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Don't grieve. Anything you loose comes around in another form.

Rumi

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Guilt.

The experts like to say that there are five stages to grief. Disbelief. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. They all like to say that it takes time, and that it may never go away. They've told me that every person grieves differently and at their own pace, but I think I could shatter their theses if they just gave me enough time. 

It's not a pyramid, or even clearly defined steps; their model is more like a cage, a room to be more precise, ill devised, cramped, underfurnished, and with blurry boundaries. One minute, you can sit in the sun, and the next you're confined in the dark. 

For four weeks, I've been tossed around that room, and now when I finally feel like I've come full circle, I can't help but be crushed by the guilt. There's no way I can feel acceptance this soon, and if I do, I must be the worst kind of person. 

But, all things considered, I went at this grief thing all backwards. I think I felt acceptance first, or maybe that's just how numb I was in the beginning, but it sure felt like I was fine. Now that I'm here, wherever this is, I feel guilty for not feeling worse. I think that guilt is part of what pushes me back into depression, but I never stay there for long, because I won't let myself, the same way I won't let myself cry. 

Either way, I feel better, and that in itself makes me feel worse. Where is it I go from here?

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No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

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Synapsis.

Scientists say that our brains work on a tenth of a second delay, that is everything we perceive as happening in the present, actually happened a tenth of a second in the past. That's how fast -- or rather, slow -- our synapsis fire. 

A tenth of a second seems huge. A sizable slice of pie is a tenth. Carve up a second, and a tenth is like a mass of gaping time, a flapping loose end, a frictionless void. But really, it's nothing. 

And it's everything. 

It takes a tenth of a second for the synapsis to fire across the endless web of neurons in my spongey head, and it takes a tenth of a second for me to remember that he's gone. 

For the tiniest fractions of the tiniest moments, I forget, and I think the silliest things. Like maybe I'll ask him, "What do you think of the flowers I picked for the casket?" "How was it you used to scramble the eggs?" "Where do we keep the hammer and nails?" And I'll consider trivial things, like that he would have enjoyed the movie I saw yesterday. But before the second tenth of that same second, I remember, with crushing airless accuracy, that he is dead. 

Today I was home alone, and I thought I heard the door to the laundry room open. The instant electrical impulses in my brain told me it was dad coming home, and I felt the smallest sense of relief without really understanding why, until that is, my brain corrected me. He's not home. I've never been scared to be alone, and I wasn't scared then, but my first thought was that I should keep a gun nearby like he used to. He left me -- or really my brother left me since he was heir to the armory -- his 9mm. It's the pistol he taught me how to shoot, but it's in the safe. 

All the thoughts seem to roll and rebound over one another in quick succession, and I still wasn't scared. 

It was only the dog. 

I felt foolish for thinking it was him and foolish for thinking of the gun. I'm a lousy shot. And I'm not even sure I can rack the slide if I had it in my hands. A few months ago, I told myself I would go to the range with him more often when the semester was over, when I got back from Italy, when it got cooler outside. I kept making excuses. He went the morning before he died, and he invited me. I declined because I wanted to sleep in. 

My brain whipped through all the neural paths easily, recalling each little detail. The smell of gun oil, the sound of him whistling, the stupid way the EMT said good morning to me at 1 AM. 

Sometimes the brain works quicker and more precisely than you want it to. 

In just a few hours, it will be three weeks since he passed, and I still feel sick and wrong, disbelieving and apathetic. Three weeks feels like a year, and I still can't breathe right. 

[whatisinvincible-blog]

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Robert Frost

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Things are always better in the morning.

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

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Blows.

The hardest thing is telling someone. 

Every few days, I run across someone who hasn't heard the news yet. Somehow, they didn't make it on the call list, or they weren't FaceBook friends with us, or maybe they don't read the paper. I don't know how, but they don't know. They don't know that our lives have been shattered, because we look the same from the outside. 

Appearances can be deceiving.

We are vastly different people than we were two weeks ago.

But they have to be told all the same, and the words are always the same -- the telling and the sorrowful phrases of sympathy and shock. It's the same words, over and over again, but they never loose meaning. We never become callous, impervious to the pain. Every time, with every word, it rips us open. The old wound gapes and the words carve away little chunks of raw flesh. 

All the air gets sucked out of the world, and then the wound is new again. He's dead all over again. 

Other people won't let me forget, and I think that's why I have such a hard time being around those who know. It's as if they expect grief of you, so you grieve for their sake. 

I don't need them to remind me, though. I'm having a hard enough time with that on my own. But I breathe in. And I breathe out. And I wake up the next morning. 

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We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. . . . [T]hat part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

John Green, Looking For Alaska

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Days and Counting.

Hemingway once said his typewriter was the only psychiatrist he would ever need, and I'm loathe to prove the man wrong. So, here it goes. 

Two weeks ago, my father died, and I'm not sure I know how to handle this.

Two weeks ago, I was infallible. My mother fell apart, unraveled in just a few jagged seconds, but I was stone. I pulled her together, ushered her around; I made the initial calls, the late night reminders of mortality and the miraculously sudden vacuum of disbelief. 

Family started pouring in, bringing food, condolences, and grief of their own. 

"The shock," they all say. "I can't believe it." Their eyebrows pull together. "I just saw him yesterday." They pat you on the back. "He was such a great man." They offer a shoulder. "I've known him forever." They offer help. "Anything. Anything at all." 

I weathered the great flood of incomprehensible sobbing and singular silences. That was easy. Learning to do all the things he did, that was harder, but a strange sort of normalcy and peace settled in slowly and painfully. 

Then, reality wormed perversely through the safe little blanket where we were wrapped in the confines of grief. Sorrow is like that; it's a universe, exclusive and remote, but eventually it begins to break up, degrade with time and hardened effort. People leave you there and peer in from the outside with reverence and pity. Still, you have to leave. 

I put my mother back together, stitch by stitch, and every now and again, grief tugs at the loose threads, pulls her apart. I'm still here, though, stoically reassembling the new patterns, knit, perl, knit, perl. 

I put her back together, and she's back in the real world, at work all day. It's good for her. It helps. But I'm at home, somewhere between university and grad school. Somewhere between sadness and repression. I stay here and do all the things I would normally do: binge watch Netflix, read, binge Amazon Prime, read, binge Hulu Plus, read, binge torrent, read. It's safe, and I don't feel it even though it's still there, niggling away, crawling below the composed surface. I don't feel it until I leave. I go outside, to see my family or to volunteer at my mom's work, and it crushes me. I put her back together, but I'm more fragile than I realized. 

But I can be around strangers. 

I like having a conversation with someone that doesn't begin, "how are you," and end, "you're going to be okay," and is not chiefly comprised of sad smiles and rheumy condolence eyes.

My friends handle it well. They glaze over the subject entirely, but I can still feel it waiting like a big gray elephant sitting at the end of the booth. 

I'm still figuring out how to put this together. I'm figuring out how to grieve, and maybe it's not something I can do on my own. But my obstreperous, obstinate independence isolates me, and, for some stupid reason, I want to do this on my own. 

Maybe this is how it gets easier. 

Maybe.