Ten Years Gone
Berry Wayne Love
Born December 10th, 1957
Died October 31st, 2014
Dad,
Today, it came up on me slow.
I experienced so much of the day without you, without needing to commemorate my grief in some significant way, as I thought I might when the time came.
I was a witch today. Wore something on this specific day for the first time in ten years, without being afraid of that phone call. Without being afraid of wailing in the middle of campus, draped in an elaborate costume, unable to see my way back to my dorm without the help of strangers.
I laughed today. Forgot that I am grieving the Big One at the Big Milestone.
I went to work today. It was not too hard to be around others or to find the purpose in my work.
I lived today. Because I forgot I was supposed to be a shell in remembrance.
But I didn’t forget you today.
I sit here, at my computer, writing the piece I have avoided for thirty-one days since I realized it was That Time. Tears streak through the black make-up that might not come off before work tomorrow - but it was worth it because my costume won the contest.
I won.
I made it to work and through work and home and in the door and with my bags down and my shoes off before sitting in silence and weeping for the ten years without you and how much I wish you could see of me and the woman I have become. I am everything you thought I could be, but I guess I will have to be proud of me on your behalf.
I can do that.
Dad,
Today, it came up on me soft.
I thought I would make the pilgrimage to your grave this year for the first time, but I know you wouldn’t ever need me there. And I don’t think I will ever go after all.
The rock that bears your name will eventually weather under the ever-gnawing jaws of time and even under decayed lichen and moss and battering rains that tear it down to nothing - like flesh away from bone and bone down to dust - it still will not be you.
Sometime in the next thousand years, you and I will both be dirt and repurposed rot and ash feeding the trees and mycelium reaching down through us and it won’t matter that I made it through today or the next ten years or the next ten years after that.
I googled “corpse after 10 years” so I could imagine you today. I have always been afraid I would forget what you used to look like, but really I am afraid of accepting I can never see you again.
Even if you are a terrible hollow skeleton, completely reduced to your brittle broken bones and metal plates and pins, I want to claw you from your box in the soil and look at you forever.
A feral grief sits in me at this age, so strong that I can finally understand the strange death rituals of others.
I wish your decay was close and visible and tangible. To give you an afterlife instead of a suffocating so-called slumber in a small chamber as you melt into the cloth bed below, waiting for even this box, too, to crumble into the earth.
Dad,
Today, it was not much of anything.
I miss you. But I am alive.
And I have spent this moment with you.
xoxo,
Lash
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