Avoiding the Sadness

Spring is coming and my dad is dying. The daffodils are blooming along the sides of the road and the trees are filled with white blossom. He sleeps most of the time now. The wind smells like dew on freshly sprung green grass. His hearing has started to fail. Next weekend the clocks will go forward and time will lurch us back into long, warm days. He is confused and rarely speaks.

I am supposed to work hard, as usual, and pay my bills and save money and weigh out the various interest rates on my credit cards. The buses and trains are still running and there are still movies being played at the theaters and people eating in restaurants. Everyone wants to talk about a T.V. show they saw or the new clothes they bought or a joke they heard.

Long, steady waves move over me every day. And when I’m under the weight, I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to do anything. But the world doesn’t stop for me. It doesn’t stop for my dad, either, even though I feel like it should. Everything should freeze so that I can concentrate solely on what occupies my heart and mind. I shouldn’t have to make small talk when all I want to do is ask big questions. What does it feel like? Where do you go? Why does this happen?

We are born into the world with Big Questions, and yet taught not to talk about them. It makes people uncomfortable. We don’t know how to react to each other. We don’t know what to say. All we can say is, “I’m so sorry,” and our one feeble phrase doesn’t even make sense.

I don’t want to avoid the sadness. I want to sink into it and by experiencing it, maybe, start to figure it out. I don’t want to remain with one foot in the world and the other in a place I don’t know or understand. It makes me feel off balance, like I’m floating above my body and watching it “act” human.

Maybe I shouldn’t publish this. Maybe it’s too personal. But I can’t stop thinking that maybe, just maybe, we’re all feeling this way. We all want to be open and honest about how downright fearful and sad we are sometimes. But there seems to be a big divide between what we feel and what we can express. Getting too “personal” alienates us from people who aren’t ready to open up like that.

From what I’ve experienced, though, good things come from opening our hearts to one another. It takes a lot of courage because everything in our culture seems against it: we are taught to defend ourselves, not to share ourselves. There is too much at risk. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Survival of the fittest. Look out for number one.

I’m trying lately to stray from those ideologies and ask the questions that I really care about. It has led me to conversations I know I will treasure for the rest of my life. For example, I spoke one day to a friend about anxiety and depression, and discovered that her and I had experienced many of the same feelings. She described that she felt some days like everyone in the world was staring at her, and it often made her not want to leave the house. Instead, she closed the curtains and hid. I told her that I also have days when I can’t bear the world outside, and I become so disconnected that I feel like I’m sitting inside a dark box looking out through a peephole. In that one conversation, we grew closer than we had in years of friendship.

It’s the same with my dad. Quality time has always been difficult because he loves to be “doing” something, like fixing your computer, adjusting a loose screw in the chair or working on some “project” off in the distance. In-depth conversations were few and far between, or cut short. As I grew up, it seemed more and more difficult to feel as close to him as I naturally felt when I was a child. It made me sad, but I accepted it as just “something that happens” in life.

And then came the news about the cancer: stage IV prostate cancer, with bone metastasis. The doctors were slow to offer a prognosis. One said he could live for years. Another told him six months. That was over a year ago now, around Christmas 2009. He thought it might be his last, but then we had another. And now, a few months since that day we exchanged gifts and talked happily together and watched Lord of the Rings, he is in a very different place.

But I feel as close to my dad, once again, as I did when I was a little girl. He has cried on my shoulder. I have stayed up all night with him talking about heaven. I know, now, that when he was a child he dreamed of becoming a fireman. I am grateful for those conversations, but it took a lot of courage, a little awkwardness, and the most terrible circumstances, to have them.

I’m ready to risk a little awkwardness to have those types of conversations with the people I love, but I refuse to ever again wait until terrible circumstances force them upon me. Life is too short, and heavy, and lonely, and important, and beautiful, and complicated. And there are too many Big Questions.

This post was inspired by a series of heartfelt articles by Meghan O’Rourke for Slate Magazine. Read them here.