It's not that I felt I needed to explain myself. I was aware enough of the love around me. It's just that I had something to say and I needed to say it right then, whether my body would allow me to or not. And the first time, it partially failed me. The words only barely made it out, those familiar shoulder-shaking, chest-throbbing, face-distorting sobs destroying me yet again. You know the kind of hard crying that evokes a few audible sobs but mostly leaves your mouth frozen open as your lungs shut down and you can't think? The crying equivalent of dry heaving that's mixed here and there with full-blown puking? Yeah, those sobs. That crying. That pain.
While I was sitting in the front seat crying after one of the roughest proceedings of my life, Chels looked up at me from helping the kids load into the back of the van and said, "What?" She probably thought I was trying to say something to her. And I was, sort of. But really, I was just talking to myself. And to somebody who I couldn't talk to anymore.
Somehow I was able to get it out a little stronger this time, still through the tears and the sobs, though: "I didn't hug him nearly enough."
And I suppose that's the strongest statement I can say about this grief. Because even if I had somehow managed to give him a hug every single day of the 5,474 days since I had first met him, it still wouldn't have been nearly enough.
We'd been standing in line for nearly an hour, slowly puttering forward in a rush hour traffic jam to the family receiving line as we watched snapshots of his life on various well-placed screens. And then there we stood, maybe 10 feet from the casket, and I was about to get my first glimpse of the made-up shell of a body that used to be animated with so much life. So much love. Always so much zeal and so much caring. And I realized in that moment that I wasn't ready for this. I whispered as much to Chelsea and wrapped my arm around her shoulder and started to cry. I think I knew I wouldn't be ready, but head knowledge and experience do not always equal each other, and it wasn't until then that I began to feel it.
Every day at work, I think I'm still operating under the assumption that he'll just walk in through the front door again with that same knowing smile on his face and purpose in his step. The past couple years had seen less of him doing that than before, and even that had been scaled down quite a bit versus the beginning. Early on, he was just always there. And I mean always. He was there early in the morning because he was weird like that, and he was there late at night because he was devoted like that. Always, just like he was there for nearly every major event of my adult life. College. My grandpa's death. My dropout from college and move to full-time. That time a cute girl walked in the store and dropped off the infamous Apology Cookies (later renamed I Love You Cookies). Our wedding day. He was there to celebrate our first baby's birth. His heart broke when I told him over the phone about our second baby's death and leapt with joy when our third and fourth babies were born healthy and alive. It was him (and Becky) that gifted FPU to us, through which we radically transformed our lives. I owed him so much. So much.
How do you handle the loss of somebody that important to your life? I'm pretty sure I just figured I had a lot more time and opportunities in the future to express to him what he had meant to me. Even with the initial stage 4 cancer diagnosis, there was the hope of a fight and a miracle. And I suppose the 2.5 years of the fight made it feel, to me at least, like that was going to be the new normal. After the finality of the move to hospice care, there was finally a resemblance of recognition inside me that my time was running out. So I made an impulse decision to stop by their house, during work hours, as they were preparing to leave on a final family trip. And yet even then, during a hug while he remained laying down on his bed with his still reasonably strong arms wrapped around me, and his encouraging words "Proud of you" hanging in the air, I still didn't say all I needed to say. Words like "I'm going to miss you" and "Thank you" and "I love you" stayed in my head. Why? What the hell is wrong with me?!
That was the last time I saw him alive in person. And a draft of this post has been sitting here, unpublished, for almost 2 months. Am I still coming to terms with the fact that he's dead? Probably. But maybe I'm finally accepting how much he meant to me, and I suppose that's a start.
