Lifting the Curtain of Loss: Rediscovering My Father and Myself

Things felt particularly raw this past Saturday, but not because of the snowfall. It was one of those increasingly rare, beautiful snowy days. The journey I took through said snow on my way to and from shul for Shabbat davening was pleasant enough. There was no clear trigger, really. Just the ups and downs of the grieving process, I suppose. It’s a process of rediscovering my father and, I think, myself.

I cried a bit. 

I was looking at pictures of my father, mostly between the ages of about 30 and 60 years old. That’s the period between when I was born and when my first child, Eliana, was born. She’s 17 now. 

I was crying because it’s been so long since I’ve had that father, a pre-Parkinson’s father. I had such a short window for an adult father-son relationship while he was still intact physically and cognitively. 

I look back at those pictures and see the man who was supposed to still be here today. He should have been seasoned, but with the same engaging charisma. His athleticism, humor, drive, expectations, playfulness, and can-do attitude towards pretty much everything should still be with us.  

Being so consumed with the state of his decline for such a long time, it’s as if an opaque curtain was placed between my pre- and post-diagnosis memories. The intensity and immediacy of the challenging post-diagnosis memories have taken up so much emotional brain and heart space that pre-diagnosis memories have felt very hazy and distant, as if from another lifetime. 

The acute feeling of not having easy access to memories of the before-life is a rather shitty, awful feeling. It’s not a sharp heartache so much as a throbbing one.

In truth, I’ve cried very little overall. So sparingly, in fact, that it’s been upsetting to me. It’s made me feel like I’m lacking some component of humanness, like a computer program with a corrupt file that interrupts normal operations. For the first few weeks, mechanical even.

So, when I have felt openly emotional, as I did on Saturday, I’ve found it to be an odd, seemingly paradoxical experience. I’ve felt the miserable heartache of loss on the one hand, and on the other hand, I’ve felt a sense of relief that my body does, in fact, know how to mourn externally. 

It’s not lost on me that I’m approaching the end of shloshim, the first 30 days following the burial, which, like the end of shiva, marks another transition in the Jewish mourning process. The unruly beard that I have not attended to since my father’s passing, which has signified the primacy of my grief over concerns about my physical appearance, will be shaved. It’s another small step towards a return to normal life.

Maybe the rabbis understood that, in the immediate weeks of upheaval following a loss, one’s capacity to have perspective on their new reality is greatly diminished because those weeks are death weeks.

How can a person fully confront the meaning of their loss in the broader context of their life going forward when their thoughts and emotions are still consumed by the shock of loss?

Maybe my Shabbat cry was a sign of readiness for greater perspective-taking.

Maybe exploring memories of my father, pre-diagnosis, was an initial confrontation with the meaning of his loss to me and my life going forward.

Maybe the opaque curtain is lifting away, allowing me to focus on who my father was in life rather than in the stages of decline and death.

Maybe I am not only starting to rediscover my pre-Parkinson’s father but also who I am without him.