Grief, Longing, and the Ordinary Extraordinary

I lost my dad when I was 26. I am now entering that part of my life where more of it will have been lived without him, than with him.

When he first passed, I had a lot of dreams about him. Some were comforting, some were terrifying, some were heartbreaking. But there was this feeling of of comfort that he was still there. In these dreams, sometimes I knew he was gone, and there was a rush to tell him everything that had happened since he left. Then there those dreams where time had looped back around itself and he was gone but not and he was just there and I didn’t know how it was possible but I was so, so glad to see him.

As the years passed, those dreams became less and less frequent which is its own kind of grief.
Last night, I had a dream that I was going to meet my Dad at Burger King. Why there I don’t know, since I don’t recall ever meeting there.

I wanted an Impossible Whopper (my subconscious has no subtlety) which is basically a Whopper with a plant-based “burger”. This caused quite a bit of consternation behind the counter.

And it aside from all the dream weirdness, like getting a giant open face turkey sandwich instead of the Impossible Whopper, and the fact that the seating seemed to be in front of Solder Field (the football stadium in Chicago) and the there was a storytelling show in the parking lot, and I think also a football game going on, and the ridiculous amount of mayonnaise given for my French fries, and the fact that they wrapped the three strips of bacon, for the sandwich in burger paper and placed them under the giant unwanted sandwich, and the list goes on…

But in the midst of all that abnormality and otherworldly dream weirdness, in spite of all of that, it was so heart wrenchingly normal. We were just having lunch, just as we had done so many times before. I got my food, found where he was sitting and sat down with him.

In the dream, I didn’t remember that he had been gone from my life for so many years. It was like those years had been clipped from my life. We were just sitting there talking about sandwiches and whatnot as if none of the past time had elided us.

When you live with grief for a long time, it develops these accretive layers, a measure of protection so it is bearable. And yet, after all these years, a wave of it can punch through and pull your feet from beneath you. It is gut wrenching and also oddly comforting to still miss someone that much. In some way, I equate that intensity of feeling with him being more present.

In the dream I realized I had the wrong order and got up to go return my sandwich (again subconscious, so obvious) and then I woke up feeling both sad and comforted.

It’s just a good reminder to try not to take those mundane moments with loved ones for granted.
And I say try because we are deeply complicated emotional beings that carry the weight of all that has come before clanging and banging behind us. Sometimes, with all that noise, it is hard to be there in the now with whomever you are with. And sometimes, the sometimes are just hard. The conditions of our cognition make it almost impossible to be perpetually present.

But holy crap am I grateful for every memory I have of my Dad. All the ordinary things that are now extraordinary because they are now more.

Right now I would love to complain to my Dad about getting the wrong sandwich and maybe even cry like a little kid (or a big kid with a missing parent) when I do.

Take care and pass it around.

*****
The photo is his compass which he lent to me when I went on a camping trip with the Girl Scouts. I had never been camping so I was incredibly excited and of course wondered what would happen if I got lost. He taught me how to hold the compass so that the needle could be free to find its way to the North. Magnetic north astonished me then, and it still does to this day.

When he was showing me how to use the compass, he told me a story about when he was in the service (during WWII) and he was on a training exercise and they were camping. He had never camped because he grew up in the city. Same with his partner. They pitched their tent in a ditch because they thought it would be good to be out of the wind. Unfortunately there was a big rain, and the ditch filled with water. They abandoned said tent in the middle of the night and ended up knocking on the door of a nearby farmhouse. The family took them in, got them dry clothes and fed them breakfast, much to the consternation of their fellow soldiers who spent a cold, wet, night and had a similarly cold and wet breakfast.

And this reminds me why those ordinaries are so important because it was during one of those seemingly ordinary moments that these stories would appear.