As I write this entry, it has been 6 years since my dad became a suicide victim. 6 years. In some ways it seems like a lifetime. In other ways, it seems like it just happened yesterday. I still have days where I figure that I will see him that upcoming weekend, but of course it doesn’t happen. I feel him still with us, yet he also seems so far away.
The grief never, ever goes away. He was and is my dad, and I was, in his words, “one of the best things that ever happened to him”. How do you let go of that? Truth is that you don’t. Life for me has been divided in two – life before Dad died and life after. Life after has actually had many great events for me, but there is still a touch of sadness knowing that my dad is not here on earth to share those moments with us. Even more poignantly, now when I look at my son, it reminds me of baby pictures I’ve seen of my dad as a little boy, and it both haunts and delights me at the same time.
And, in a way, a mixture of haunt and delight is a good way to sum up how I feel 6 years after my dad’s suicide. Nothing is truly delightful, but nothing is truly haunting either. It isn’t even something in between. It is something both light and dark together. Perhaps that is the way life has always been, but it took me 36 years to realize it. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but the great news there is that it gives me the freedom to continue living and doing what I think is right. And, ultimately, I hope that what I’m doing in part is doing right by my dad and the hell he went through.