Grief is Tidal

My dad died a little over two months ago. This is my first time losing someone close to me.

For a few weeks after he died, there was a persistent background process consuming 10-30% of my brain's compute. My body felt heavy and it took intentionality to get up and move. Most of the day I felt like I was on the verge of crying, but never did. At work, I had the recurring thought, "none of this shit actually matters."

I told a friend, "I feel like I'm 20% depressed." I've been depressed before and those were the best words I had.

My friend said, "I understand why you might call it that, but what you're describing to me just sounds like grief." That was the first time the abstract concept of "grief" became real to me. Like, "oooooh this is what you all have been talking about."

My psych said, "Grief is tidal." It comes and goes. There are cycles of high grief, low grief, and high grief again. There were days I thought, "I'm better now," then got hit by a wave I didn't see coming, and was back underwater. Recovery is non-linear, and that's normal.

I've found comfort from my Jewish friends whose tradition has guidance for mourning during the first seven days, the first month, and the first year. For thousands of years humans have known, "you'll need people around you, you'll operate at diminished capacity, you'll find it hard to express joy – and you'll get better with time."

My greatest source of healing has been figuring out how to tell the story of his death. For me, that's been a lot of writing and verbal processing. Stories are how we try to constrain the chaos. What's the two-sentence version vs. the ten-minute version? When someone at work asks "How are you doing," how do I answer honestly without dropping an anvil on them?

Every time a friend reached out or offered to chat, I tried to gratefully accept their invitation and ramble without guilt or shame. Every iteration reduced the entropy a little bit.

Thank you – so much – to all of you who have reached out, showed up, and listened.