The hardest part

Grief is a strange thing. It will never be the same for everybody, and it doesn't matter what your official relationship to the deceased was, because your personal relationship is what you lose and that's what you cannot capture.

In recent years, my Papa Fender would tell me me that when he first met me, I was a different person, that I was not present.  He was the one that intuited my family dynamic, the baggage of my childhood in my relationship with my brother, with my family in Mexico. He was the one that let me be myself.

We had a funny dynamic, we bickered. I think the thing I'm struggling with is that he never hurt me, but I feel that I hurt him. By rejecting his attempts to teach me things (because I'm defensive), by rejecting some of his attempts to get close to my son (because he didn't get the whooping cough vaccine, because he was an electrician who did manual labor and came home with dust I was afraid of, because he had a cold).

He was the person that was there for everybody. He was the one everybody would call and he would always say yes. It was his greatest strength and maybe his greatest weakness.

And I pushed him. I pushed and pushed and I feel the guilt of playing a role in his running himself into the ground.

That's my guilt. And I can't work out - is it my guilt, or my grief? Is it because I love him, or because I'm just selfish?

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When someone dies, they are just gone. One minute they were there, he was standing at the kitchen counter before I went to bed, and the next time I saw him he was dead on a bed at a hospital with a tube in his mouth. Dead. DEAD.

I couldn't bring myself to really touch him, to stroke and kiss him the way my mom did. He wasn't there. Where is he?

My husband says we are just meat suits on a skeleton and everything we are is just chemicals in our brains and when we die we cease to exist. And in many ways I do believe this, but I am struggling with it. Is a person really reduced just to everything they left behind? Things, memories, recordings, writings?

There is definitely a hole in our hearts where he was. There is pain here. We are missing a limb, a light that we had. He was the one that always had fun. He was the one that always was here. And as we deal with the aftermath, with trying to go through the rooms full of things he left behind, it all feels empty.

I touched his keys, his phone, his Birkenstocks, and I don't know if I felt his presence or his absence.

I am grappling. And it hurts.