Threading Grief

on weaving a new fabric of humanity // reflections on grief from a decade in the Dead Dad Club

At fifteen years old, I was given the great gift of grief. Though disguised as a devastating tragedy, a decade in the Dead Dad Club has allowed me to recognize my grief for what it really is: a safe space to feel and process our most human emotions and reactions to a life that was never meant to be easy.

I won’t go into the details of the difficulty of navigating 12 years of childhood with a sick parent. My dad’s cancer diagnoses certainly threw a wrench in all aspects of the romanticized Normal American Childhood Experience I naively believed in. But what I struggled with the most during those years wasn’t the hardships of processing terminal illness, financial strain, and familial tensions as the root of my suffering. I knew how to sit with my sadness, worry, and fear and felt very comfortable with them in my solitude. Grief was a friend, she led me to so many beautiful moments of genuine connection with the people and world that I held most dearly. The difficulty for me came from my inability to weave this narrative of suffering into the rest of my life. The world around me did not appear to be welcoming of those heavy, darker emotions with the same enthusiasm as it celebrated my childish joy and pleasure. But the truth is, those 12 years of pain and suffering were also equally filled with immense joy. For every unavoidable medical setback, treatment failed, grim diagnosis, or loss of hope, there was opportunity to challenge and overcome, define a new level of hope, recalibrate faith, and bask in overwhelming gratitude. The pure joy of knowing that my dad was still alive, a different treatment worked, or a temporary remission was declared was a level of bliss that could not be realized without the relative moments of pain, hopelessness, and fear.

I couldn’t fully understand these joys then; I struggled to compare the excitement of my dad simply being home and healthy with my classmates’ exciting news of family trips to Italy or Disneyworld. While I knew there was no outlet for my sorrows in society, I also found it appropriate to hide my greatest joys. When friends’ parents or teachers asked about my dad’s health, I practiced and perfected my pretend answers. I kept it vague as not not make anyone uncomfortable. Could I tell them that the steroids he was on had given him the energy and motivation to start another project on our house that would be left unfinished? Or that his new medicine has made him hallucinate, sometimes waking up to visions of terrorizing paranoia? How can I communicate the relief that his last scans came back clear? But that uncertainty still looms around every corner, and my worry can come back in an instant? I couldn’t find a way to express these complex sentiments, so I abandoned authenticity in exchange for a sense of normalcy. “He’s doing okay!” followed by some less intimate recent details and an uplifting sentiment or story to share became my practiced and perfected response, without fail.

For many of years that followed my dad’s death in 2013, I abandoned grief. I forced it to the background so that I could deal with what was left now in the foreground. It was time for damage control. A part of me (that I had a very difficult time accepting) found a sense of relief in my dad’s death. In his absence, the opportunity for that normalcy I had always craved was within reach, and I pursued it with near perfection. I achieved the social life, the grades and extracurriculars, the high school sweetheart, the instagram aesthetic, the Normal American High School Experience. I checked the boxes of “success” I had internalized from my peers and the adults of my immediate environment. Then I went away to college. I studied and partied and volunteered and travelled and immersed myself in anything I had access to. I achieved the Normal American College Experience. I had a new list of “successes” that started to look a bit different, as the environment I found myself in changed.

I graduated in a pandemic and joined the infamous class of 2020. This timely exit from the incredibly sheltered utopian environment of a college campus into a world that was certainly not functioning properly thrust me into a period of deep questioning the Normal American Human Experience at large. When the entire world was forced to slow down, we saw just how abnormal it all truly was. The rules we were being told to us by people who cared more about political polling than a catastrophic global pandemic. No one had any idea what was going on, who to listen to, what information we could trust. Some people decided they just didn’t want to follow the rules, and their privilege protected them. Others followed every rule, and their lack of privilege got them killed. The guise that our country was past its racist roots was lifted, real truths about our nation were being brought to the surface and people were actually accepting them. Suddenly, people had time to understand the truth behind the many myths of normalcy. We had time to care. We realized just how capable we were when we weren’t shackled to the constraints of unsustainable capitalism and insatiable consumerism. We realized how necessary and overdue change was. At least I did.

This unveiling of the realities and suffering of the world on such a massive scale opened the door for an old friend of mine. My grief returned, and I was so struck by her raw familiarity. She was strangely warm, comforting even. I knew her well, she had sat with me in my darkest times and yet I had abandoned her for so long in search of temporary pleasures and avoidance of pain. But while I looked at my list accomplishments and checked boxes of “success”, I could not see the piece as one whole. I did not recognize myself. Something was missing. Reuniting with the heaviness of grief brought me to a place where I was able to put the pieces together again.

Grief is my golden thread, its strength in emotional memory holds every other piece of the story together. Without it I am just disconnected parts, boxes filled with checks as proof I am alive even if I am not fully living. It is the feeling part the threads our experiences together, that threads all of us together. It is beautiful but it also hurts so much. We can not separate beauty from pain, the two are inextricably bound together. Every beautiful thing you know and love is accompanied by the looming pain of losing it, the potential for grief. To deny ourselves of grief is to deny ourselves of the greatest privileges of being human,

A misconception I have grappled with is that grief is not an all-consuming darkness. It can be, if I believe it is. But it can also be the euphoric, all-consuming pleasure of gratitude. It can be getting lost in a memory of pure bliss, being reminded by the uncontrollable smile creeping onto your face or the happy tear that drips down the slope of your nose is living proof of a great love. It can be a consolation to a world of inevitable grieving that there is only darkness because there once was light — a reminder that I believe this world is so desperate to hear.

Lately I’ve found myself pretending again, slipping too easily back into perfected responses crafted by inauthenticity. All to appease the comfort of others. When I bump into an old friend in my new neighborhood, I smile and say “Everything’s going well” as if there aren’t images of the livestreamed genocide flashing behind my eyes. I found myself smiling at a turkey dinner surrounded by my family after spending the morning screaming “Biden, Biden, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today?” at a giant inflatable clown parading down Sixth Ave. I congregated again for a “Christmas celebration”, negating the fact that in his own birthplace, the people cannot in good conscience celebrate the birth of a radical, Palestinian Jew known as Jesus Christ. I go out to dinner and my heart is there, sometimes. But it is also in Gaza. It is broken and bruised with the horrors that my fellow human beings are experiencing in Palestine. It is also in Sudan, Congo, and Armenia. For the last three months, in most social settings I have forced away any truthful yet intrusive thoughts that make me seem like I’m losing my mind because I’m seeing the ugly truth for what it is. But I’m certain that my discomfort is no delusion, and I will not dismember myself again for the comfort of others. I will not abandon my humanity by denying this lunacy. I will not abandon humanity by hiding my grief.

We grieve because we love. We love because we are human. To numb ourselves to grief is to fail to water the seeds of love, to impose a drought on ourselves that affects the entire ecosystem of human society we belong to in such devastating ways. Do yourself a favor, and let yourself feel. Do the world a favor, and let us grieve together. Hold space for yourself to sit in your pain and suffering. Then expand — hold space for your friends, your family, your lovers. Hold that same space for your neighbors, your greater community, your strangers and their friends, family, and lovers. With this space, our stories and threads of empathy, we can weave a new world with the most fantastic fabrics our existence has ever seen.