Sometimes I can live my life normally like anyone else. I can go days without remembering or thinking about it. Other days I can say out loud, “My Dad is dead.” I don’t feel anything because it is just a fact. Other days the pain that this thought causes me is too much. It feels like someone is squeezing my heart and they are never going to let go and it’s tighter and tighter and my heart might implode from the pain and I will have to live without a heart because it’s the only way I can go on. It’s the only way that I will never have to experience this pain again. But slowly, after the tears stop, after I am done sobbing for this countless time, the ache and pain in my heart becomes less intense. I can breathe again. Now I will have to complete this cycle once more. Forgetting, remembering, accepting, and then being torn apart again. As the years go by the stages of this cycle lengthen and being torn apart becomes less frequent. But it still comes and it still hurts. Whoever said ‘Time heals all wounds’ is wrong. It doesn’t. In my experience with such deep grief at the loss of losing a parent suddenly and much too early, time goes by and the cycle of pain comes less frequently. But it still comes and it is just as intense.
This year marks the sixteenth anniversary of my Dad dying from a catastrophic heart attack.