It’s been six months since my father passed away suddenly while on a cruise with my Mom and brother.
I’d like to say that things have gotten easier since then, that the pain isn’t still crippling at times, that I’ve come to terms with the fact that I won’t get to share life with him anymore—but that would be a lie.
I’d like to say that I’ve made peace with the pain, but I’m not sure you ever really do that.
What’s so unbelievable at times is the ways in which grief waves hit you.
Sadness often springs its cruel surprise party, jumping out of bushes or from behind grocery store aisles or from inside the hall closet. The simple, ordinary, sometimes completely unrelated stuff that derails and devastates you is staggering; smells, sounds, food, sitcoms, songs, breezes, temperature.
Lately, one of the things that’s been my constant companion in the Grief Valley, is the idea of thinness; of the stark, brutal, incomprehensibly small space between living and leaving.
My father died in his sleep on the ship, following a birthday dinner filled with food and laughter, and with the usual excitement and promise of the first day at sea.
As far as any of us can tell he experienced no pain, no trauma, no anguish.
He simply went to sleep and stayed asleep.
As he closed his eyes, it probably never occurred to him that these were his last hours here. No soul-searching, no fond looking back, no final words, no dramatic speeches.
I want to feel relief, but what I really feel is cheated.
I’ll never forget one of the first things my mother said when I spoke to her on the phone that day: “He had a beautiful death.”
It was, in its gentleness and swiftness, indeed beautiful, but here a half a year removed, it’s that same silent suddenness that’s really messing with me.
I picture his face in that moment lying there in bed; as he quietly passed from this life into what is beyond it; no fanfare or drama or bombast. He just breathed—and then he didn’t.
His heart was beating and then it ceased to.
And in that most infinitesimal of spaces, my father’s 70-year life was over, and so many others were irrevocably, completely altered.
In the width of one breath, everything changed for me.
I’ve heard and spoken all the words about how quickly life moves and about how fragile it is, and those words have never been truer than they have these past six months.
However, what’s both infuriating and frightening (and yet somehow beautifully sweet), is just how thin it all is.
And honestly, I’m not sure what to do with all of this here as I type; other than feel like I’m reading aloud some saccharine-soaked greeting card platitudes; about loving the people around you while they’re here and about living your life to the fullest and about not sweating the small stuff, but that’s horribly underselling the gravity of it all.
Besides, there are some lessons that can only really be learned when looking back, and sadly the Grief Valley is something you simply can’t walk through until you’re in it.
My faith tells me that on a September night in a cruise ship bed, in that thinnest of expanses, my father went from conscious to much-more-than conscious; that without ever waking-up, he suddenly received the answers to the questions that every one on this side of the thinness wonders about.
And yet some days I confess, as I ponder all of it, that my faith too, becomes the thinness. It sometimes stretches to a paper-width place, as hope and grief pull from opposite ends and where I strain to look for the light breaking through.
And it’s in that place, where somehow God is closest.
One breath here, the next breath hereafter.
That, is life and death—the great, glorious thinness.
