I don’t quite know what to say about Joannie Rochette. I’ve been stunned by her bravery, humbled by her strength, amazed by her determination in the face such terrible sadness. When my father died, it was days before I could even walk in a straight line, weeks before I could hold myself reliably upright. After losing her mother, Joannie Rochette strapped on her skates and competed for an Olympic medal. Incredible. Courageous.

It’s courageous because it represents an overcoming of a terrible grief, a grief that comes at you like a baton to the knees and the gut and the mind and the heart. It’s not a defeat of such grief – there is no defeat of such grief – but it is – it represents – a willingness and an ability to power through that grief and to keep moving, keep persevering, keep living, in spite of that grief. And more than that, perhaps: to take that grief and let it move through you in a way that carries you forward, to feel its battering force and take that force and bend it to your will and make it dance, to dance with it, to take the lead and turn the struggle into something beautiful.

I would like to do that. But I still feel, more often than not, that the grief is moving me, leading me, directing our steps. We’re dancing, I know, and it’s not always terrible (that is one grief’s secrets: that it is sometimes welcomed, that it is sometimes embraced, because the grieving soul does, sometimes, just want to give in, to fall back into the deep curve of those arms and yield to the bending and the tipping and to just let its fingers graze the floor as it sways and drops) but it is not controlled, I am not controlling it, I am just being led, and I wish, sometimes, that I were not.

Jeannie Rochette will have her moments, I know; moments in which she will no longer feel in control, when she will not be able to stand, let alone skate, because this kind of pain – no matter what anyone says – is terrible, terrible, beyond measure. But she will always have this moment of triumph, this overcoming, this demonstration of the force of life and love in the face of death. For that she should be proud. To that we should all aspire.

I do.

Alexander McQueen died this week. He committed suicide, and he did so, in part, it seems, because of his bereavement over the death of his mother earlier this month.

This is going to sound awful, terrible, extreme, insane… but… I think that I know – maybe, a little bit – how he felt. (more…)

I’m trying to figure out how to write my ghost story. It’s my solace, it’s what I cling to, it’s the closest thing that I have to proof – proof! as if there could be such a thing – that the love and the light that was my father did not just snuff out, did not just disappear absolutely, when he died. So I want to write it. I promised myself that I would, when I got the courage. And you all have given me the courage, with your stories and your reflections and your all-around awesome.

But I’m tired, and writing the story is hard – each tap of my fingers on the keyboard is a tap on my heart and although I tap gently, still, the tapping wears and the words exhaust me  – and I just want to think about snowflakes and ice castles and ice dancers and all things light and sparkly and melty. And then have cocoa. Spiked with espresso.

Today, I might do just that.

I think that I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief. It’s not that I deny the fact that my father is dead – his ashes sit in a box on my mantle, surrounded, at the moment, by a few Christmas ornaments and my kids’ picture with Santa and Emilia’s bardo-drawing – it’s that I can’t wrap my head around the fact – is it a fact? – that his death is the end, that his life is over, that I’ll never see or speak with him again. The absoluteness of it all, the finality: I’m having trouble accepting this. I can’t accept this. My heart aches from its stubborn refusal to accept this.

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I wanted this year to start with laughter and smiles and cookies and fizzy soda. I didn’t want confetti and champagne and fireworks and streamers – I just wanted smiling. I just wanted this year to start happy.

I’m still trying to find the happy. Yes, my heart lifts when I hug my children and my lips curve when they giggle but the last week of last year and the first week of this year have been covered in a thick blanket of fever and snot and heartache and it’s been hard to find the laughter. And although Nyquil takes the edge off the fever and snot, there aren’t sufficient meds for heartache, Ativan and Xanax notwithstanding. Last week was much, much harder than I thought it would be – doing the final clean-up of my dad’s place in the week between Christmas and New Year’s was, in hindsight, less than ideal timing. Coping with the heart-punches of the holidays was difficult enough without throwing myself into the line of fire of the gut-kicks and soul-wedgies that came with seeing the last of his things carted away, his home wiped clean of his presence.

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The question was: what story are you telling yourself right now? (And, can you give yourself permission to change the ending?)

The answer was: this year, this decade, is ending in sadness. This year, this decade, is ending and my heart is wrapped in grief.

But: I can give myself permission to change the ending. I just need to figure out how.

A start: reflecting on the things that have made me happy this year. To wit: traveling across the country with my children and with dear friends; having a few lovely, brilliant days with my father before he died; my husband, who is my joy and my rock; my children, my children, my children, my children; overcoming fear; overcoming greater fear; facing fear and calling it to account and demanding that it reveal itself as something more, something better, something beautiful.

This is the ending that I want for my year, an ending that celebrates all the joy that circumnavigated the grief, and ending that finds the bravery in the fear and the beauty in the darkness and the wonder and greatness and living and loving that was in everything.

And I want this ending to be a beginning, an opening-up, an opening-towards new fear and new beauty and new wonder and new confusion and new dark and new light – because all of these need each other, each of these requires the others – and all of this as it folds back into the old and becomes greater-than and more.

And it can be. It will.

Happy New Year.

Christmas has come and gone and we are still picking figurative tinsel out of our hair, even as we move forward into a difficult week, clinging to the hangover of joy so that whatever pain the next few days bring is blunted by its residue.

We’ve come west to try to finish the work of clearing out my father’s home, of getting closer to closure with the business surrounding his death. My husband is doing the heavy lifting – the packing, the moving, the cleaning – and leaving to me the sorting – the physical and emotional sorting – that will, hopefully, bring the aforementioned closure, closure that I am not certain that I want, but still.

I cannot go to his home this week. I cannot do it. I am ashamed of this, a little, but it is necessary, so I am trying to forgive myself. Instead of me going to Dad’s stuff, his stuff – the few remaining things that might matter, the stuff that my husband will sift and sort and set aside – will come to me in the lair that I have fashioned for myself in my mother’s home some miles away, and in the meantime I will fret and fuss and worry that some precious object – some note, some stone, some photograph, some feather, some fine bit of detritus – will be misplaced or overlooked or tucked in the wrong box and sent to the thrift store or the recycling box and be lost forever. I will, worry, I will worry constantly. But that is also why I cannot go, because were I to go I would linger over every last spoon and teacup and paper clip and oil change receipt and spend an age agonizing over whether I could bear to let these – these remaining artifacts of my father’s life – go.

So, no. I am struggling to keep a distance, some little distance, between myself and the things that are, right now, too difficult, and working to distract myself with diaper changes and music shows and marathon cookie baking sessions and visits to see the horses at the ranch and eating my mother’s lasagna. And I am tending my grief carefully and quietly, keeping it well watered with the last drops of holiday joy. And hoping that I will be okay.

The view from the road between my mother’s home and my father’s. Desolate, and breathtaking.

I don’t know how much I will write this week. I may need to write. I may need to not write. We’ll see.

Last night, I was writing a post about having had a particularly bad day while Christmas shopping. It was a post about struggling with grief over the holidays, about the heartache that comes in those moments when you’ve gotten caught up in the holiday spirit and forgotten that something – that someone – is missing and then suddenly remembered and OOF. It was a post – again, again – about my dad. I struggled to write it. I always struggle when I write about him. I was wondering, as I always do, why I persist. I was feeling sad.

Just as I was finishing it, I heard a small voice from the other room, singing, in very high, measured tones, hallelujah.

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When I received the call telling me that my father had died, I cried. I cried loud, I cried hard, I fell to the ground and clutched at my aching chest and I wailed. And then, curled up on the floor, phone in hand, I tweeted.

I tweeted because it was instinct. I tweeted because it was the only thing that I could think of to do. I tweeted because I needed to get the words that were reverberating in my head and smashing against the walls of my mind out out out and into the world so that I could step back and see them/hear them/feel them and know that they weren’t just the narrative of some nightmare conjured up by that corner of my soul that holds and nurtures its darkest fears. I needed to face the words, and know that they were true. I needed to take control of the narration of the terrible story that was unfolding. I needed to speak. I needed to write.

So I tweeted.

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My dad was a hoarder. When he died, they had to cut through the outside wall of his house to remove his remains. There simply wasn’t room for the coroner to get him through the packed hallway, the corridors lined with stuff. They cut a hole in the wall and pulled out the contents of the room. Including my dad.

Someone thought to board the wall with a piece of plywood, afterward.

The coroner said to me, if you don’t have to go there, you maybe shouldn’t. Someone else said, see if the insurance company will hire cleaners. Someone else said to me, if you go, you have to remember, this is not who he is.

I went. I was afraid, but I went.

My mom came with me. When we got there and went inside, she cried. I stood in his kitchen and looked at the boxes and the books and the electronics and the crocheted wall hangings and the computers – the dozens of computers – and the tools and the CD cases and I ran my fingers over a stack of disemboweled laptops and I thought, oh, Dad.

I might have actually spoken the words aloud. I can’t recall. Oh, Dad, I thought. You had nothing to be ashamed of.

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