More on Grief as Love…

I had a jar of my father‘s marmalade in my refrigerator for three years. I don’t even like marmalade. Daddy did. I don’t know how it got from his refrigerator in Houston to my refrigerator in Austin after he died. I’m sure I brought it with me, tucked lovingly into some box of carefully curated treasures that reminded me of him. I don’t remember the specifics, I just know it was his. Grief is funny like that. The details get really fuzzy. I know that having that jar of Daddy’s marmalade there, sitting on the door of my refrigerator amongst the other jams and jellies, made me feel somehow closer to him. I’m sentimental that way.

We bought a new refrigerator recently, and just like that, just as mysteriously, I was ready to part with Daddy’s marmalade. Grief is funny like that.

I’m in the shadow period, the two weeks between Daddy’s death and his birthday. It was an irrevocably dark time for me three years ago. Grief can change relationships in unexpected ways. Relationships I mistakenly thought unshakable ended in a blinding flash.

I suspect I won’t ever fully recover from the choices that were made then, the words spoken that can never be unheard. I knew when it was happening that somehow, inadvertently perhaps, a course was set for a future I didn’t want at all. I fought kicking and screaming until, quite literally, I had no fight left.

If you know me at all, you probably know that I almost always have some fight in me. But not in those circumstances.

And so I grieve. I woke up with the grief all over me this morning. It filtered into my dreams last night and hangs on me still like a heavy wet black cloak of confusion, unanswered questions, sorrow, anger, and despair.

That’s the way it is with grief. There is no grief without Love. I have dedicated my life to Love, and grief is a part of that dedication, to be sure.

I miss you, Daddy. The world is certainly a different place without you in it in ways I never could have imagined.

Photo: Soul Collage