Summer 2016 Post-Amble: Love, Grief, and the Election
3 months, 20 states, 13 National Parks Service sites, and 43 blog posts later, I returned to Philadelphia, PA in late August to finish up my last full semester of grad school. I was reluctant to write a final parks post because I couldn’t get a handle on how unexpectedly anxious and sad I felt about saying goodbye to the Petrified Forest. I thought it would be easier to leave there than it had been to leave The Smokies; I hadn’t been at Petrified Forest quite as long, after all, but as I drove away from the park mid-August I felt like I was going through a really, really rough breakup. I’m not done here! my heart cried out. My chest was tight, my heart was pounding, and I found myself with an intense case of site specific FOMO.
As I boarded the plane in Phoenix to meet my family in North Carolina for the last few days of our annual family vacation, I was still unsure if I had made the right decision in leaving my little casita at the park to fly to the outer banks just to take my nieces and nephews out for ice cream, drink wine with my siblings, and sit on the couch and watch the Olympics with my Dad.
I’ve never been a big fan of goodbyes and to write about leaving the park would have been to admit that it was over. So I held off. A week passed, then a month, and then I was faced with circumstances that fundamentally changed my understanding of goodbyes.
I didn’t know it back in August but the memory of curling up on a couch with my Dad to watch the Olympics would be one of the last new memories I would ever have of him. My father died, unexpectedly, on September 29th of this year; 1 month after I last saw him, 3 states away, with 0 words of goodbye. He died the day after my brother’s birthday and 7 days shy of mine.
I have entered a new decade of my life with heart that is so full of grief, which is, from what I can tell, nothing more or less than the bastard child of love and loss, with a shattered heart. I miss my Dad. I need him. He is a part of me. Apart from me. A part missing. Apart, missing.
The last post of the summer was meant to be about how certain places can hold our hearts, no matter where we are. The place where my heart is, where my Dad was, is in Milford, Connecticut, where I was born, raised, and where my family has set down roots. I returned home after my father’s death but I am still a full time grad student and am now back in Philadelphia, 3 1/2 hours away from my home, my siblings, and my sheepdog, Brody. I am still working, walking, talking, and breathing though I don’t know how. I am pressing my palms against the glass wall that separates me from the world as I once knew it. How is it possible that I am the resident of a city where no one knew him? I put on earrings he gave me just to have something of him close to me.
Before going to rehearsal, work, or class I prepare myself by stitching up the gaping wound in my heart as tightly as I can to protect it from the shrapnel of other people’s casually bad days, easily made jokes, and offhand mentions of calling their dad back later that day when they’re not so busy. We are selling my childhood home, Brody is scratching at my father’s bedroom door, I have to decide whether or not to buy a funeral plot next to the rest of my family, and I am dissolving into tremors in an elevator when I see a missed call from my Dad’s secretary at his office that reads “Voicemail: Dad.” I am minute by minute quelling the irrational, stupid, heartbreaking hope that this loss is just a nightmare, that my Dad will walk me down the aisle someday, hold my child- his grandchild- in his arms, and open the five Christmas gifts I’ve already bought for him this year. By the time I get home at night every single stitch, so painstakingly sewn just hours before, has been ripped out of me and I am raw and bloody once again.
How can I possibly express the depth of sorrow that has wrapped itself around my everything? How can I bear this magnitude of pain? I am still a novice in grief. I don’t have any better advice than that of the novelists, playwrights, and poets who have come before me. I think back on who I was 3 months, 20 states, 13 National Parks Service sites, and 43 blog posts ago through a long, dark tunnel with a painful throb of jealousy. I would give up those three months in a heartbeat for just 3 seconds in my Dad’s arms.
Our love for each other is the root of my pain and somehow, I have to believe, love is what will heal it. Someday, I hope, the offers to help, the cards, the flowers, the food, and the check ins will form such a huge pile of love that I’ll be able to climb up it and drop down on the other side of the glass wall that I am pressing up against right now but that day is not today. I’m grateful to those who had already scaled this wall and to my family who is scaling it with me now. And for those who have yet to run up against it, I hope it is a long time before you do but eventually you will and I am so, so sorry for that. I wish I could leave you with something kinder, something gentler, but that is not the way of it.
And then Trump won the election and suddenly I am surrounded by grief, surrounded by people who’s world has dropped out from under them, too, and I am so, so sorry for it. As this is the second time in six weeks that my world has shattered, I am overwhelmed in the truest sense of the word. My body is not big enough to hold the events of this Fall, or rather, these falls. It has been 36 hours since the election results came in and I cannot yet separate personal from civic pain. I am frozen in the moment when you touch your hand to a hot stove and pull back, looking at your hand, which is clearly seared but not yet searing. I am too overwhelmed by loss to feel the pain just yet. It is a cruel, unasked for, unwanted gift to return to a state of numbness for a day, two days, however long it takes to sink in that there are swastikas drawn in South Philly, KKK in West Philly, Trump will likely repeal the Presidential edicts that granted hundreds of thousands of miles of land to the National Parks Service, sell the rest of it, and my father still isn’t coming back. I feel it building up in me- grief, mania, fear, and rage- and a deep determination, from a voice at the very back of my mind, to use my feelings rather than be used by them.
I have a purpose now, as we all do, to do what is good and right in this world with all of our might. So yes, fight for this country with all of your heart, and also call someone you love, maybe even someone hard to love, because love piles up and maybe, someday, we’ll have built a big enough pile of it that the walls that separate us will come crashing down.
