You Can Grieve Almost Anything

Like the absence of a subtitle or copyediting

This series of 40 sober truths is a commitment I made to myself, so I will keep going, but it’s hard. I’d love to be more lighthearted - and do intend to get there - but the process of sharing so much of my privacy is weighing on my soul. Whether or not he’d think this storytelling was a good idea, my Dad’s words keep me going. I hear him all the time.

I’m so glad my Dad got to see me get sober and happy. He saw me working with his old newspaper contacts and colleagues. He told me he knew how hard it had all been for me, to quit drinking. As a lifetime smoker, he intimately understood the concept of addiction.

I know he’d be happy that Jeremy and I are getting married. He’d have asked for goats or something silly, I’m sure. I’m not sure we could’ve convinced him to come to the beach for the ceremony, because he loved staying home. It’s one of a million things I understand and relate to, to the core.

My Dad loved me and my sister more than anything.

Any blog about mental health must surely make room for grief, I suppose.

Sometimes when other people talk about loved ones they’ve lost, it can seem like a distant echo, or something that’s no longer real. But when I think about my Dad, he’s right here beside me, and I can feel his love all around me.

When he died, I had 18 months sober. I didn’t want to drink, I just wanted to curl up and die. It made me question death and life, and wish I had a different higher power. I want to share some thoughts I scribbled in my journal at the time.

All his knick-knacks, carefully collected over a lifetime.

All the time spent keeping tidy so that his day-to-day life was efficient and well-stocked.

Every family member reflected in the groceries, now up for grabs or in the trash.

Every book, every record, every cord, bulb and manufacturer warranty,

neatly arranged, just in case.

He’d know where to find anything, but it’s all just a mess now.

I will think of my Dad every time I see or climb a rock wall, from the daddy-daughter retreat where he hung blindfolded waiting for my instruction.

And the quartz mining trip.

And pies. And road trips.

Golden Girls.

Bacon, egg and cheese biscuits.

What’s sentimental about the silver is how he saved it all for us.

I wish I felt purpose like that.

I remember falling out of bed on purpose so he’d come tuck me in again. It must have been so annoying.

I just feel empty, like some of my memories are only mine now.

Do they even really exist at all? I miss him so much.

The air is thick and hard to breathe.

I’ve got grief all over myself.

Like sobriety, the idea of moving on without my Dad was/is too much to bear. But one day at a time is digestible. And when 24 hours feels like too many, one hour or even one minute at a time gets me through.

You know when you’re sick with a bad cold or Covid, and you’re out of work and routine for enough days to feel off track? When you do start feeling a little better, it becomes hard to tell if you’re back to “normal” or if your baseline health was always kind of shitty. Grief can be like that after a while, too.

Except, when you lose someone so close to you (like a parent) you’re never going back to “normal”. The world changes. At least for me. It changed my perspective on everything.

Still, I guess grief is a decent way to understand how someone with major depression might look to alcohol for relief. People are prescribed antidepressants acutely for grief all the time. Without a numbing agent, it is a powerful, overwhelming, all-consuming void.

Grief isn’t just about losing people. You can grieve what was, or what might have been. You can grieve the loss of a job or marriage, even the loss of an optimistic world view. In sobriety, you’re likely to grieve the life you had, and that gets tricky.

Fortunately, gratitude is a powerful source of strength.