Haloooo. I Welcome You.
My dad called me every single day.Same opening. Every time. Without fail."Haloooo! I welcome you!"I hear it in my head still. I will probably hear it for the rest of my life. And I have stopped trying to make that sad.
He died a few years ago and for a long time grief felt like a door I was trying to hold shut. Like if I just stayed busy enough, productive enough, fine enough, the weight of it would not get through.
It got through anyway. Grief always does.
Then my therapist said something I have never forgotten.
She said: what if you treated grief like a friend? Not something to fight or avoid or push away. What if you opened the door, let it in, offered it tea?
You are going to be living with it regardless, she said. So why not change the relationship?
I thought about that for a long time.
And then slowly, carefully, I started letting my dad back in. Not the loss of him. Him. The whole person. The things that made him completely, specifically, irreplaceably himself.
He loved life more than anyone I have ever known.
I mean that in the most literal way. He was not performing joy or chasing happiness or working on his mindset. He just genuinely, deeply loved being alive. Loved people. Loved food. Loved a good story. Loved his New Balance shoes, which he wore with a dedication that bordered on religious.
I saw him cry exactly once in my life.
Our cat committed suicide. I am not being dramatic. The cat made a decision and followed through with it. And my dad, this man who held everything together his whole life, wept.
That was him. Completely unsentimental about most things and completely undone by a cat.
He was absent when I was a child. Work took everything he had and we were left with whatever remained. I used to be angry about that.
Then I grew up and we found each other properly. Rebuilt something real from scratch. And those years, the ones where he called me every single day just to say haloooo and welcome me into the morning, became the most important of my life.
He was my anchor. I did not know how much until I was out at sea without one.
I still go to visit him on Saturday mornings. I stand there and talk to him the way I always did. About the cats. About the job search. About Thailand and the dream I am building from the ground up. About the dancing I am going back to.
I think he would have something to say about all of it.
Probably something short and slightly inappropriate and completely accurate. That was his style.
If you have lost your person, I am not going to tell you it gets easier. I do not think easier is the right word.
I think it gets different. You learn to carry it differently. You stop fighting the grief and start walking alongside it. You let it come in, sit down, have tea.
And sometimes, on a rainy Saturday morning when you cannot go for your walk and you are on the stepper listening to the rain, you hear it.
Haloooo. I welcome you.
And you smile. Because he is not gone. He is just somewhere you cannot see yet.
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From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you today, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
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