At times I can't believe that it has already been 3 months and in the same breath it feels like it was a lifetime ago. Some days it feels like it happened to someone else and some days the finality of it consumes me.
I hate that time keeps on moving forward. I feel like the further we move from the date of his death the more I lose of him. The more my grasp of him slips. I don't want it to ever be years since he left but I know that there is nothing that I can do to stop that. I really don't like that idea at all.
Two weeks ago we got his autopsy report and it was a difficult but disconnected read. How was it that it is my dad's name on such a report, the one talking about internal organs and incisions? What this report did bring was a small sense of peace though, my dad was in a very bad way and the decision to not resuscitate was the right one. His lungs were by far the worst, respirator lungs was the term, but his brain, heart, liver and kidneys had also all experienced a level of tissue damage in one way or the other. That is every vital organ. He also had some pretty serious pressure sores which had become infected. Cause of death was cited a quadriplegia and complications thereof, primarily being bronchopnuemonia. There were abscesses in his lungs. I don't know how he managed to survive as long as he did.
All of that - from a motorcycle accident. Eight months of agony, physical and mental, all from a split second of bad judgement. A mistake. It is terrifying to contemplate.
So here we are, 3 months on, and there has been some closure from the perspective of his physical condition and why we are where we are now. Emotionally the road is somewhat rocky still although substantially smoother than where we have been. I still cry almost daily, and it is almost always while in the car - the only time that I am by myself during the day. The tears are different all of the time, sometimes sad, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes angry or afraid and sometimes in disbelief, but they are always healing and the crying comes in much shorter bouts now. It is quiet crying.
Once a month however I do get overwhelmed and anxious and just utterly heartbroken and when I try to figure out why it is hitting me so hard at that particular time I come to realise that it the day before the monthly anniversary of his death. Every time without fail. I don't try and stuff it down though, I feel it fully as sucky as it is. Somehow by taking ownership of the feelings it seems to stop them from overpowering me.
One particular aspect that I have struggled with is my memories of him. Every time I think about him it is a time that he was in the hospital, only post accident memories, and I was starting to get concerned that I was only going to remember him that way, helpless and dependent. Then I went back to our whatsapp group, the one where we kept each other updated visit by visit and discussed all of his issues at whichever point in time and I read everything and listened to every voice note all over from beginning to end. It took almost 3 hours. I was shocked by how much I had forgotten, or gotten wrong from a timeline point of view in this blog. There were far more ups and downs than I had ever remembered. There was one voice note from November that I had eliminated from my memory, didn't even know it existed, until I pressed play. My heart caught in my throat as I heard my dad's trach voice (a rare occurrence, I had forgotten he was well enough in November to have his trach cuff deflated at times to talk) address my sister and I. The tears came immediately because it felt like he never left or like I was hearing a message from the grave. The end of the message is priceless though - I love you, bye... I have listened to it often since I found it.
Despite all of the above and also feeling like people seem to think that we should all be over his death already (which I try not to let upset me but I do get annoyed at times), I actually feel much stronger emotionally. I am starting to have more and more spontaneous memories of him from before the accident which hurt at first for all the things that they will never be again, but I have started to find myself smiling at some of the memories as well. Something I thought was never going to happen.
There is so much more that happened during this entire 8 month process prior to his death that I haven't mentioned in this blog because they are so personal and so devastating that it isn't fair to any of our family members to bring it up on such an open and public platform. I have done a load of therapy work on it and I am amazed by my own, and others, capacity for forgiveness. It overwhelms me. I thankfully don't have much experience with grief, but the little that I have gathered over the past 3 months has certainly changed me in a way and helped me to grow as a human being. Probably more so than I have done in my entire life before this.
I have realised the fragility of life. There really are no promises.
And I don't ever want to take this life for granted again.
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