Father’s Day Grief
Father’s Day was a week ago, and for the first time in a long time, I greeted the morning with sadness. As of June 29th, my dad (and his wife) died 31 years ago in a freak motorcycle accident. The call came in the middle of the night from one of my dad’s neighbors in Arkansas (his adopted state, and I think the one he loved most though he had a fondness for Oklahoma and Texas as well). The moment of the phone ringing, the sudden dread that chilled my body, remains with me to this day. I knew that something terrible had happened.
I am a deep thinker and a deep feeler. But at the time, I was emotionally numb (literally). I carried the weight of a lot of pain. I carried the weight of emotions that were too much for me to understand or to process. I lacked the funds to get support. To the extent free options existed, I wasn’t aware (this was in the pre-internet days). At some point, during a long night of sobbing, I prayed to God to take the pain away, that I could not bear it because feeling simply hurt too much. I passed out, and I awoke with the pain gone—it was a miracle but one with a cost. I called the period of my life that followed the Living Death. There was no “highs” and no “lows”—there was no pain--there was merely functioning and existing. It felt like I had been given an emotional lobotomy. A kind of dullness overlaid existence. As a result, when I got that call, I didn’t feel much of anything. There was a panic, but it was limited to my intellect. My heart, shattered into pieces holding too much pain, had been closed off.
When my dad died, part of me was conscious that grief boiled under the glass of my inner world. I remember at the time thinking that one day the grief would have its day to be expressed. I never imagined it would be 31 years later.
Over the years, and especially the last 2 years since my husband’s death, I have been blessed with immense discomfort and subsequent healing. My husband did not block me from healing—but he was a living embodiment of counter-messaging to my many shadows. I told him many times that he was my light, and with his light, I had a shield to ward off the shadows. But with his death, that ended, and my unfinished work, the repressed wounds and traumas that I had postponed healing, descended upon me all at once. Since then, I’ve done a lot of work—healing work to my mind, body and soul. I have regained access to my heart, to some of its deepest layers, and with that has come the full immensity and intensity of emotions that I could not withstand before.
The healing reached the place in my heart where my grief at my dad’s death had been locked away. The sadness I felt on the morning of Father’s Day, June 15, 2025 swelled into a physical and emotional heaviness. I did not understand that it was the grief building—that the glass has been shattered. The following Tuesday, a sad song played on my YouTube feed, and the grief exploded into hours of sobbing late into the night. It was as if I had just gotten that phone call in the middle of the night so long ago. It was as if in some weird way my dad had just died. Waves of grief followed the next couple of days; another sweeps over me as I write this blog. I am grateful that I was able to give voice and passion to his death that I was unable to give so long ago. I have carried guilt that I had been unable to properly grieve and that shame too is released.
I am also reminded that unprocessed emotions live within me/us. The last week has been difficult. I wonder what else may remain hidden. And I believe that I have reclaimed part of my self, a part of my heart, that had been locked away. At long last, I got to say goodbye to my dad.
