I think that I might be having an existential breakdown. That, or I’m just exhausted and depressed after a month of dealing with the aftermath of my father’s death. Or both.<\/p>\n
I think both.<\/p>\n
The death of my father rattled me in a way that I could never have expected. I knew, of course, that I’d be overwhelmed by grief – I’ve known this since I was a child, since I first began fearing the deaths of my parents – and I knew that I would be mourning both my father and the past. What I did not know was the extent to which this latter mourning – the mourning of my past, my childhood and girlhood and womanhood as his daughter, and his pasts, the pasts that I knew and the pasts that I didn’t know, the pasts that I have been living and reliving this past month as I forged my way through decades of papers and mementos and photographs and memories, some know to me, some not – I did not know the extent to which this latter mourning would unsettle me.<\/p>\n
Ordinarily, I write my way through sadness and conflict and crisis. But this time… I find that I cannot. Most days, I cannot. There are nights that I lay awake, narrating some portion of this story to myself, and deriving comfort from that narration, but when I sit down to type, the words don’t come. They don’t come, I think, because this feels, to me, like a story that no-one else could possibly understand, this story of a daughter obsessing over the life and death of her father and the spiritual crisis that this obsession provokes. And so I balk at sharing it.<\/p>\n
I hope that I’ll overcome this reluctance to share. That, or that I’ll be able to push these concerns to one side and return to stories about bad motherhood.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I’m just so tired.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think that I might be having an existential breakdown. That, or I’m just exhausted and depressed after a month of dealing with the aftermath of my father’s death. Or both. I think both. The death of my father rattled me in a way that I could never have expected. I knew, of course, that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,26,21,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-faith","category-fearlessness","category-my-dad"],"yoast_head":"\n