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There are nights that I dream about the funeral, about how bitter cold and wet it was, from the rain. I replay it all over again, about how unwilling I was to leave. About how unable I was to accept that he was already gone, and just his body remained. But I refused, absolutely refused, to think of him in the ground. As cold as it was, I just couldn't imagine him there.
There are days that I wake up from those dreams, and I just cry. I never knew I was capable of so many tears! And I will do my best to go about my day, I will do my best to try to shrug the looming fears and anxieties, the guilt, the painful void inside of me...
...but I just never can quite get it right.
Those are the days that people ask, in a seeming constant barrage, if I am okay. And I say yes, because I don't know how to answer truthfully. How do I feel? Hurt? Lost? No. It's something just beyond our grasp, something we are not capable of labeling with a word. The closest I could relate to it is...empty.
And after I overcome the barrage of innocent questions, I find myself in the arms of someone who does care, who does try to understand what I feel, but will never feel what I feel. And he asks why I isolate myself, why I can't just talk to him about it, and feel better.
Those days, I don't think I ever will get better. I am sick of everyone saying that it will get better. Yes, I am aware that intense emotional feelings fade, that time marches on, that moments become memories, distancing themselves from the current reality. But am I not allowed to feel, just for a little while, that this is the end of the world? Just a while, to help grieve?
Is that not an option I am entitled to?
The hardest days, I am bitter. I am angry, and hurt, and I am depressed. I do not feel that my life will function anywhere close to normal ever again. I shut doors to the outside world and expose my loved ones to the wall around my feelings. It is not to keep them out, per say. It is to keep me from hurting their feelings in my frustration. It is to keep from feeling worse.
I will never forgive myself for not being there to say goodbye to my father. When he needed his children the most, I was 1,700 miles away. I could have been there. I could have done so many things different. But I did not. And the reality of the situation plays havoc on my mind. I am guilty. I am angry at myself for all of the things I could have done differently.
But I did not do them differently.
And on the hardest days, I am forced to face reality. And I am not ready.
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