Tough Cookie

A few days after dad died, my friend sent me this quote: You never know how strong you are, until being strong is the only option you have.

I think about that a lot – how strength has given me balance when nothing else can. My mom, brother and I have all held our composure during moments I thought would leave us broken beneath their weight. It was like that again last week, when the first anniversary of dad’s passing eclipsed us on an otherwise average Thursday.

Like most things this year, the anticipation was worse than the actual event. Holidays, milestones – we’d see them coming and brace for the riptide of emotions that would pull us under. But they wouldn’t. Those moments would come and though our hearts were heavy, we’d laugh, and smile and remember. It was always the preceding days that were hell. That’s how last week was anyway, when I felt numb and detached on Tuesday and Wednesday and cried into my pillow.

But when Thursday came, and we piled into my brother’s Jeep – there weren’t any tears. And they didn’t follow us as we drove north, spending a weekend away sitting lakeside on a beautiful, but chilly beach. Somehow, strength ushered us forward.

That’s not to say it’s always that way. It took me so long to utter the words “dead” and “died” when speaking of dad, versus the softer “passing” and “gone” that I thought would lessen the pain. And there’s so many times I don’t want to be strong – even now with a year that’s passed. But it feels almost uncomfortable to fall apart now.

It’s not malicious, but as time passes – people forget. Or they may expect you to have evolved beyond the confines of your grief. They see you smile and think everything is fine. It’s made me self-conscious in an unexpected way. I stay quiet, because the truth is a lot of what I’m feeling is so ugly that I’m afraid being honest about these feelings, even to just to say them out loud, will break my heart open and the pain will flood right in.

When I am around family, I don’t want to upset them. Around friends and coworkers, I didn’t want to seem needy. And around strangers, I didn’t want to be inappropriate. So I smile, crack jokes and laugh when something is hilarious, as I always have.

It’s strange territory for everyone. Friends and family don’t know what they should ask, if anything at all. They don’t want to upset me, but don’t want to be insensitive either. And most times, I don’t know what to say. My relationship with my grief is constantly changing and, truthfully, it takes some rediscovering for how to be around loved ones, and I’m sure they with me.

But beneath all of the insecurity and fear, there’s strength – even when it’s faint. There’s a fire that burns hotter as things get harder. That’s human nature, after all – to rise when you’re trembling.

I think of my dad in those hopeless moments, and how he’d tease me whenever I was brazen – typically when I was giving a guy a hard time, or being aggressive at work. “You’re hard, Toots,” he’d say, dragging out the word “hard” in an almost Southern drawl. I know he’d say it to knock some sense to me, but I’m pretty sure there was a sense of pride behind it, that he raised a tough cookie.

But dad was hard too, and I’ll never stop being a tough cookie, just for him.