The night everything changed

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and what I see is unrecognizable.

I can leave the house perfectly happy with the way I look, then the first time I pass by a mirror I’m taken aback to find someone who is not 25 years old.

Lines deeper set by the puffiness of baby weight I have chosen to ignore. A shine from the extra makeup I’ve begun to rely on to cover up spotty sleep patterns and surprise visits from the acne factory. The makeup company calls this luminous, but we all know it’s just greasy.

I hurry by the mirror and begin to think about the passage of time and how its massiveness escapes me.

Today is the 8-year anniversary of the day I lost my dad. And this week in history is so jumbled by confused memories that I did not realize this until late last night. That tomorrow, now today, was when everything changed. I mean EVERYTHING.

You do not know how much a single person can be the glue holding everything together until they are not here anymore. I certainly did not realize that my dad, with all of his problems, internal and external, was keeping our family tied together. No matter how thin the thread was, his thread was very, very strong.

But now I know. The relationships are like a loose tooth. Even if what kept us together was one person’s balancing act, it still kept us focused, aligned, on the same page. This is more complicated than saying “dysfunction keeps you together” or something like that. There was a reason our little unit drew into itself like magnets at family functions. We understood. We laughed. And oh shit did we cry.

But we did it all together.

For me, eight years has been enough time to feel reflective and even sometimes celebratory of his life. I’ve said this before and I will say it again and again and again: He was an artist, a writer, a cinephile, a truly imaginative mind that would have excelled in some circles. But. So many buts. He was so complicated and how I wanted to understand—

After his heart attack, he was kept alive for about 24 hours. Tubes and stuff. I remember sitting on a bright sunny bench with the other two women in his life. Faced with our decision to end it I said something like: We don’t know all the facts. Let’s fight through the night, knowing we may lose, but I don’t think we have a choice.

I was the youngest but they looked up to me so they said yes. I will never know if I did the right thing. I already knew in my heart that his mind had left us but as humans we have ties to the physical body and I suppose that’s where I was coming from. We ended up losing the next day.

Gone. Poof. The end.

How do you deal with that? How does that happen? Sometimes it is all too much.

The next day was the 4th of July. Boom! Bang! Blast! Drink lemonade! Wear red, white and blue! Wave the flag! Have the best day of your life!

Sometimes it is all too much.

And that’s just the way it is.