2:20pm July 23, 2015

Everything is connected, in weird ways.

And I’ve always been good at finding those connections, instinctively, and finding connections most people don’t find, and therefore interacting with the world in a very unusual way from the moment I entered it.

And I knew I’d gotten some of this from my mother, who sometimes does similar things. But I didn’t realize I’d gotten a lot of it from my father as well. I didn’t even begin to suspect, until he was dying and began to say things that indicated he was well capable of seeing these odd connections between things himself.

But after he died, he had my mom send me a lot of his things. Shirts, rocks, a backpack, hats, beard clippings.

And I was able to see him more clearly than ever by looking at the way all these objects connected with each other, all centering on who he was.

And I was able to see that he was able to see such connections between objects himself. And I was able to see that he spoke Rock, and Tree, and Mountain, and lots of other languages I speak, and that he’d hinted at being able to speak before, but not so strongly as he did after he died.

And through all these things I feel like I can connect with what he is now, which is… something that reminds me of Gandalf, after he’d fought the Balrog and won and been taken out of the world and put back into it again in a new form. I don’t understand it, I wouldn’t have believed it before I saw it, and I’m not the only one to have noticed it. (I tend to try to confirm perceptions like this by asking specific questions of other people, because it’s too easy to fall prey to wishful thinking if you’re the only one perceiving something.)

I feel like I know him better now, and am constantly connected with him now, and his love is always there, and my love is always there for him, and mourning isn’t as bad as people made it out to be, it’s actually been quite beautiful sometimes. And yet I fear to say that, because I don’t want to sound like everyone ought to mourn the way I mourn, or everyone ought to be as happy as I am, or something like that. I don’t mean that at all. I’ve been told that people like me were originally thought to be in some kind of denial because we didn’t “mourn properly”, and then later they realized it’s actually one of many very healthy ways of handling grief and not a dysfunction at all. (And apparently it’s often connected to having strong spiritual or religious convictions that help you put death in context.)

I feel like the hardest part was before he died, weirdly enough. My stress level was through the roof, and it only started leveling off after he died.

But towards the end, he was doing exactly what we’d talked about – trying to immerse himself in love, which is the only antidote to fear when death is involved. We all tried really hard to love each other as much as we could, no matter how stressed out we were. That was the one thing we could give to each other as he was dying. And he became incredibly good at perceiving love in others, as well as giving it. Towards the end he couldn’t talk well, so we just stared at each other through Skype, and I made purry cat noises at him. He once said that anything I had left to say to him, he could see in my eyes, so I didn’t need to type it all out. I still wrote him a letter towards the end. Writing that letter was hard, it really did feel like throwing a rock in a deep lake and walking away forever, knowing I’d never be around when the rock hit the bottom.

But then after he died… he went away for a few days, but then he was still around. I could feel him still being around, outside of time somewhere, in Gandalf mode. (I always did tell him he had Gandalf eyebrows. But in temperament he was more of a Radagast, I think. More connected with living things of all kinds.) I knew that everyone sort of exists outside of time in a way that can’t be destroyed, but I never understood what that could mean for after death until I saw it.

And people ask me questions about their loved ones sometimes when I talk about these things. I don’t know anything about anyone else’s loved ones. I barely understand how it worked for my father. I just know something happened, and he’s still here, but different, and that’s kind of amazing. I don’t care if anyone else believes me or not, it’s a personal thing. It just… is what it is, and I have no particular explanations or wisdom or anything about this. I’m just relieved that I can still continue a relationship with him, still continue getting to know him, including sides of himself he didn’t show as much when he was alive, but that shine really brightly after his death, now that he has nothing more to fear. And that love and absence of fear is amazing. I hope I die half as well as he did.

And they were right, grief is a form of love – whether it feels good or awful at the time, you can’t grieve without loving.