Grief is a BEAST I'll Never Tame.
Crying over tiktoks.
Grief is fucking wild and that’s putting it mildly. I was scrolling through TikTok on my lunch break just needing a moment to reset after a long week and ended up crying hard as hell because a girl had just lost her dad and realized she had no idea what water filter to buy for her fridge. Normal behavior and not at all meant to make me snotty nose and sobbing but it was the comments that got me. They were full of people wanting to help and offer encouragement. For a moment these comments reminded me how essential community is in the quest of healing but to see it laid out so perfectly on an app that is SLIDING fast into right wing hell was stunning. I cried for many reasons but the most glaring one was that I am now a fatherless girl who is facing the world one step at a time.
Grief is so haunting and incredibly isolating. Its an invisible boulder on your shoulder constantly weighing you down and yet, you keep moving forward hoping if you tuck the pain away long enough it will be like it never happened. My dad died right before Christmas and I feel like I am often transported to that moment, a few drinks in and feeling like I was on top of the world only for the inevitable crash to take me out. It was like a gunshot to the chest and I’m slowly bleeding out and no one can see or hear me, my boyfriend is hugging me and yet, I feel nothing but bone chilling coldness that has bled out of me, a reminder that I’m empty and utterly alone. Grief and death reminds you that while the aftermath is painful you are filled with a dose of understanding. My dads fight was won. The pain was gone and he was free. But that freedom cam with its own set of challenges. My dad existence was snuffed out like a thief in the night and while he floated to wherever he needed to go that loss and sadness was now transferred to the ones he left behind. Us.
What is it that Andrew Garfield said, ‘I hope this grief stays with me because its all the unexpressed love I didn’t get to tell her’. as he spoke about his mothers death and I think that will stick with me. I loved my dad, I didn’t always like him but there was love there and even in those final moments, I know that he loved us even if he wasn’t able to show it. I will embrace this grief and the pain that it comes with because that means he was real and he was loved.