Recently, I saw a post written by a human being with a public personality that I follow fairly closely, and it reflected on losing a parent with whom that person had a complicated relationship. In the past year or so, a couple of my friends have been in the same boat - losing a parent and...it's complicated.
When I encounter situations like this, the first thing I realize is that everybody's "complicated" is different. There are too many factors to even begin to compare situations. Knowing this, I try to keep my "advice" to a minimum, except to say that you will find a way through that works for you.
That said, I do have one piece of advice that I think is solid. So I thought maybe now was as good a time as any to share it.
My dad died 25 years ago and...it was complicated. It was about as messy as a situation like that can be, between history together, trauma, caregiving, family interventions, the overwhelming sense of grief all around, the lost opportunities for the future. To be honest with you, the morning he died, I wasn't really sure what I felt. Or perhaps I should say that I was feeling too many things all at once to be able to pin any of them down.
The funeral director gave me some precious private time with my dad's body, time that was not afforded to me in any other way, and he told me quietly that if I wanted to write a note to send with my dad, we could tuck it into his jeans pocket and nobody would ever have to know.
As a 15-year-old with a knack for writing, that sounded great.
When I sat down to write, a lot of things came pouring out of me that I wasn't really prepared for. I really wanted to give it to him. I wanted to tell him all of the things that I hated, all the brokenness I was going to take forward with me, how much he was responsible for the struggles that I was having (I had no idea how much he would be responsible for the struggles that were coming shortly thereafter). How there was a part of me that was glad he was gone because it set my future free in ways that it simply couldn't have been if he'd continued to live.
And that's what stopped me.
My future.
I wondered, as I wrote that letter, as I spewed word vomit all over the page, what my future would really be like now. And most importantly, I started to wonder if I was actually going to be angry forever. If I was going to be broken forever. If I was going to be so profoundly affected by our years together forever as I felt like I was at this moment.
And I realized I didn't want that for myself.
The letter that I ended up writing to stick in my dad's jeans pocket was a letter that I tried to write from the place of healing that I was hoping to get to. After all, I was a little-ish girl and he was my dad and the only dad I was ever going to have. I didn't want to hate him forever. I didn't want to feel weighed down by our relationship forever. I wanted more for us, and, as a person of faith, I found myself already wondering what he would be like healed - without the burden of his own trauma and relationships and experiences and brokenness. I wanted there to be a place in eternity for me to learn that about him.
So I wrote a letter of love from a place of healing that I wouldn't actually see for another 20 years, but that I was already somehow able to dream about, able to latch onto in my sanctified imagination. I imagined my life forward into what I wanted it to be, and I brought that backward into this place of tremendous grief and overwhelming ambivalence.
And you know what? That may be one of the best decisions I've ever made.
So that's my advice to anyone who is losing a parent (or a sibling or a friend or whatever) and...it's complicated. Imagine it forward to the way you want your life to be, to the patterns you're not going to continue, to the things you're going to take from it and the things you're definitely going to leave behind...and bring that imagination back into this moment and let that shape you.
There's a time and a place for anger and trauma and processing and all the messy stuff, but if you try to make it this time and place, then it will take this one forever. Instead, use forever to shape this one and put all that other stuff aside for later.
I don't think you'll regret it.
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