4:30pm November 18, 2014

mourning is weird

I got some good news and some bad news
I don’t know where to start
You’re gonna love the good news
The bad news’ll break your heart

-Wayne Parker

Anyway that’s what I feel like about my dad’s death. I’ve been trying to puzzle out why I don’t feel like I’m grieving in any way anyone has ever told me about. I haven’t cried since the moment I got the news that he was dead. I haven’t felt depressed, in either the clinical or the colloquial sense.

But I figured out one thing that is absolute: I feel absolutely driven – to the point I’m almost crying just thinking about it – to commemorate my father in any way I can. I want to dress like him. I want to put up a small ancestor shrine to him and my great-grandma in my bedroom. I want to finish my novel – whether during NaNoWriMo or afterwards – because it meant so much to him that we were both writing novels at the same time.

These are concrete things.

These are things that have to do with remembering Ron. And they feel like things that ground me to reality in a really intense way.

I had thought that somehow, because I wasn’t completely broken up over this, then I wasn’t mourning properly. I thought if my tears stayed inside, and didn’t come out, then something must be wrong with me. I know that the feelings I write about in my poetry are real, and the poetry is another way that I have been trying to commemorate my father’s existence.

It’s just like the form my mourning takes isn’t as much “He’s gone, and I’m really broken up about that.” That’s certainly a part of it. It feels like several times an hour, at least, I think of something I want to tell him, or do with him, and then I realize it will never happen, ever. I don’t usually cry, but it is upsetting. Like just now I was trying to work out how to plan something, and I thought of whether I should involve Anna or Ron – and then i realized I can’t involve Ron in anything ever again.

But the real thing, the thing that seems to be at the core of my mourning at the moment, is this intense driven urge to make sure the world remembers Ron Baggs. That’s what I’ve been feeling every second of every day. Just that I wasn’t sure if it counted as a feeling, or as mourning, or as anything, really, that was important.