Mourning the Unknown

I’ve recently been thrust back in time to when my dad died. I was doing all the work around thinking about the aftermath and how that event changed my life so completely. There isn’t a major decision in my life that hasn’t been touched by my dad dying when he did. Grieving this event and reviewing it is at once a hobby and rich field of heartache. There are memories good and bad, things I can conjecture about and things I wish were different. But he’s gone and I have to be okay with that or else my life will be torture. He’d want me to move forward. Not be a pansy ass.

The last few weeks have been really difficult. We lost the future. We lost a question mark. Part of my man brain won’t accept that it was a life yet, but I’m still sad. I don’t want to belabor the point or wallow in it, because that’s not moving forward.

I remember having a conversation about 10 years ago or so with a friend on a ski lift. I conjectured that most of my friends acted a certain way in life because we were young, but also because most of us hadn’t experienced loss. Loss of a friend, family member or loss of a great job; it didn’t matter. Just loss. I may have been wrong, but I suspect that’s true of most young people. Until one goes through death of some kind life is lived a certain way with a certain approach. After going through a loss, life is lived no less certainly, but every choice and reaction that follows the loss is formed by it in strange and unforeseen ways. It’s as if the loss itself becomes a separate entity. It’s the event and the emotions. I suppose it makes it easier for me to see it like this, but that’s how I’ve been getting through these past days.

I don’t know who our unborn child would have become and I never will. I don’t know if this event deserves the amount of attention I’m giving it. Some of my reticence is because I’m a man and cannot carry a child. I will never know what it is like to miscarry a child from a physical standpoint. Some of my hesitance to share anything is because there are a whole bunch of other people who have miscarried more times and under more painful circumstances. Still, I am sad.

However, there is always tomorrow. There is always the new. I have to think that this happened for some reason or set of reasons that I’ll never understand. I must move forward or else be consumed by a question mark of grief.