Grief I.

It isn't rare that I am woke in the early morning by the sound of his voice, the outline and nuance of his face, his curly hair, his thin hands, dangerously vivid enough for any daughter to remember grief. I almost always turn over, toss myself in the early morning sunlight, and ask the dreaming world for just another moment with him, just another moment to hear what he has to say. He is always kind and gentle, looking stronger and more full than he did when he was here.

This time, he is drinking. We are moving between different houses in the winter as snow settles around us on the roads and sidewalks. It's nighttime. I too, have a wine glass in my hand. We are unfazed by the cold winter. Dad drinks his beer but he doesn't stumble. Perhaps in this realm, he won't miss the bowl when he goes to pee. Perhaps this time, a full sentence would form from his lips. Perhaps here, his brain fog would be lifted, his drunkness far enough at bay. We are living in a house together, and he looks at me, before I fully commit to being awake, and tells me he will have to go, that he will have to leave eventually. His eyes are big.

I toss one more time, pulling the blankets around me, and ask the morning sunlight to creep back out of my bedroom, away from my bed and my messy hair. I invariably ask for the reversal of time when it comes to my father.

In my dream, I tell him he doesn't have to leave. I tell him that he can stay. Death gives way to the things we have always wanted to say.

I sit up in bed and see the morning red sky for what it really is: here and present. I stumble into my kitchen and put on my kettle to make myself a cup of coffee, thinking all the while of the cruel confidence of the universe to connect me so deeply with him only after his death.

One year after he died, I was still having trouble sleeping. Going to bed every night caused me intense anxiety. I never knew if I was going to have loving dreams of him where I felt his gentle presence, or flashbacks to when he molested me as a child. Parents are complicated.

I eventually attended a community grief group to help me move through my grief. With a group of strangers, I was able to share about my story and my experience. It felt unfair to share with people who spent their whole lives with the people they mourned - I had maybe five memories of him, the majority of them unkind and violent, only two of which are from my adult years. Eventually a daughter begins to wonder if she made her father up altogether.

The rest of my memories of him are in my head, all occuring after he died. They are stories that people have told me. They are moments of deep connection and presence when I feel him holding my hand, or touching my arm. There was the one time I was sick and I saw him sit on the couch to be near me. They are impressions from psychics and calling in's from mediums that are too powerful to ever explain. They are fables, and fantasies, and the dreams in which we communicate, the times that he sings to me. The majority of our history together has played out in another realm, one that I can't bring with me into this one. But most days I will try, and I will always try to explain. I carry him with me, from sleeping to wakefulness and back again.

In my grief support group, I tried to explain how unreal it all feels, how impossible it all probably seems. That I barely believe myself as a trustworthy narrator of my own story. (But isn't this just the way with trauma? Who believes us, and how often do we believe ourselves?).

The group meetings ended on a Monday night in May. We all brought images of the people we had loved. I brought the one image of my dad that I had.

I shared it with everyone and began to cry. I told them how it feels like we exist together in another realm, and how unfair and unreal that feels, when a kind older woman in the group said 'but maybe that realm is the realest realm of them all'.

Since then, I have always trusted the tidings of my dreams.