“If you are saying, over every little thing … ‘THIS IS THE END OF EVERYTHING!!!’ … in a relationship, that is emotional abuse. But in politics, it’s business as usual.”
Two Father’s Days ago, we traveled to Charlevoix, Michigan to celebrate not only the father that my dad was, but also the one that my husband was about to be — as it was also the weekend we first told my dad I was pregnant with his first grandchild.
If someone then had told me then that, the following year, I would begin a less-than-14-month stretch of horror in which I’d lose my breasts, my cat, and my father -- let alone that my dad would die unexpectedly in the exact town where we were now celebrating, I likely would have said the exact same thing so many people say to me now: that I couldn’t imagine. But, as anyone who has been hit with tragedy knows, your previous ability to imagine something actually has no bearing on whether or not it does.
Miss you every day, Dad. Today and every day, the world is a worse place without you in it.
So, expressing feelings of grief a month after my dad and best friend who helped me through cancer last year suddenly died does not equal a "pity party," nor does it make me an inadequate mother. We would be a better society if more people felt they could speak openly and freely about the experiences that unite us as humans. I'll continue to do so, and if you are offended by it, then you can unfollow me.
"For a long time I wrote nothing else.
Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.
At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, 'the ordinary instant.' I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word 'ordinary,' because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. 'He was on his way home from work --- happy, successful, healthy --- and then, gone,' I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an 'ordinary Sunday morning' it had been. 'It was just an ordinary beautiful September day,' people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: 'Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.'"
-Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking"