicting emotions all existing at the same time. And that all of that is okay.

I’ve been learning a lot, too, and one of the things I’m learning to is take up space. That it’s okay to take up space. To exist. That I have, in fact, a right to exist. That even though I’ve been told my whole life that I don’t really deserve to be here, I do. I deserve to be here just by virtue of being here.

It’s a heady concept.

So I’m writing today to take up space. To be here. To say something I want to say. To be honest. To find my voice. To practice my voice. Because grieving has been hard. Being isolated has been hard. And learning and growing and changing has been hard.

Just so you know.

Fragility

It’s been a strange week.

Last Saturday, at a punk rock band reunion show in RVA (that’s Richmond, VA), I learned that two people who had been quite influential in my life had not thrived in the intervening years. One had gone “into hiding” (as he had evidently called it) in Florida, and wanted no contact with people he used to know—he was “off the grid.” One of his former bandmates had managed to track him down and glean this information. I was sad not to see him, but also, in a strange way, heartened. I had imagined a far worse situation for Jeff. My high school bestie and I had actually imagined that he had overdosed some time ago, so it was relief to hear that he was alive, and, in many ways, unchanged. Jeff always had been an overachiever in paranoia and conspiracy theories. There’s something comforting, really, in imagining Jeff somewhere in Florida, having his groceries delivering through a slot in the door, watching TV and chainsmoking, and talking to himself about Gershwin.

Greg didn’t fare as well. He used to own a record store, and I feel confident in saying that there was not a single person in the room at the sold out show who wasn’t affected by him and his store. His store was the hub of the RVA punk rock scene for many years. I spent hours with my bestie at Greg’s record store after school. Greg recommended new music and saved new albums for us. He was insightful and funny as hell. After college, I dated his stepson for a time, and it was his stepson who told us at the reunion show that Greg had become addicted to heroin, gotten arrested, become homeless, and had gone back to New York somewhere. That was the last he had heard, and he had heard it several years ago.

I’ve been thinking about them a lot. About fate. Not the destiny sort of fate, but amor fati, the Nietzschean sort of fate, where who we are is what we become. For Nietzsche, our characters make our fate, and the idea of amor fati is the idea of loving your fate, no matter what it is or where it takes you, because in a way, we design our own fates through who we are.

Then, earlier this week, my coworker died, unexpectedly, of a heart attack. He was a gentle, kind, quiet man, whom I didn’t know very well. But I saw him every day. He smiled every day. And now he’s gone. I keep thinking I see him walking past my office. I keep thinking I’ll run into him in the hall. The day we found out, I heard another coworker crying in the bathroom. Grief and mortality have clouded my office.

And all I can think is that we are such fragile creatures. We try to forget our fragility. We like to pretend that tomorrow is certain, that our trajectory is certain, that we know where we’re going. We tamp down our doubts and we look away from the abyss. We have to. It’s too deep and too big. The emptiness yawns before us and we step backward. We’re meaning makers, and there’s no meaning in the abyss. We are far too delicate to live without making meaning, without the certainly that we’ll have a tomorrow. We plan. We grocery shop expecting to make breakfasts and lunches and dinners all week. We go to work expecting that we’ll always go to work somewhere. We fix our houses and apartments expecting to always live beneath a roof.

And then we don’t.

And sometimes, a surprisingly often number of sometimes, there’s nothing we can do about it.

But what we can do is remember how fragile we are, how fragile each other are, and see that about ourselves and the people around us. We are wondrous, magical, hopeful, delicate creatures. And we should try to remember that more often, and be kind, and generous, and giving, as much as we are able. And for as long as we can.