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7 Aug

Voices In The Dark

The writer in me wants to narrate my grief. The writer in me wants to remove myself from the muck and mire and pain of navigating this dark valley and rise above it and float, weightless, a disembodied voice that just describes the action, that is removed from the action, that just describes the woman sitting alone at the airport, looking out the windows at the ocean in the distance and missing her father desperately, wishing that he were there – here – to talk to about love and loss and souls. Missing him, and dwelling on the missing, because the missing at least is something, is a known thing, where so much else is not.

And there I go, narrating. And here I go, continuing to narrate, because the words lift me out of myself and allow me to remove myself, a little, from the immediate experience of pain.

I do not know if this is a good or bad thing. It just is.

The night, again, looms long and dark, and tomorrow longer and darker. Police. Coroner. Autopsy. Body. I am not grown-up enough for this, at this moment, at this precise moment when I have been plunged back into my childhood, into my childishness, into my childish need to just creep into my parents’ bedroom and curl up at the foot of their bed and hear them breathing and feel their warmth and feel their love and feel secure in the belief that mom and dad are forever, are always.

At this moment I need my Dad more than anything. At this moment I cannot have him.

All I have is this story of him, and of me, this last story of us, this story that I can’t help but tell because the telling is the only way I know to wrap arms around myself and pull myself some distance, some very little distance, out of the eye of the pain.

(I don’t know how much of this story I will post. I don’t want to lash the Internet with my grief. And I will need, at some point, to just live this, and not narrate. But the narrating helps, the storytelling helps, it’s the only thing, right now, that helps. And it helps to know that you have listened, are listening. I don’t know. I’m keeping comments closed, for now, because I’m not ready for this to be a dialogue. I know that you all are out there, wishing me strength and love. I am so grateful. Thank you for letting me whisper this all to you. Thank you.)