Heartsore.

Last night I grieved (a lot? Hard? how do you measure the levels of intensity?) for my dad.


I stopped by my mom's house with Eric after dropping Meghan off to pick up my winter coat. She was still up, so we stayed and chatted. Somehow we got onto the subject of Dad, and I found out some things about his sickness that I was never really aware of. I just remember the social side of the sickness, the everyday life. I knew as much about the medical side.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about myself as a child, especially as a sixth grader. I always just knew what I had felt (ie, I felt "old" because I was in middle school!) and I had assumed that I knew what was going on and that I could handle what was going on. Because there were the moments when I was frustrated. It seemed as though my parents didn't want to tell me what was going on; they always struggled with that balance of how much I should know and how to help me lead a normal life.

But having worked with middle schoolers in the last few weeks, I've realized how young they are, but also how intuitive they can be. They still have so much innocence (even the ones from refugee camps) but they're embracing life head-on, too. I see myself in them.

Anyhow, the realization set in on the way home from Holland of how unfair it was to lose my dad at age 45 (and then for him to die slowly until he was 51) to a disease that there are so many unanswered questions about.

(Why didn't the doctors do something about the mark on his rib from day one? How did he get cancer? How long had he been living with it? What if he had never gone in for that routine physical?)

Eric and I sat in a parking lot just off the freeway while I cried. I hadn't felt angry about any of this in a long time, but for a while I was. Grief is a strange thing. It never has a smooth 5 step process. Sometimes it reverses itself. Sometimes it takes years to move forward. My grief is stamped with my own individuality, however odd that sounds.


It's time for me to go.


Betsy