I still cry, though not as much. Usually it happens when I’m alone, with nothing to distract me; in the shower, in the car, at the top of the mountain that I hike up every week, with the expansive view of the ocean. My dad loved the ocean, and that view would have blown his mind. I’ve also noticed that every television show, commercial and movie seem to be about dead or dying fathers. I never noticed it before, but my husband, who lost his father when he was seventeen, assures me that I’m not imaging things. He’s been noticing it for twenty years.
When I can be objective about things, which is happening more and more often, I can say that the grief, I expected. The sadness I expected, too. Even his death, though sudden, was not a total surprise. You can’t abuse your body the way my father did and expect to live to be an old man. In the back of my mind, I always kind of knew that it would go down the way it did. But there is one thing that’s caught me off guard in all of this, and that is the way that other people have reacted to the news. My close friends, of course, have rallied around me – calling and e-mailing to check in, to see how I’m doing, offering to help with my kids or with whatever. They’ve been incredible, and I’m so lucky to have them. But it’s the people on the periphery of my life who’ve surprised me the most. I’ve gotten cards, emails, Facebook messages, even comments on this website, from people I barely know, or from people I used to know but haven’t spoken to in years, who just wanted to reach out and tell me their memories of my father, or, to let me know that I’m not alone. I have to say, I truly had no idea that so many people I know, who are my age or close to it, have lost their parents already. It’s as if I’ve been let into a club that I had no idea existed, and one that I would never choose to join. But now that I’m here, the advice and the empathy and the totally unexpected “just thinking about you’s” have been more touching, and have meant more to me, than almost anything else in my life.
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Risa Green, author of Tales from the Mommy Track on MommyTracked.com, lives in Los Angeles. In the last four years, she has produced two children, called Harper and Davis, and two novels, called Notes from the Underbelly and Tales from the Crib. Her third novel will be published next year.
