The Hole Where Grief Lives

It’s always there and it always will be. But you learn to throw a tarp over it, or a manhole cover.

And then some little thing, something you haven’t thought about in years, will pop out of it and poke you, or swat at you, or coil around you. Not like a monster or a snake: more like a kitten in a bag, or a hug from a ghost that feels real, both close and far away, both warm and cold.

It happens when Angelic Daughter does something she used to do when she was a toddler. She had a habit of collecting things of the same type, like magazines, or Mom’s little frog figurines that were scattered around my parent’s house–and bringing them to her Grandfather, my Dad.

Now she brings things to me.

“Thank you, but Grampa can’t take any more, sweetheart!” he’d say, when his lap was overflowing with magazines she’d collected.

“Just throw it away, sweetheart, but thanks for checking with me,” I say, remembering not to snap at her (“why are you bringing that to me?”) but instead recalling that I made a rule that she should check with me before she tosses anything, after she’d thrown away one too many important pieces of mail, or catalogues I hadn’t had the chance to flip through, or leftovers I was looking forward to warming up for lunch.

“Remember, don’t touch other people’s stuff!” Her natural tendency to tidy up has often had me searching for the book I’m in the middle of, or trying to find my water bottle, which she has taken to fill for me and placed discreetly outside my bedroom door, or my headphones, which she has tucked away in my desk drawer.

But the bringing things–the reusable grocery bags she unloaded for me, that are supposed to go back into the car. The mail, every day but Sunday (which doesn’t keep her from looking for it, despite reminders that there won’t be any). Cups of coffee and tea. Thank you notes she writes immediately after the gift giver has departed, needing an address and a stamp.

And the memory of her as a toddler, in her little yellow flowered dress for Easter, bringing things to Grandpa, when Mike and I were both so charmed by her intensity and diligence, overcomes my senses for a moment. And there’s that kitten swatting me with its little paw, or the ghostly hug, and the surge of grief that says he should be here to see this, he would love this, he’d remember too, I wish he could see her now.

It happens when she sings, too. About 15 years later than her neurotypical peers, she seems to be going through a period of teenage-like fandom, having become enthralled by a new young pop star, a guy with a retro guitar sound and an early Elvis wiggle. She plays his songs on repeat, and sings along, loud and clear, with emphatic diction and impressive high notes, and its like a laser, coming out the The Hole Where Grief Lives. Mike should be here to hear this. He would love this.

And then in the middle of the workday, after she’s made her lunch, and having been up half the night in her disrupted daylight savings time sleep pattern, back in bed to start a long afternoon nap, she calls me, drowsy and muffled and sniffling.

“Are you having a nice rest, sweetheart?”

“I miss Dad. I was crying.”

And I tell her it’s OK, that we’ll always have those times when we need to have a good cry about Dad, but we’ll wipe our faces and blow our noses and remember a happy time, and then go back to sleep.

And once she is asleep again, the Hole Where Grief Lives opens wide, and the tears come, and I think about how unfair it is, how she shouldn’t have to be so sad, and how helpless I feel.

Knowing your child is hurting and there’s nothing you can do or say to make it better–that’s when it breaks you. That’s when I’m perversely grateful she’s asleep, and she can’t hear me making those ah-heh, ah-heh crying noises as I write this through my tears. And the Hole is open wide and I feel engulfed in it and the only thing that will shrink it back down enough to fit back into that place in your chest is breathing, just keep breathing, and throw the tarp back over it.

When she tells me she’s feeling sad about her Dad, I tell her to put her sadness in a beautifully decorated box inside her heart, and to open it up and go ahead and feel sad when she needs to, but then to remember the happy times, and close the box back up, and keep it safe inside her where she can carry it around with her.

“Dad wants me to have friends and stuff to do, and to just enJOY,” she repeats, with so much emphasis on “enjoy” that it perfectly expresses how absurd it is to try to just enJOY, how neither of us will ever really, fully enJOY again, because there will always be the Hole: the absence where Mike should be, with all his infuriatingly reckless, silly fun, his goofiness, and his unexpected moments of wisdom, where he shared something from his enormous store of reading that resonates or reveals, or reduces my anxiety to ridiculousness and laughter.

I miss him when I read.

I miss him when I listen to classical music. For one whose only music education came from listening to what had been two, and are now down to just one, classical music radio stations in Chicago, he had an appreciation for music that was both joyful and profound, both subtle and giddy with discovery and amazement.

But I miss him most when I hear her crying, or when she does something so typically, inherently thoughtful and kind, or when she sings with such heart and feeling, and I can’t be him, I can’t give her the same kind of goofy appreciation that he would give, and all I can do is tell her, oh, sweetheart, that’s great, Dad would have loved that.

Dad still does, from wherever he is, sweetheart.

You can feel it when you cry.

Drying my tears and putting the lid back on the hole because she’s getting up now, I remain,

your lonely, aging, sore-from-Sisyphean-resistance-workouts widow, who can never fill the hole,

Ridiculouswoman