iMarci

I have always loved writing. It is innate in me. I have always had a passion for words. I may not use big words like our president, but my passion for writing has been lifelong.

Until about ten years ago. Something happened. I don’t even know what. Maybe it was the very first death I ever had to try and survive.

My godfather was a wonderful man. He never had a harsh word to say. He always had a smile. He worked so very hard, his entire life and then one day at 45 years old, he suffered a stroke.

He survived the stroke, but not completely his old self. He lost some vision in one of his eyes, which made it difficult for him to drive and do the job he’d been doing the last twenty-five years of his life. He became broken. He became desolate. He became a completely different man from the one I knew my entire life.

Yet he continued to smile. He continued to try to get up each day and go to work to support his wife and three children. We knew it was all just something that he would have to work through and we tried SO hard to support him. To show him how much we loved him, but sometimes … sometimes love isn’t enough to pull us away from our demos. The demons that haunt and torture is every waking and sleeping hour and nothing can get through their grip on our souls. Not even love.

The day I got the call that he was dead, I … I can’t even describe it. It was a Saturday. I’d been at my job for two years and NEVER had worked a Saturday before, but that day I had. It was almost like a divine intervention that prevented me from being home, because if I had been home, I would have gotten the call and not my father.

My father got it. My godfather’s 7-year-old daughter called our house, crying that her daddy was asleep and she couldn’t wake him up. If someone could go there to help her. My father rushed over, confused and worried.

When he got to their house and she was waiting at the door, tears streaking her face, he knew something was off. He just knew. When he got down to their basement and saw his lifeless body lying on the floor … he knew. The cold rushed to him, he almost fell down the stairs. He saw the rope still around his neck and turned to the frightened child and asked her what happened.

She had cut her father down. Not truly grasping what was actually happening, but somehow knowing deep down. What that child had to see that day, what my father had to see… I cannot fathom. I cannot put into words what that experience was like for either of them, and I hope I never in my lifetime ever have to.

I was called an hour later after the police had come and then the ambulance to take him away. So I never saw him like that. I still have his beautiful smile on my mind, his beautiful face, his laugh … everything in my memories of him are beautiful and it breaks my heart to know my dad lived with this other vision of him… this vision I cannot and do not want to imagine.

One would think THAT is when I would turn to writing. That I would escape into it and explore the rollercoaster of emotional warfare this death caused on my heart and soul. It wasn’t. I turned away from it. I broke completely away from blogging and never returned.

Ive tried a few times over the years, and just never found it ‘right’.

Then my own beautiful and wonderful and amazing and cherished father passed away a little over a year ago. A death, I never in a million years imagined coming so soon.

He was only 63. Way too young to pass away … but cancer is a disastrous machine that has no bigotry or prejudices… it picks at random and turns lives upside down like its a game to it. Cancer is evil incarnate, right behind the demons that would push someone to commit suicide and tear apart the lives of every person that has ever loved them.

The loss of my father brought me back briefly to writing. I wrote privately, dissecting the emotional turmoil one day and absolute (and confusing/guilt-inducing) numbness the second. My emotions were the same and yet different from when I lost my Godfather. There was no shock behind my dad’s death because I watched him dying day by day as cancer consumed him from the inside out. I grieved EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE DAYS. Every chemo session I went with him. Every half-smile he tried to give us because it was all the strength he had, to try to reassure US. Every word he spoke that I tried to memorize and knew I never would, leaving a broken hole of despair inside of me every single day I watched him crumble and slowly slip away.

I love my father with every breath I have ever taken and continue to take. He was my center. My soul. My heart. He was everything I am. He is the man that every man has to match up and every man has fallen short of. His loss has ripped me to shreds and I have spent the last year and few months trying to piece myself back together.

Each day can go either way. It can feel a little easier to breathe. It can feel a little easier to get up. It can feel a little easier to remember him and not fall completely apart to a sobbing mess of a girl I once was. Those are days that the pain lessens just a little more but still everpresent.

OR it can be the complete opposite. It can be like I am right back in his bedroom, sitting on his bed and holding his hand, watching with overwhelming pain and excruciating torture as he takes his last and final breath and the instant trigger of being lost, confused, angry, and GUILTY that he is no longer suffering and is in a better place … all rolled up into this fist that keeps punching me in the chest and making it so hard to breathe … so hard to see… so hard to LIVE without him.

Any day …. can be either one of those days, and living like this can be so hard. People look at me and see a smile. A smile that hides so much pain. A smile that is trying so hard to move forward because that is what he would want. He would want me to be happy. He worked SO DAMN HARD his entire life so I COULD be happy. I know this. It’s why the good days are getting a little more and more in between the bad days. It’s why I can see his picture now and totally break down. It’s why I can laugh with friends and not have that gutwrenching and soul-punching guild overriding every laugh. It’s why I know it’s still okay to cry too and grieve him still. EVERYTHING is still okay.

I know deep inside my heart he is watching us. I know he is crying when we cry, and I dont want that. He has suffered WAY MORE than any human ever should and he never deserved one fucking second of it.

He is, and always will be, the center of my life. My soul. My heart. He never will be forgotten. I will carry him with me always. But some days … some days are just so damn fucking hard