Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Grieving is a Ninja

Grieving is a ninja, for me it is, well nowadays anyway. It hasn't always been a ninja, for a long time it was more like one of those Italian mob lackeys who stays in the room with you while you're tied to a chair and taunts you constantly. Then a couple times a day the lackey just comes over and beats the living tar out of you. Yep, for a long time I was in the mob lackey stage of grieving. But now i am in ninja stage where grief sometimes comes in stealthily and roundhouse kicks me in the face. The chances of getting ninja-ed increase steadily the closer I get to march every year. And would you look at that, today is Feb 9, getting awful close to March. Five years ago on March 19, 2005 my Dad died very suddenly. And so every March I feel that in a deep way. When I hear a song that he loved or that we played at a funeral I get the grief ninja kicking me in my head.

Today I got doubly kicked as I attended a funeral, a friend of mine lost his Mom last week and today they said goodbye to her. This was my first good friend to lose a parent since I lost my Dad. Five years and no one in my circle of friends lost a parent. Thank God for sparing them that pain. And I don't want to talk about it much because I want to support my friends as the grieve this loss and not have any of their support taken away. But here in this space I can't deny that helping them through this has put me back in the grieving mindset. Remembering all the things I went through five years ago next month. Five years, it's such a neat even number, but it is bigger than all the other numbers I have faced in March. It's one of the milestone numbers. Something in me scream that there is no way that five years can have passed since the last time I talked to my Dad, or hugged him, or saw his face on this earth. And grief unlike anything else is so steadfastly permanent. I don't get him back because I went five years without him. If I grieve extra well I don't get a prize. The years march on and Noelle won't meet her grandpa, not on this earth anyway. And you have to understand that so many days this is completely okay. And that if you were to ask me about my Dad about 80% of the time I can tell you about what happened and not have a tear well up.

I don't know how I am going to do this March, maybe the rawness that has resurfaced will subside, calm down and go back to whatever box I keep it in. I have thought about making a soundtrack of these last five years, of my journey away from Dad. This was so much easier when I still lived around the people who held me up as it happened, how do I re-explain it to new friends, trust them with this part of me?

Maybe I don't. I don't know. For now I Am going to get in the tub and just let my mind do what it needs to do, let God into the mess of grief instead of keeping him out of it as I am more prone to do.

1 comment:

Deanna said...

Praying for you during this difficult time...