It is the two-year anniversary of my dad dying today. Yesterday was his birthday; he very nearly Mark Twained, my Pop.

A few days after he died, I found myself in rather a state. Processing not only the fact that he was gone and no longer here and no longer alive, but also, for the first time, examining the actual images in my head of him ill for that time. See, I had refused to allow for grief while he was still alive. Or at least I tried.

My theory was that if I grieved while he was still alive, for the fact that he was dying, I was cheating the both of us out of precious, limited time being together with him still alive. Also, I figured that steadfastly believing that he would be an outlier on the data and statistics (which I knew were not too good from the jump) and beat the odds and beat cancer might help convince him that this was the case, which might be the most helpful thing to making it happen. I would be his Dumbo’s magic feather and convince him that he could fly out of all of this. Power of positive thinking; all that jazz. When you’re facing a terminal disease, you go for what hope you can.

And that was it, too. While he lived, I hoped. I reasoned that every day spent alive is a chance and a hope that the next day too will be spent being alive. Each breath, I thought, is drawn with the hope that there would be another. So don’t abandon hope until it is truly and completely gone.

Well, then I saw him die, over four days with a sudden attack of pneumonia and a truly heroic maintaining of dignity throughout a process that might have otherwise taken it away. But I saw him die.

I wasn’t there the moment he did die , but in making the decision to go home and not be in the hospital, I knew that I was helping my dad to stop being alive, with as much control as he was afforded by the circumstances. I saw these breathing treatments and machines pushing air into him, keeping him alive and I saw the binary nature of it all.

Being alive is the one thing without shades of gray. Here, one moment, you are, and all of you that is is a complex latticework of interlocking systems and functions working together to produce the youness of you. There, the next, you are not and all those things are no longer systems and interactions. This that was my father’s body was now my father’s corpse.

It is a lot to handle.

But there it was, the moment to stop hoping that things would somehow get better.  When a person is breathing, there exists in the future a probability cloud of possible outcomes for them. Some are more probable than the next, but still– while one is alive, there is always what statisticians call a non-zero chance that one may continue to be alive.  It may be close to zero, but with breath, it isn’t there yet.

I found that no matter how small that space is, it is never so small that Hope cannot reside in it.

But I also found what it was to have that space close and have Hope exit and deal with the aftermath. I sat next to my father’s corpse in the living room I grew up in.  This was when I tried to take the croc-tooth necklace from his neck. I had told him I didn’t want it until it no longer belonged to him. That was the time. And I failed.

I couldn’t do it.  I tried but I felt like a ghoul and a grave-robber. My aunt Tammy helped me and I put it on and we waited for the people to come and take his body away.

I was okay that night. I mean, it was done.  The next night, however? Not so much. I had these thoughts, half-formed and swirling and they wouldn’t let me accomplish simple things. I needed to get them out of my head and onto “paper” (well, a screen, in any case) in order to put them down. Like, actually put them down, so I didn’t have to carry them anymore.  I sat down at 3:00 in the morning and I don’t remember typing what I typed. I found it the next day and it was like reading a letter from a stranger. Automatic writing, but not from the spirit realm to the corporeal, but rather from the subconscious to waking world.  It was like the release of dam, or the relieving of a pressure of swelling on the brain.

I went crazy there so I could begin to go sane again.

These words came out of my fingers and I was able to sleep. I’m putting them down here because I want them to live in various places in the “cloud” of the internet so they don’t get lost. I’m putting them down here because, who knows? Scattered and disconnected though it is, it might help someone in a similar state, or some part might resonate and help shape a half-formed notion in another person’s head.

But also I’m putting them down as a chronicle of what grief really feels like, not what we back-date and retrofit it as.

It, like so much else, is a process. And here was the specific reality of where I was in that process, searching to put it into some kind of context, a few days in. I have edited only one sentence here, which I put in italics, as it is just too personal and private. But the rest, everybody else can have if they want.  The full text of what came out of me that night is below.

The fault occurs when we mistake the machine for the animation, but the larger mistake is in assuming the animation is itself another machine. Time is not a collection of solid moments. There is a process with movement. There is also a sculpture that is formed from the movement. Movement of matter through time creates a sculpture of “what happened.” We can’t see the sculpture behind us but for sketches of memory. Sculpture still exists. Our record,though– memory,faulty: Courtroom sketch artists.

There is no present. Knife edge; the future is always a moment in front, past a moment “behind,”  the present becomes an academic notion. Angels on pins, where is the “atom” of THE PRESENT?  False division, maybe, breaking into 3 groups for clarity’s sake; nervous system’s wiring. Whay not 4? Why not one? Lines on a map, no5 lines on the ground. We’re wired to “see” a straight line of movement. What happens when you tinker with the wiring (acid, o2, grief, etc.)? Time displacement feeling first. “Time slowed down/sped up.” Connected feeling, all matter/time/whatever “are one.” Then you beome a guru and try to sell someone your moment of false enlightenment (partial) for lots of money or to feel important. No gurus. All gurus.

I thank you for your indulgence, here, constant-reader.