Probably Don't Text This to Someone Grieving

The laughing-crying continuum persists.

I’m going to tell you something wild.

But before I do, a request: don’t feel bad for me.

Someone recently texted me something cruel, out of thin air. This is someone from way far back in my past. Someone who is having a hard time in life and knows nothing about mine. Someone I speak to once a year, if even that.

She texted me two months after my dad died to say he would be highly disappointed in me.

Funny part was, it didn’t hurt.

When the worst possible thing happens and you lose one of the Greats of your life, an unserious text like that barely makes a scratch.

So then, why air the dirty laundry?

Well, I guess to keep myself on the hook. I, too, have used that kind of phrasing, albeit in a different way: I can only imagine your dad would feel so proud of you.

But is even that worth saying? I’m not so sure.

When I say something like that, I don’t intend to speak for the dead. But inevitably in the course of conversation, I feel so much tenderness for the person suffering the loss that it’s almost compelled out of me. It comes out as they’d be so proud! but maybe it would be more honest for me to just say I’m so sorry, it’s all going to be okay.

Even though I know it won’t be.

I mean, how could my life ever be okay again without my dad?

I know it will.

But also, it won’t. Will it?

The Earth, suspended. Or so we think. // Photo by Pixabay via Pexels

Why do we say these wild things to each other, resurrecting the dead in some manufactured plot twist as if to say: if they were standing here with us in this scene, this would be their line?

Does that do anything for the grieving?

Wouldn’t it be nicer sometimes to just hold someone’s hand?

Well, not always. Depends on who it is. Sometimes that would be awkward.

Sometimes I offer the manufactured plot twist (they would be so proud!) as a way to say, I’d hold your hand if it wasn’t awkward.

There are chasms between what we feel and what we can do with what we feel.

Grief feels like an endless chasm.

The chasm between the Great Before and the Great After breaks open at my feet and I fall into the depth and I keep falling. Someone can text me “your father would be highly disappointed in youuuuuu!” from the cliff of the chasm, but their words turn into a shapeless echo because I’m, you know, falling into the depths of a chasm.

I want so badly to talk to my dad. I wish I could sit down on the couch next to him, and he’d slap my knee and say, “So Court! What’s new?”

My dad and I could talk about anything. Often politics, sometimes art, annually taxes, but it was mostly the nothings we said that I loved most. One time I was explaining SEO keyword research to him, and he looked at me incredulously and asked, “How do you KNOW all that?” My dad, the avid reader who was never without an open book when he was at the kitchen table with his cereal, or deep in the comfort of his recliner, the guy with shelves and shelves of hardcovers (because he could never wait for the paperback) overflowing from room to room, thought it was remarkable that I was teaching myself new things. As if I wasn’t simply emulating him.

I miss shooting the shit with my dad.

Also I talk to my dad every day. I felt him walk with me down my block two weeks after he died. I know he’s there, somewhere.

The chasm widens and changes shape and sometimes flips upside down. It’s forever deep and dark. Also sometimes it’s bright and okay.

I wonder if eventually it spits you out on the other side? (The other side of what? you’d be right to ask. I don’t know. Space/time? Myself? Love?)

Enantiodromia is the idea that, taken to the extreme, things turn into their opposites. The sun goes so far away at night that it comes back around to create morning. I got a cartoonishly mean text about disappointing my dead dad, and immediately heard one of his famously scathing one-liners responding in my head.

I told Craig and we burst out laughing at the thought of my dad’s ruthless humor. He didn’t punch down, only up. His commentary was hilarious and brutal. So often, he’d flick out these zingers under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear them, and I clocked every one. So in a moment when someone was attempting traditional narcissistic manipulation with the bullying bait of “your dad would be highly disappointed in you”, I didn’t feel bad at all. Instead I felt his warmth and heard his justice-seeking sharp tongue.

It all made me laugh.

And then, it all made me cry.

I wept for a very long time after that.

Because my laugh bounced back against the chasm walls, reminding me where I was.