Changed for The Better

There are a few things I’ve learned since my father died this spring. That sentence sounds like I’m setting the reader up for a list, and I’m not, I confess, entirely sure I have a list in me: I’m just not there yet. 

So, here is the chief thing you need to know about dealing with the death of a parent: no matter how much work you’ve done at the psychologist’s office; no matter what the circumstance, how long it took, how expected, or unexpected the death was; no matter what the quality of your relationship with that parent was; you are not prepared to live in a world that no longer contains that person. 

When it comes to our parents, we hold our grudges just as close to our hearts as we do their love and guidance. They are the people who, at one time, were our north star, our omniscient, all doing, all controlling, all fixing, gods. If we mature, at all, it is because we grow to understand that our parents are fallible – sometimes deeply flawed - human beings, and we love them all the more because they are, at the end of the day, just another human, doing their best to make it through each and every day. 

Even if their death is only the end of the opportunity for reconciliation, it is still an ending, and endings are just as formative to who we are, as beginnings.  Losing a loved one changes you in fundamental ways, and those ways are not all negative. Being reminded of our own mortality, and the impermanence of everyone we love, is a painful, but a potent, notice that life is short and precious. How we spend that blip of time is important, and holding petty grudges against others, or about how this relationship, or that career choice turned out, is truly, a waste of our one bright flash of time on this planet. 

I am perfectly aware that I am rehashing some well-known truths today, it is only that they are such utter, capitol T, truths that they bare repeating. They bare engraving into every surface of our homes as constant reminder that life is short, and we should love others, not in spite of their flaws, but because of them. We must also learn to love our cranky, annoying, selfish selves, and let that authentic person be seen and loved by those who have earned the right to do so. 

Our time, and our labor are the only precious unrenewable resources we have to give to this world: if we spend that time walking on someone else’s path, living out someone else’s choices, then we’ve truly wasted what is precious about life.

I am not writing any of this with the evangelical zeal of the converted, or even as a practitioner of self-love and acceptance. In fact, I’ve got a lot of work to do! 

The point is this: you, or anyone you love could be gone tomorrow, and you will feel a kind of whole-body sorrow, absence, and longing for even a moment more with that person. There is no point in trying to prepare yourself for this. It will come, it will rock you and your world, and it will leave you changed: it might even leave you changed for the better.