A REKD Girl

I’m not sure when it started, but as far back as I can remember writing has been my safe haven. I’d wake at all hours of the night and crouch beneath the lamp on my nightstand to scribble down poems or short stories – probably causing my parents to wonder what the hell I was up to when they saw light peeking out from my bedroom doorway. Aside from being something I enjoyed, it was a simple comfort that I could turn to when my heart would wilt in disappointment, or when my dizzy thoughts needed a safe page to land on, so that I could make sense of them.

In May of 2014, my dad was diagnosed with colon cancer. Here was my strong, amazing father suddenly at the mercy of a debilitating disease. The next year that followed was an awful, unpredictable journey – as alarming ailments and complications further challenged his diagnosis, and stripped more of life’s freedoms and joys from him. As a child, you expect to lose your parents – eventually – but you put this idea out to the far-reaching future. A future when they’re old and gray and have watched so many of life’s beautiful milestones unfold in your life. That’s what I thought, until May 2015 when I lost my wonderful father. He was just 64 – I was 30.

The immediate weeks and months are numbing, and confusing. You’re pulled under by a weight of new and extreme feelings, trying to navigate through a consuming sense of grief. You’re desperate to find some grounding and feel only somewhat normal, if possible. For me, that meant channeling all the things I couldn’t say or understand through a keyboard or pen.

I wrote veraciously, privately, and searched for others – because despite how well intended, no one could relate or understand how I felt not knowing this pain themselves. Grief is isolating that way. So I became ravenous with articles and books about other people’s stories, and yet nothing tamed my hunger. Even in recounting their own experiences, it felt like people were holding back and dressing up grief. It was all too nice, too tame, and while sometimes comforting, not very realistic. Nowhere did I find a book that would say “today I felt like screaming so loud that my lungs might collapse” or just simply acknowledge the only sure thing we can agree on: “this is hell.” I sure feel like this very often, as I guess others in similar situations do too.

Death has long been an uncomfortable topic – something taboo we speak of in quiet voices and soft words. But really, while there will still be moments of joy and beauty in its wake, death is awful. It’s raw and painful and brings out the realest emotions in people, especially the ugly ones.

I’ve found myself at a cross roads that I’m still staring down – at the crux of rectifying who I was before, and who I am responsible, or more so able, to become now. So I decided to create a place that could talk openly about this experience – to get deeply honest about what happens instead of glossing over death with commercially-packaged phrases like “everything happens for a reason.” To talk plainly and say the things that no one else would. I’m no expert of course, I’m just someone who has dove into the depths of grief and at times still find myself treading water.

And worse yet, at my young age – I know far too many people intimate with unexpected loss, particularly with one of their parents. So I’ve gathered all of those private writings, whether journal entries, poems, blunt thoughts or unforgiving rants to the universe, and have decided to make them public – in the hope that maybe, in some way, I can help others. And I’ll share them here, maybe in real-time, or perhaps post things I’ve written before that still have a message worth expressing.

Maybe this isn’t the best place to start a blog – in the wake of losing my dad. And maybe it’s the best, since I’m forced to go forward into a totally new and foreign way of life. But his abrupt and heavy absence is what defines my life most right now – so it’s only natural for it to guide my hand.

Pivotal moments in one’s life are usually cause for celebration, evaluation or both – I suspect will do both here. It won’t all be gloom, because truthfully there is also light, understanding and even gratitude that comes with grief. And we’ll explore life in all of its many forms – whether happy or sad.

Dad always said that “life was for the living,” and – well, I’m still here. So I have an obligation to if not myself, to him, to make something of it. To find laughter and joy and moments of complete unbridled madness. Here goes nothing.