My father is sitting in a corner of the bed, next to me. He tells me something, he doesn’t care I’m asleep. He keeps speaking and I wake up, barely, with heavy eyes, and I see him there, on the other side of the blur. I can hear his voice, I am listening. I try to move and shake the stiffness of the body just awaken…
Then I wake up. I truly woke up this time. The corner of the bed is empty. I’m alone in the hotel room. I had a dream where I saw my father sitting next to me in that very hotel bed. A hotel room that is miles away from where he really is, in some hospital bed, across an ocean.
In my dream, I was listening, and finding some meaning in his words. Awake, I can’t remember. I just feel that his voice was clear, like it used to be, clearer and stronger than how I heard him the last time we spoke. A phone call, long distance, across an ocean. A voice in a dream that was not tired and panting, like the voice of someone that is having trouble breathing. I could hear him gasping for air. He said goodbye. He knew.
My father died early in the morning of the following day.
Grief is supposed to be scripted. One must go through stages, was it five? But who said how long does it take to navigate grief, or when does it strike, or if it strikes at all?…
There must be the confirmation of a loss, better if you see it by yourself, so you can’t deny it. And what happens when you are an ocean away. Then you must find a way to overcome the anger, you will find someone or something to blame, either God, a system, or a person in power, that made you the target of a loss at a time that wasn’t right. Because the time is never right.
When loss is certain, and definitive, I guess, it leaves little room for negotiation. Unless… Maybe some people with some internal faith that makes them believe in an encounter that will happen at some point, like death wasn´t truly the end.
Then sadness takes over, overwhelming sadness, the anguish of the never more, the sudden sob that comes out of nowhere, like an earthquake. With time it becomes less frequent, although it is never certain that it won’t come back again. And one day, I hear, memories start to produce smiles. And the loss is replaced by some form of ethereal company. And that is supposed to be acceptance.
My father died. It was a summer morning, in a faraway hospital bed. I was away in another country. I did not attend his funeral or burial. I learned of his death in a text. I cried. I cried more with every phone call. I took the honest ones, from the people that I felt really meant it when saying I’m sorry. I didn’t pick up the rest. Fuck the protocol calls. But my crying wasn’t grieving.
My cry was closure. I was closing a chapter, a whole book. My father’s death brought me the gift of certainty. The end of a conflict. The end of a story. So final that it left no place for open endings. Questions, unanswered or not, don´t matter anymore. I discovered certitude in the finality of death.