The blue hour of morning

On memory and grief and living in the land of unknowns

The month of August is ripe with grief. Even if my mind wanders, my body remembers. It remembers and it stops me from sleeping. It’s 4am and I’m still awake and my body has also just remembered that I need to eat—-so I eat pasta over the kitchen sink, the dinner I made for myself earlier that night but couldn’t eat, the dinner I made myself because it reminds me of my Dad. At 4 am I am twirling cold pasta with my fork alone as the night sky slowly unfolds into the deep dusty blue of morning. At 4 am I whisper to myself, “this is fine, grief makes you do strange things”.

When summer stretches into August, each day is the count down to the anniversary of my dad’s death. There’s other grief mixed in there now—- the anniversary of our last pregnancy loss (our 6th), the anniversary of when we first got pregnant with Birdie (and how painful it is to know that a little over 4 months later we would lose her). The summer heat will always feel heavy with the reconciling of the years and how they pass. How different it all feels and how time makes no sense. How much I wish I could transport back to those versions of myself before I knew so much death and loss. How impossible it all is, this wrestling with grief.

My dad has been dead for 16 years today—-which makes me feel physically ill if I think too much about it. That time is so fuzzy and without any documentation. I didn’t have a phone that took photos, or if it did, they were grainy, pixelated postage stamp sized images, trapped forever inside a flip phone which is no doubt in some technology landfilll right now.

I wasn’t writing elaborate instagram captions or Facebook posts or substacks like this one.  What I remember is only in my mind, memories in dreamlike bursts. I often wonder if I’m even remembering correctly. How many memories are suspended in other devices, other universes, waiting for our brains to remember? What is a memory and what is a story we have told ourselves and what is real and what is not? I have to trust that my body knows what I can’t fully remember, which is maybe why I spend so many nights awake lately.

When August 1st rolls around, I think about the last 9 days we had with my dad. The blazing summer heat and the smell of sizzling asphalt. How one miraculous day my mom and I were able to get him into a wheelchair and sat him outside under the Linden tree in the backyard. She brushed his thinning hair and we drank Arnold palmers in the sunshine. I spoon fed him small bites of ice cream.

I remember the hospital bed in the family room, sitting squarely where the couch used to be. When did we do this? How long was it there? It became so familiar to me that it felt like maybe it was always there? I know this isn’t true. This fuzzy memory thing frustrates me.

I remember that my mom would sleep in the recliner chair next to him, and in his final days, I wanted to sleep close to him too, so we dragged a twin mattress in so that I could sleep on the floor near the foot of his bed— just like I did as a child. How did we do that? Where did the mattress come from?

The hospice social worker—or was it a nurse?— told us once that we needed to tell him it was okay to go. To go where? I didn’t want him to go anywhere! During the restless nights I thought about my friends at school out dancing at bars while I watched my dad’s chest rise and fall, studying the intervals, waiting for him to die. I had just turned 21 years old three weeks prior. Nothing was okay and everything in my body felt like it was on fire and I didn’t know what anticipatory grief was so I just raged silently inside, whispering what had become my nightly prayer: You can go Dad, it’s okay. We’ll be okay. I think… I don’t really know. Are you there God, this is really fucked up!

In his final days and our final last ditch effort to control his pain and agitation, he was taken away by ambulance to a hospital where they inserted what I can only imagine was probably a PIC line. At this point he was completely bed bound, sleeping most of the time, unable to swallow medications, barely able to speak. When I reach into the deepest parts of my memory I can hear what his slow, choppy, slurred speech sounded like when he attempted to speak. My heart also sinks a little to remember this, because I also remember the embarrassment I felt as a young college kid, wanting nothing more than to not be the person with a sick and dying parent. I remember avoiding the looks from some of the EMTs, people I knew and had gone to school with (the joys of living in a small town) as they wheeled my dad on a stretcher through the kitchen. How badly I wanted to be seen and also disappear at the same time.

I don’t remember much about his time in the hospital except for one moment when I came to bring my mom some soft foods that my dad could eat— individual containers of chocolate pudding and some mashed potatoes from a place in the strip mall nearby. When I leaned into my Dad for a hug and a kiss, he held on longer.

“Love”, he mouthed at me, unable to get the out words fully.

“I love you too Dad,” I squeaked out though tears as I pulled away and squeezed his index finger, the one that had frozen months ago, his hand stuck in a permanent finger gun position.

Two days later he came home with this port near his clavicle and this machine that pumped his medications directly into his system. Two days after that, he was gone. Or was it three? Was it the next day?

All I know is that sixteen years ago today my dad took his last breath and I was careened into the land of dead dad grief, a place of pain and rage and confusion and monstrous heartache. I’ve climbed the hills of guilt and regret, traversed through the ache of unknowing, slid face down through the terrain of self destruction. The last sixteen years have been littered with sleepless nights and identity crises and self doubt but also somehow, love. Also somehow, so. much. beauty. Sixteen years ago, I lost myself and I lost my dad and now I travel through space and time to find him, to find myself, again and again and again.

I look through photographs and he is like a mirage. He is there and I remember, but he is also not here and hasn’t been for so long, so I forget. I spend a lot of time wondering and imagining and grasping for more stories. I say things like, I have my dad’s hands, and then I second guess myself, because it’s been so long since I held his hands in mine and can I really trust myself to remember what they looked like? I tell myself this doesn’t matter, and continue to search and unearth the ways that he is still so alive within me. That maybe so much of grief work is actually having to be both creative and brave enough to re-write our own stories and the stories of our dead, weaving together both the real, felt memories and all that we don’t know in order to bring them into the future with us.

I stand in the kitchen in the middle of another sleepless night, looking out at the dark sky, the wind rustling through the drying and brittle grasses, the sound of the fan whirring in the dark. I think about the stories I know, the stories I’ve been told, and the stories I have yet to write for myself. How this ache of grief, in all its tenderness, invites me to soften into the land of unknown. To make a home there. To invite everything in: the ache and longing, the joy, the questions, the searching. To fill up this big empty space with love and curiosity and imagination. To allow my memories to be in soft focus. To trust, what my bones know. With each breath, I settle into a new way of being. Of being with myself. Of being with this grief. Of being with my dad. Right here, right now, as the night sky blends into the blue hour of morning, fully awake, allowing myself to dream.

.