Am I willing?

The pace of life maintains it's warp speed. Everyone around me seems to pass me by. I'm like the granny in the Buick in the right lane unsure of just what speed I can go. Slow then fast - then stuck. Immobilized. Dad is everywhere sometimes, and then he disappears. I want to cry out to him, "Dad, wait for me, please wait. I see your arms open wide." I think it's the tedious parts of life that have taken on a fresh challenge. I sat down on a recent Saturday afternoon to balance my checkbook, easily one of life's joys. As I reviewed the transactions around the time of Dad's escape, I noticed the ledger was fraught with errors, wrong transaction amounts entered, receipts that had disappeared, just a mess. It took me quite awhile to reconcile, and afterward, I thought to myself, "This is how grief is to me. I want to reconcile it and be done." Oh how i wish.

We all know the saying about time and how it's supposed to heal. I don't buy it. This is why: for my entire life, whenever Dad talked about his Dad, he would cry. Always. Every single time. It was a fresh and painful place for him, even forty years after his dad died. I recall thinking on more than one occasion that he must have really loved his pops, that they must have been close friends. And I'd often wonder, will it be the same for me when he's gone? Will it plague me or will it be a sweet sadness? Sometimes I couldn't tell the difference for him, and so far for me, forty-five days later, I'm engulfed in the pain part of remembering.

All that I'm reading tells me that I need to be willing to grieve, willing to feel it, willing to enter into that place. If I don't, the "experts" say, I will face a deeper pain further down life's road. "Hmmm, interesting," I think. Does it make me more receptive to going to the dark place? Sometimes. Always. Never. Too soon to tell, I suppose. And life goes. I've got to get to the dry cleaners today.