A Year Later
A year ago this past Father’s Day, I was sitting at a large round table across from a funeral director.
My dad had been on vacation and came back to the hotel for a rest. One minute here. The next minute gone.
I sat in that chair… the one that exists in funeral homes all over the world, the one no one ever thinks they’ll sit in until they do… completely stunned. Planning a funeral for my father on Father’s Day. The surreal cruelty of the timing hadn’t even landed yet. I was just... moving through it. Helping my mom sign things. Nodding. Making decisions about who was going to pick up flower arrangements and greeting people I hadn’t seen in 20 years while my brain kept trying to catch up to what was actually happening.
I thought that was the hardest thing I would ever do.
Then, just over a week later, I walked into a different location of the same funeral home… owned by the same family… with my husband and my son.
The funeral director looked up and saw us walking through the door. Confusion crossed his face for just a moment. He had just seen us. He knew us.
“Hello. What are you doing here?” he said, surprised.
“We’re here for my nephew,” we told him.
He hugged us. He was stunned. We were stunned. And then we somehow made it through that day the way humans make it through the unsurvivable.. on autopilot. Processing what the mind simply cannot hold all at once.
It has been a year.
And I wanted to take a moment in this space that so many of you have shown up for me to say thank you.
Thank you for continuing to open my posts. For sending words of love and encouragement in the comments, in my inbox, in little notes I have read more than once on hard days. For staying. For reading. For being here even when I went quiet, even when I wasn’t sure I had anything left to say.
You held space for me without knowing you were doing it. That matters more than I can articulate.
Just wanted to share with you a few lessons I’ve learned in the last year.
1. No one prepares you for the paperwork.
The sheer, staggering, relentless amount of paperwork you have to complete when someone dies is something no one warns you about. The number of places you have to contact is soooooo overwhelming. You are grieving and simultaneously drowning in admin work. It is one of the cruelest parts of loss, and no one talks about it enough.
2. There is a you before, and a you after.
I will never be the person I was before these losses. That version of me didn’t know what she didn’t know. The person behind the screen sitting here writing this carries is different. I am not the same. I have stopped expecting to get back to who I was, and I have started learning to know who I am now.
3. Only you can decide what you do with the pain.
Grief will seek you out when you least expect it. It will sit with you at the kitchen table. It will show up unexpectedly in the middle of the grocery store or on a random Tuesday afternoon. And at some point, you will have to make a decision about what you do with it. You can let it swallow you whole. Or you can find a way to carry it alongside you and channel it into something. Neither is easy. Only you can decide which way you take each and every day you wake up.
Final thoughts…
Being born is a gift. Being given the chance to live a life, for however long, is a gift. And I want to make the most of the days I have left on this planet. I want to read books that change how I see the world. I want to move my body. I want to build something that matters. I want to connect people to stories that transform them.
In doing that I want to honor the way my dad and nephew shaped me into the person I am today.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this post. Grief doesn’t really do tidy endings. But I am here. I am grateful you are here. And I believe… with everything I have… that community, and stories, and showing up for each other matters in ways we can’t always measure.
If you’ve lost someone. If you’re in the middle of something unsurvivable. If you’re on the other side and still figuring out who you are now — I see you.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments or just click reply to send me a private message. Grief is one of the most isolating experiences there is, and yet it is also one of the most universal. You don’t have to share. But if you want to, this space is yours.
We’re in this together. With love.
— Melissa
I often call it the business of death. One year after the death of my beloved husband, it seems that there is always something new that pops up that needs attention and at least a few forms and phone calls. I now keep a copy of the death certificate with me.
Peace to you in the midst of it all.
Again my condolences on your losses.
And it shows your strength and goodness as a person that you helped your mother for it and were a pillar for her.
And yeah, the administrative part is hard. In a way, it forces you to delay your own grieving until all of that is over. I remember doing that multiple times.
But I didn’t know real grief until I lost my wife. And what you said in this post seems to agree very much with what I said in my earlier private message to you, that it hits you at unexpected times, went grocery shopping, or doing something else. It suddenly reminds you of some thing or time with them.
At least, with my mother and grandmother, the dementia had sent into the point that I knew that I had already lost them a long time ago when their bodies finally gave up. Something similar with my father too. I guess you could say that the grieving had already begun by that point because the actual person was already gone.
I wish you and your family the best through this difficult time.
But I know from your most recent posts, even though they have been a little while ago, that you were moving forward and building things to be even stronger and better. Like you said, you can’t be the same person again, but you find a way to pick up the burden and carry it with you without letting it cripple you.