You can ask how they're doing

Even if they're crying into their kid's lunch.

My dad taught me to let the steering wheel gently glide through my hands when coming out of a turn.

I was probably doing some version of an awkard ee-er-ee-er to get the car off Middletown Road and he wisely suggested I relax.

“Just let it gently return back, Court.”

It was that exact move that my driver’s ed teacher noted as the reason I would not be receiving my license that Tuesday. Even though I parallel parked a giant boat of a Ford Taurus perfectly, on the first try, and made no other errors — the grumpy driving teacher felt my hands on the turn were too relaxed. I had let the wheel, incorrectly, just return back.

When I told my dad, he felt awful. Oh shoot… he said with a grimacing smile.

I didn’t feel bad though.

Of course I wanted to pass on the first try, especially because my guy friends said stupid early-2000s things like girls shouldn’t be allowed to drive. So I mainly wanted to pass because I wanted them to shove it.

But I didn’t feel bad about failing the test.

I recognized the system was flawed and because this driver’s ed teacher was feeling prickly that day or he was a grown up boy who thought girls shouldn’t drive or perhaps letting the steering wheel gently return back was indeed asking for an accident, I got pinned between the driver’s ed manual and my dad’s driving advice. But I knew my dad was right.

Suffice it to say, every time I make a right turn, or a left one for that matter, I remember my dad is dead.

It’s like that.

I shouldn’t say remember. I don’t forget. It’s just sometimes the excruciating thought cuts above the other thoughts in my head like the back of a whale skimming the surface of the Pacific.

It comes through when I’m cutting the crusts off my kids’ PB&Js, a scene I find to be alarmingly on the nose.

INT. KITCHEN - DAY. Mom cuts the crusts off the kids’ sandwiches. Her single tear drops in the jelly.

That sentence wouldn’t make it past the first draft, and yet, there I stood just this week, weeping into the Smuckers.

Also I remember at bedtime. After I sing my daughter to sleep, and drift a little bit into unconsciousness myself, I startle awake and remember right away: Dad is gone.

I hate this one the most.

There I am, wrapped up with my little girl, our legs entwined, her steady deep breath the only sound in the room, and I’m nearly suffocated with the feeling I’ll never hug my dad again. And then I think what she might feel when she loses me. And then I think back to what it felt like when my dad slipped away the last time. What it felt like when he didn’t gently return back.

via Dxmiq . on Are.na

So this is why you can ask how they’re doing.

You can ask them how they’re feeling, or ask them to tell you a story about the person they lost, or say the person’s name out loud.

You will not, will never, remind them of what they lost.

You can’t remind people of what they’re already thinking about.

But you can step into the void with them for a moment. You can. You might not want to, and that’s okay too. I think we all understand.

My best friend¹ and I were recently chatting about how American culture cannot handle death. How we can’t even say someone died, we have to say they passed. Or they’re no longer with us. Or they’ve gone to a better place.

All may be true, but also — they fucking died.

Who am I to have an attitude though? What is the right thing to say when someone dies? I don’t know. I really don’t.

As my dad died, all I could say was thank you. I just kept saying it over and over again, Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The more I think about it, it’s really not about the words themselves.

It’s the acknowledgement of a Before and After. And from here on out, all you’re going to get from me is After. All I am now is After.

I don’t have words for After. I try to find them, but they sound so cliché and it makes me feel like my grief is a deflated bouncy house, pathetic and useless and ordinary. I suppose grief is ordinary. But my dad wasn’t, not to me.

So the words we use — grief, pain, depression, sadness, misery, heartache, stomach problems, insomnia, anger, despair — they sound empty, while my grief is full.

There’s rampant emptiness in the words of the After.

So many people told me they’d “be there for me in the coming months” never to text me or call me about it again. Which, truly, I understand. People have their own complicated understandings of death.

Plus they have their own lives. I’m not the first person to lose someone I loved.

Death itself is unoriginal, the same way birth is. It happens every day.

But I wish we could say plainly what is true: Gonna be up to 70 today. Someone I love died. The Sox got a new manager. I’m not okay.

It is actually that easy to let death be part of life.

Condolences from my girl.

The nice thing about kids is they will speak it plainly all the time.

Poppie diiii—iiieeedd, Poppie Poppie Poppie Popp-iieeeee, my son sings to himself playing Legos, when he has a memory of his grandfather.

“Mom, you know how Poppie died? Well…” my daughter starts as an introduction to a series of questions she has about life, some related to my dad and some very much unrelated.

When Hotel California comes on the radio and I tell my kids Poppie loved that song, my daughter will adorably whine ughhhh whyyyyy did he have to dieeee?

And I say, I know how you feel, kid.

My kids are honest and that helps me grieve.

I try to be honest too. I’m cutting the crusts off the PB&Js and my daughter notices first. She looks up, rightfully pitying me, and says, Poppie? I nod my head yes, and my son toddles over and hugs my leg. Kisses my thigh. And returns back to smashing peas into smaller and smaller bits.

Grief can just be like that. It can just be there, in everything, in every place.

In the jelly, in the peas, in the legs, in the right hand turns, in the Grateful Dead, in the 4pm light, in the empty, useless words.

I suppose if I’m ruthlessly honest with myself, I don’t need anyone to say anything specific about it. Words don’t work here anyway.

But when someone outside of my grief lets it stay, I feel better.

It’s not about forgetting or remembering it.

It’s about letting it stay.

Sometimes I just need it to stay.

1. My bff who, not for nothing, talks about my dad all the time and asks me how I’m doing without needing a response back, is the best.