The Grammar of Grief

Past tense:

My dad was a lawyer. My dad did stand-up comedy. My dad lived in Denver. He was, he did, he liked, he ate, he read, he loved.

He died.

I struggle to formulate the words. It’s been over a year since my dad’s sudden death and I still find myself unsure of what to say. How to say it.

This is the grammar of grief and I never wanted to be fluent in it.

Death took away my dad but left me with a heightened desire to talk about him. Cruelly, I only have past tense now and my mind hasn’t been able to catch up to this reality. Having to modify how I communicate about my dad is like adding salt to a wound and then not giving me the words to scream out in pain.

English doesn’t give me any sympathy as it’s not as fragile as the human heart: the arteries of language are needed to pump love and connection and memory through us all, and they find new paths without ceremony.

Verbiage for me is not dead, but it is severely maimed. I cling to the past wishing I could speak about it with present or future tense. I was dripping in tenses and verbs for 28 years, blissfully ignorant that some of them could be gone in an instant. That my dad would be gone in an instant.

Present tense:

I have a dad. I miss my dad. I love my dad.

Present tense is a privilege reserved for the living. We say someone can be dying but in that case they are technically still living. My dad never was a gerund of the word death, he was just alive and then dead.

As a result of the suddenness of my loss I often stumble over these finalities. I slip up and casually remark to a friend how “my dad loves carrot cake.” Shit, present tense.

I internally wince but I don’t correct myself. I trudge through my sentence with the focus of a flight attendant telling everyone to stay calm during rough turbulence: I think it’ll be okay but honestly I’m not sure.

I wonder if the person I’m speaking to has noticed, if her blink was well-timed or if she’s silently chastising me. “He loved carrot cake, Rose. Past tense only, okay? Tsk tsk. Did you forget your dad is dead?”

And the trouble doesn’t end with speaking out loud. Written words bring their own searing pain. Picking up his ashes from the mortuary with ‘Frank J Schuchat’ typed on a plain white label suffocated under layers of packing tape, I wept more than I did at his funeral. Seeing his name like that, weighed down and attached forever to a box of ash and death, transported me to a foreign land of mourning without a translator for my heart’s pain.

Future tense:

I will always have a dad. I will always miss my dad. I will always love my dad.

If it’s not clear yet, words mean everything to me as a writer. And I never want to stop talking about my dad.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this grammatical pain I finally stumbled upon a glimmer of hope. Within the run-on sentence of death and grief I found a way of speaking that makes me feel close to my dad again. Death did not take him from me no matter what grammar cruelly tried to make me believe.

I currently and will always love him.

Look dad, no past tense!

I am present and my feelings are happening right now. I am a host to his memories and his 61 years of life. He no longer has the luxury of being alive so I’ll carry him into each moment with me. I love my dad. I miss my dad.

Don’t you see? How I feel about my dad never has to go through the woodchopper of grief-speak. My love for him stays the same. Actually, it has only intensified since his death. Love was intangible to begin with so it can keep its blissful existence if only in my unseen heart.

I am grateful for this semantic revelation. Elated, even.

Until you have gone through the aching pain of reaching to find the words to speak about your dad and hearing the empty echo of the vast cavern of grief, you will not know the soaring pleasure of discovering him resting comfortably within the sentences you speak.

It’s a feeling I may never be able to put into words but, dammit, I’ll keep trying.