Thursday Essay

Here’s a short, searing piece from Andy Kopsa about losing her father to pancreatic cancer. Why do I keep posting about grief when I have enough of it in my life? Because, as she points out in the essay, there is something to be said about hearing from someone who has also been through this. “I am finding my tribe — the ones of us who watched our parents dying.”

From “There Are No Five Stages of Grief“:

 

My research suggests there will be a period of adjustment as I try to find a new normal. So far my new normal has involved a variety of public and private acts of mourning. Some days my pain is like accidentally brushing fingertips across a hot iron, burning yet mercifully brief.

Other days I start crying over a bag of frozen shrimp at Trader Joe’s. Or like today, I stare out the back door at my wintry rooftop garden and think of summer tomatoes, the smell of dirt, of my father, and sob.

[…] As Americans, we have been trained up to believe that grief is a process, something linear we are capable of understanding. But I am comfortable with my broken heart now after my dad’s death, comfortable even when my sadness reaches a maddening crescendo because that is when I get the gift of giving up.