My dad died last week, probably due to COVID, probably due to complications from his brain cancer and stroke last year - and there’s so much I’ll never know for sure.

Ego forces tradition. This is why I have a very secular view of the world and humans. I can honor others’ traditions and not adopt them.

Words like family, father, mother, brother, sister, love…the definitions of which have mutated for me over my forty three years of human experience.

These words have been broken in me for so long (damn…is broken even the right word?), I really have to stretch myself to understand what they mean to other people.

I have to trust that they HAVE heavy meanings without feeling the heaviness of them myself. So my ego dies a little when I hear what these words mean in other folks’ minds.

It HAS to.

I have scattered memories about my dad…one that stands out more than any other. I was eight years old, sitting on the porch, waiting for him to come by like he promised. I got all dressed up and sat there for hours. My mom didn’t know how to comfort me, but she tried. I just cried my eyes out and created a fear of abandonment that day. In more recent years, after my marriage, kid, divorce, reawakened identity, etc., we got to know each other better. I’m still the same little girl, living in the same skin, though. His wife was awesomely patient with me and my awkwardness with him. My pain re: his death is really for her. I’m his oldest kid and there are others that have their own thoughts on this - I wish them well. We all have our own mental processing to do and it’s based on our own filters and our own lives.

People have lost people to this coronavirus situation in really weird ways. Some folks in New Orleans are pushing for real, old-fashioned funerals, and some are doing virtual funerals.

I’m still awaiting the official decision. Either or none can serve the purpose of saying goodbye for me.

I’d love to say goodbye and understand what kind of pain I’m feeling now. I can’t label it. Maybe it’s because I am supposed to feel pain due to the general word: ‘father’ or maybe my socially-acceptable pain mutes because my soul has been empty in that respect and that emptiness carries a general pain.

I honestly don’t know and I’ll never know for sure.

Moving on is key now. I do like the word ‘honor’ though, because it can carry a diverse hodge-podge of opinionated people in one bucket in a way that cares for each of their individual feelings. Instinctually, I go here. I’ll never know what he was thinking or saying as he took his last breath, but I know of my last great conversation with him on one of his best post-stroke days. I was telling him why I was scared about the next steps in my life:

“You can reinvent yourself whenever you want to…whenever you need to. Once you do, you look ahead and keep moving forward. One foot in front of the other… and you keep doing that and life tells you what you need to do next. It’s scary for a while, and then it’s not. It’ll be alright. Just keep moving.” circa fall 2018

I had friends, whom I love dearly, that have told me some version of these very same words. But he said it to me. He did. When I was forty plus years old and divorced and scared and gripping the wheel of my shit-pile of a car, failing at holding back tears.

I just needed to hear it that way, that day, from him. He grabbed my hand and told me this and made me believe it.

That was a big day for us.

We talked about a lot of things I never wanted to talk to him about and I’m so glad we got that chance. We had been calling each other and chatting pretty regularly by then, for a few years and it does feel like we were trying to reach something.

As we started to talk, making our efforts toward what looked like a healthy father-daughter relationship, his health started to decline more and more and the deeper conversations were sparse. I am just glad we had the ones we could. Now my mourning feels heavier, and it’s all about the conversations I wish we could have had and didn’t. If anyone could persuade me a life could be reinvented, it was this man.

There are people that believe that trauma should always be hidden.

There are folks that think that believing in Jesus cures all your pain, or at least helps you hide it well.

There are folks who are hellbent on making their trauma known, seen, heard and picket until it’s understood and they want you to feel some version of their pain because they don’t think you’ll understand if you can’t feel it too.

And then there are those of us who have lived with so much pain for so long, it can’t be quantified or shared fully. Some of us express it in addictions, perfectionism, forcing an ideal for the words and beliefs that mean the most to us.

Others of us are okay (or made it okay) with being alone and going inward with our emotions. That ride can be chaotic, but hell, at least it’s true.

I don’t share my vulnerability with an agenda. I don’t have one because I can’t. I don’t KNOW anything. I can’t rest my mind on anything because nothing is solid or true in the ideal world regarding this for me.

I will never know anything for sure about any of this…except, it hurts. It hurts to not know what others ask of you. I can’t answer questions. I can’t share emotions. I can’t say goodbye as others will, even though I try to avoid all funerals anyway, traditional, virtual or whatever.

I do know that I have to say goodbye my own way. THAT is the only thing I know for sure.