A WEEK WITHOUT WORDS

The sky during the “week without words” in Pittsburgh.

I’d planned to write about Pittsburgh today—what the city feels like, what it means to me, what it meant to him.

Dad would have been 80 today.

I thought, “He’d like that, if I wrote about Pittsburgh.” He always read these things.

Just like yesterday I thought I’d start taking down all his pictures from the walls so I could paint the walls and replace his pictures with my own. I removed a few, cried, and couldn’t.

Instead I spent the day creating a mood board. It calmed me, so I just kept doing it. I hadn’t been sleeping well, layers of stressful things and a predisposition for insomnia. I’d gone all week barely sleeping so I finally brewed a big, strong pot of valerian root tea and drank it all throughout the day yesterday, starting in the morning. I was moving so slow, mind and body. I forced an afternoon walk, I was in outer space, I talked to people I love, but I didn’t take anything else off the walls.

Then, I finally slept through the night.

I felt reborn today but found myself crying again. Is it the full moon? I have cried about him more this week than I have since he died. Things keep triggering it—driving the street where he grew up, the street we drove together the last day I saw him; seeing a cardinal while thinking of him; a teenager on TikTok crying from a hospital bed while having a vision of his dad in heaven.

Going through all his boxes of papers, all his clothes, his mail—all of that was hard a year ago, and I felt like I was in some space outside of time as I grieved, but I think being there with his things helped me to grieve. It put me in a place where I could make connections, see lines of generations more clearly, understand who he was, who I am because of him, how and why we related, all these things.

The process I’m currently in is much different but equally unknown to me. I am buying out my siblings and keeping the apartment, so this has become a process of transforming his home into mine, to fully remove his things—not just go through and sort but to remove the art and items he looked at every day, the things he lived with, and replace them with my own—to effectively erase him, to not have “Dad’s place” to go to anymore, like a museum or effigy of what once was, but one in which I could spend the whole night, maybe on some level like he was still here. It is the last piece of him to let go of, and yet … I will still be here, inside the same four walls he lived in.

It is a mind fuck.

The passage of time will do that, I guess, the comings and the goings, the changes you couldn’t possibly foresee.

So I set out to write about Pittsburgh, or maybe my dad, to honor him in some way, but I have not been wordy this week. I have not woken up and rushed toward pen and paper because words are spilling out and I must catch them. Instead, I follow run-on sentences that stem from run-on emotions. I have been in a liminal space outside of time again, as if he’d just died. I have been drinking valerian tea, making mood boards, taking salt baths, seeing things from unusual angles at 3 a.m., 4 a.m., just lying there, 5 a.m., noticing sunlight behind the blackout curtains, and eventually I rise.

I wrote this on July 11, my dad’s birthday, but never posted it—partly because I was so out of it that week. Happy belated birthday, dad.

What do you have no words for?

FROM THE ARCHIVES . . .

THAT THIS WILL END ••• e-zine on death + grieving

Personal note:

Reflecting back on my life over the past 18 months, since my dad died, the lyrics “everything changed, then changed again” (Tom Petty) came to mind. My life has done a 180 after 180 after 180.

instagram

shop ebooks + zines

book an astrology reading

get snail mail!

WRITE ME!
PO Box 483, Frederick, MD 21705