Denial

The further away I move, in time, from what happened with my father, the less it feels like reality to me. I feel like the pieces of my days that deal with my father dying are part of a dream, a nightmare. That I’ll wake up and go see him, and he’ll be laughing his ass off. “I got you guys!” Yeah. He would have thought it was funny.

I feel like it couldn’t possibly have happened. There is no way I stood at a hospital bed with my sister and cried and said goodbye to him. That memory feels fuzzy at the edges and faded. For the first day it was sharp as a broken piece of glass, digging into my heart constantly. The small amount of time has dulled it. I try to remember what happened and my brain will not let me go back there. I can grasp pieces of time, small words and pictures of the moments. I can’t think it through all at once.

I can almost pretend like it didn’t happen. I can pretend that it was a dream. That the time that I have spent since then has all been a dream, and I’m going to wake up. I’m going to wake up, and go to work, and accept the condolences for my grandma. And people will ask me how my father is doing, and I’ll tell them that he pulled through the infection and is recovering. I’m heading out there next week. I can almost pretend that might be true.

I spend lots of time away from tears. With dry eyes, getting through my day. I feel drained, it’s true. I feel like I have been scraped empty and there’s not much inside of me. I can feel that way without falling apart as long as I can pretend that it might be possible that my dad isn’t dead.

As Khalil and I drove home Thursday night, I kept saying it out loud. My dad died. My dad is dead. I kept trying to make that reality a reality. The pain felt real. The memory of him leaving us was still sharp and real. I just didn’t- don’t- know how to work that into my reality, into my life. I don’t know how to be a daughter whose father is gone. I don’t want to know how.

As long as I can pretend it might not be real, I can walk through my day. I can get out of bed. I can take a shower and get dressed. Eat and sleep. Do the things that need to be done. Get the details for an obituary. Find pictures of my dad. Tell people over and over that he died and then when ‘the services are’. I can do all of that as long as, somewhere in the back of my head, I keep believing this is all a nightmare I am going to wake up from.

It feels weird, feeling as if you are moving in a dream. It makes all of the edges a wee bit fuzzy, a little less defined. I still feel like I could wake up at any time.

I am fairly sure this is what they call denial.