Emotional Default

This week is the essentially the same as any other week, except that it marks the 3rd year since my dad died. Similar to how some people treat their birthday weeks, I want to spend this one engaged in a quiet version of self-pity and loathing—engrossed in my own romanticized thinking about how one should react to or process the turning of the years marking a parent's death. It doesn't help anyone, but damn does it feel good now.

"I'm going to phone it in this week," I think to myself as I settle into my desk at work on Monday morning. "None of the other people here have to deal with this like I do." It seems to me that I'm entitled to a form of do-nothing job this week, not have to work much if at all, instead engaging in low-level pointless tasks masquerading as work so my colleagues don't suspect anything. I'll need to keep my brain lightly tasked, of course, lest my default mode network be allowed to wander into the parts of my thinking where I do have some agency in my life and change is not an insurmountable obstacle and for whatever fucking reason the walls are plastered in inspirational posters like yesterday is history tomorrow is a mystery today is a gift that's why they call it the present.

My dad's death was tragic in the sense that he went from "decently well" to dead in a matter of months and that it was not without his suffering, but it was not, ultimately, tragic. I think certain Buddhists would probably argue that no death is tragic, that saying any death is a tragedy makes a certain Western value judgement about the finality of death and implicitly regards life on a sort of "value" spectrum. Though, who is to say.

It is the Year of our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Five and my dad died in 2022. He was 56, a few months shy of a birthday, and I was almost 4 months into my 28th year. My daughter dropped a sucker on the floor today. This, to her, was a tragedy. She has a relatively brief history to draw upon. It's probably most appropriate, lexically, for me to say instead something like, "My father's death was the most impactful event in my life to date." Since then, my daughter was born, the life soup of three years has simmered, which is to say the timeline of my life continues to unfold—events continue to occur, the aggregate result of which diminishes the impact of happenings in my life on and throughout the weeks following October 30, 2022.

Healing is not simply a function of time dilution. Me forgetting doesn't mean I'm cured.

Setting aside my mixed experiences with my father's tender moments and alcohol fueled episodes of rage, it would be impossible for me to fully flesh-out the pros and cons list of "dad's dead" in a way that acknowledges the present moment while also accurately measuring future impact. For just about every "negative" aspect of my father being dead I can think of a "positive" one; or, perhaps I'm still a bit too close to see the issue clear-eyed. "Jesus Christ," you may exclaim upon reading the idea of a pros and cons list for a close family member dying. I can agree, it seems absurd—though any remotely critical assessment of death and dying practices in the United States should result in a similar conclusion.

A physician colleague of mine once broke the news to me that another colleague of ours had unexpectedly died. She said exactly that, "so-and-so is dead." The news was hard to hear, but the way she phrased it was such a breath of fresh air—real, raw, unfiltered—and so unlike my prior close experiences with death that my emotional path forward was made that much clearer.

Without such a clarity of vision in this circumstance, I'm left wondering what should be the "right" way for me to mark this annual passage of time. The proximity of the event to Samhain seems like a natural fit but I think some fundamental underpinnings of the holiday are, essentially, bullshit—so that's off the table. A weeklong decent into self-pity seems unfitting of an emotionally well-developed adult. I would like to get close to a place where I'm able to acknowledge the continuation of his life in mine, annually disavow the parts of his life that were harmful, all while tangibly getting something out of the experience like a day off work or a nice coffee. This year I'll probably just do the tangible part and start to lay the foundation for work on the intangible stuff—saving the real work for next year.

After all, I decided on Monday: this week I'm phoning it in.