Francomenz

Mannie Mendes
Originally uploaded by j58.

It’s amazing how words can have such an effect on you…how reading about someone else’s experience can make you feel less alone.

I just came across an article written by Dawn Raffel, who, in mourning her father’s death, finds “the world made strange”. “Strange” is a word I have been using for the past two weeks since my own father died and it doesn’t begin to describe the feeling. It’s a complete loss of equilibrium, stranger even than a Stanley Kubrick film – sharper and more intense because you wish it were some demented form of imagination, but it’s not. It’s very real and despite the finality of the formal part of the process (the funeral, the burial), the smallest details of his passing replay themselves. At any given moment of the day or night you remember something and the tears thunder through the levee of your self-possession once again.

People are helping, though. Kind words, a call to check up on how you’re doing, these are like soothing balm to an open wound. Some say time heals everything. Others assure me that this kind of loss is something you learn to live with, but never forget, which is fine. I don’t ever want to forget. I will miss my father until I see him again in whatever form that may someday take. And in the meantime, love, which he always used to say was the most powerful force in the world, will bring comfort. And time, peace.

My father died four days ago. Four days ago still feels like four minutes. Even when someone is ailing, even when you know death will come, it’s always too soon. There never seems to be enough time. It’s so quick too, that moment in which your world changes. Like that. Like a breath or a breeze or a blink. One minute you know the familiar parameters that frame your life, the next, they disappear, along with your father, into a deep, perfectly carved hole.

In the church, I was strong. Mostly strong. It surprised me. But I shook during the Our Father, when it hit me that I would never again feel the warmth of my father’s hands in mine. There was something about the way he held my hand that brought me straight back to my childhood, my core, my knowing of myself. As a child, my father was my world. You think you become so sophisticated as you grow up; above tender things like lullabys and being called “darling”. But I realize now that nothing had changed in the precise moment that everything did. My father was still my world in so many ways and now the world order has changed.

The earth was dark. It had rained, giving the soil a rich, fertile sheen. Everything happened in slow motion. The winding walk up New Street. The conversations with the priest and the grave diggers. The blood-red rose that came out of nowhere, sent by his former employees to be tossed into the earth that surrounded him. The prayers, the singing, the stifled sobs, the gritty feel of the soil between my fingers. It’s bizarre, this natural order of life, that makes you have to say these inadequate goodbyes.