It's been two weeks since my dad died, and I don't really know what to do with myself.
I wish I had a better way to explain it, something more eloquent or insightful, but that's the truth of it. I wake up in the morning, make my coffee and sit down at my computer, just as I've done on countless mornings before. The manuscripts are there, the characters are waiting, and there are stories I was genuinely excited about telling only a few weeks ago. But I look at them now and feel absolutely nothing.
I haven't written any fiction. I haven't had an idea that made me want to open a document, or a conversation between characters that started playing out in my head while I was doing something else. I haven't even felt particularly guilty about not writing, which is unusual for me. Mostly, I just feel empty.
And everything feels so terribly grey.
It's difficult to explain that feeling to someone who hasn't experienced it, although I suspect most of us eventually do. The world hasn't actually changed in any obvious way. The trees are still beautiful, the sun still comes through the windows, and there are still things happening around me that I know I would normally enjoy. But I can't seem to feel any of it in quite the same way.
It's as though someone has taken all the colour out of a photograph, leaving everything exactly where it belongs but somehow making it unrecognizable.
I've been trying to get interested in things. I've been trying to find something that makes me feel excited, or curious, or even just pleasantly distracted for a little while. I sit down to do something I usually love, and within minutes I find myself wondering why I'm bothering. Not because I think those things are pointless, but because I can't seem to reach the part of myself that used to care about them.
And I miss that part of myself.
I miss waking up with ideas. I miss being excited about the day ahead. I miss feeling like there was something waiting for me that I couldn't wait to get started on. I miss being able to spend an afternoon completely absorbed in something without the knowledge that my dad is gone finding its way back into my thoughts.
Because that's what keeps happening.
I'll be doing something entirely ordinary, something that has absolutely nothing to do with him, and suddenly I'll remember.
My dad is dead.
It's such a small sentence for something so enormous.
Sometimes I think about the fact that I'll never speak to him again, and I can't quite make myself understand what that means. I know what death is. I know he's gone. I know there isn't going to be another conversation or another opportunity to say something differently. But knowing something and being able to comprehend it are apparently two very different things.
And I think that's part of what makes this so difficult.
My relationship with my dad wasn't simple. There were things between us that were painful, things I wished had been different and conversations that never happened. I don't want to pretend otherwise now that he's gone, because doing so would mean pretending that parts of our life didn't happen.
But none of that changes the fact that he was my dad.
He was here for my entire life. There has never been a version of the world I knew that didn't have him somewhere in it, even when we weren't speaking, even when things were difficult, even when the distance between us felt impossible to cross.
And now there is.
I think that's the part I'm struggling to get my head around. The permanence of it. The fact that something can be unfinished and still be over.
There are so many things I wish had been different, and now there is no possibility of any of them changing. Whatever our relationship was, whatever it might have become, whatever I hoped for or regretted, it has all been left exactly where it was when he died.
I don't know how to make peace with that yet.
And I don't particularly want to pretend that I do.
The strangest thing is that life keeps going. There are groceries to buy (and people who look at you funny when you start bawling while looking at peanuts), emails to answer and appointments to attend. People are making plans for Christmas, talking about their weekends and complaining about perfectly ordinary things. I understand that. I don't expect the world to stop because my dad died.
But sometimes I want to ask it how it can possibly keep going as though nothing has happened.
How can the sun come up again? How come more people aren’t crying in the grocery store? How can I stand in my kitchen making coffee when someone who has existed for every single day of my life suddenly doesn't exist anymore?
And then I feel ridiculous for thinking those things, because of course the world keeps going. It always has. It will keep going when I'm gone too.
I just didn't realize how lonely that could feel.
Writing has always been one of the ways I've made sense of things. I write when I'm happy, when I'm angry, when I'm confused and when I have something I desperately want to understand. I've spent so much of my life putting words together that I think I've come to rely on them to help me figure out who I am and what I'm feeling.
But right now, I can't seem to write anything that requires me to imagine a life outside my own.
I can't find the energy to care about what happens next in a fictional world, even one I've created and loved. I can't make myself interested in conversations between characters or the complicated little problems I've invented for them. A few weeks ago, those things occupied so much of my mind. Now I open the manuscripts and wonder how I ever had the energy to care so much about something that wasn't real.
I know that sounds awful.
I know those stories still matter to me, somewhere underneath all of this. I haven't stopped loving them. I just can't reach that feeling at the moment.
The only thing I can write is poetry.
I've written quite a lot of it since my dad died, and I think that's because poetry doesn't ask me to go anywhere else. It doesn't require me to invent something, or inhabit another person's life, or figure out how to move a story forward. I can sit down with whatever is hurting and try to give it words, even when I don't understand it myself.
Some of the poems are about memories. Some are about regret, or anger, or the strange experience of missing someone whose presence in your life was complicated. Some are about things I wish I could say to him, and others are about the fact that I'll never get to say anything to him again.
I've been sharing them here, if you'd like to read them.
I don't know whether writing them is helping me heal. I'm not even sure I like that word very much right now. It makes grief sound like something with a predictable beginning, middle and end, as though eventually I'll arrive at a place where everything is neatly resolved and I can look back on this as something I've successfully worked through.
I don't think that's how this is going to work.
I think I'm going to miss my dad for the rest of my life, even though there were times when I was angry with him, even though there were things I couldn't forgive and even though our relationship wasn't what I wanted it to be.
I think I'm going to miss the possibility of things being different just as much as I miss the things that actually were.
And I think there are going to be days when I'm perfectly fine, followed by days when something completely ordinary makes me feel as though I've been knocked over.
Maybe one day I'll understand how all of those feelings fit together. Right now, I'm just trying to let them exist without demanding that they make sense.
It's been two weeks, and I know that isn't very long. I know nobody expects me to have everything figured out, and I know there isn't some imaginary deadline by which I'm supposed to be interested in writing novels again.
But I miss myself.
I miss the woman who was excited about her stories, who could spend hours researching something obscure because she wanted to understand a character better, who had more ideas than she knew what to do with and who genuinely looked forward to sitting down at her computer.
I miss feeling like the future was full of things I wanted to do.
And I think, perhaps, that's one of the things grief takes from you for a while. Not just the person you've lost, but your familiar relationship with the world. You still recognize everything around you, but you don't quite recognize yourself moving through it.
I don't know when that will change.
I hope I'll wake up one morning and find myself thinking about Merritt and Beau again, or feeling excited about Even the Fire Loves You Until You Are Ash, or suddenly realizing that an idea has been quietly forming in the back of my mind. I hope I'll feel that familiar impatience to get something onto the page, and that writing will become something I look forward to again rather than something I remember loving.
But I'm not there yet.
For now, there are no new stories. There are no exciting announcements about my books, no progress updates and no clever observations about the ridiculous things authors do to themselves.
There are just the poems, the memories and the grief.
And this strange, awful feeling that someone has taken a little of the light out of the universe.
I know the world is still beautiful.
I just wish I could feel it.
Peace, love, and inspiration,
Britt 💚
