No Tears

I didn’t cry at your funeral.

I don’t remember it well, but I know I didn’t cry. My eyes were dry when I sat in the car during the reception and ate my food alone, when I walked down the road below the church and texted my friends, and when I thanked everyone who expressed their condolences. It’s not an unusual reaction, I don’t think; I’ve seen others say the same thing, on forums on the internet.

Most days I don’t cry. Most days I make jokes and laugh, get angry and resentful, or I don’t think about it at all. I don’t think about you at all. I cried when you died, when your body kept taking raspy breaths with no life behind them, only a reflex of a body shutting down. I cried when you were dying, not even yourself, incoherent and thinner than I had ever thought you could be. You don’t think about that sight when you know someone who’s alive, when you talk to them all the time and see them in new outfits every day, enjoying all the food they eat, the movies they watch, the fun little trinkets they enjoy. You don’t think about them unresponsive and starving, lying in bed in a too-big white shirt that used to be too small.

I didn’t cry at your funeral, but I cry at weddings.

I like weddings. I love weddings, even. I think they’re fun, and loud, and I love seeing people be so, so happy. But amidst that joy there is a feeling deep in my chest that I can’t describe, tucked beneath all the muscle, caged in my ribs. It’s burning and it’s cold, it’s hollow and it feels heavy.

Because I see your face even in people who look nothing like you, and I feel so happy for those who still have their own equivalent of you while being horribly jealous and angry that I don’t. I am angry that few other people know this pain, I am angry that they get to be irritated at their parents while I am terrified of losing the only one I have. I am angry and bitter and hateful that it, among everything else, should happen to me; me, me, me. And it is selfish, which I’ll admit. Many others suffer far worse than I have, but it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change how many haven’t felt this and take for granted everything I wish I could have but never will.

I will not get a father-daughter dance. I don’t know if I would’ve even cared that much if you were alive, but now I certainly do. Not because of the dance itself, but because of why it can’t happen. If I have children they will never know their grandfather, my father. I’ll describe you as best I can but it won’t matter because they won’t know you.

But I know you. I knew you, at least. I know that if I asked you for nearly anything you would get it. I know that you, now clearly detrimental to your health, loved sweet things and candy, like those cookies you asked me to make when you got home from the hospital. I know what your voice sounded like, even though it becomes foggier with every day that goes by. I know I have a voicemail from you that I’ll inevitably lose, the only one I have, that sometimes I listen to and find it difficult to comprehend that was once real, that you were real. I know what it felt like to see you cry, for the first time, knowing that your father had cancer; how ironic it was, what would come only seven years later.

Even my friends have no memory of you, none that matter. The circle of people who knew you became a little bit smaller when Grandma died, and again when Grandpa died, and it will only continue to decrease, never grow. You, like billions of people alive before you and me will fade, just as I will fade. In two hundred years only our names will be known, if even that.

I found an arrowhead on the farm a few years ago; I picked it right up out of that skinny little stream, hands shaking, overjoyed at my find. I was probably the first person to touch it, to hold it in thousands of years. My brother found a tool, a pestle for grinding wheat, lying clean on a bed of leaves in the woods. It’s solid granite, heavy, rough and unusual; but it is smoothed in the shape of someone’s right hand, a thumb held up on the top and fingers curved around the side. How many hands and how many years it took to smooth it down, I don’t know—there’s even some smoothness, albeit less of it, where it was held with the left hand.

I don’t know the people who made it that smooth. They have faded just as I anticipate we will. But fading didn’t make them any less real, and I suppose that in a way, that's a comfort to me. Whoever made that arrowhead, whoever touched it last, surely they felt the same, at some point in their life. The hands that polished granite belonged to people who must’ve felt the same kinds of pain. Forgotten or not, they were real, and a piece of them still exists today, sitting on my window ledge.

In a thousand years, maybe someone will find a piece of me. Something small or something big, maybe even just a rock that I picked up and immediately sat back down. They may look at the same mountain, the same hill, the same river. They will certainly look up at the same moon and the same stars. Whether or not they know my name, or know of me at all, it won’t matter because I was real. I am real, just as you were real, just as they were real. And our pain, however raw, is nothing new; the world turns without ceasing, lakes form and mountains sink, forests turn to desert and desert turns to ocean but none of it changes what was. How terrible it would be if things stayed the same and never, ever changed.

I did not cry at your funeral, and I suspect there will be someone who doesn't cry at mine, either. That is alright, I think, because it’s something that will never change, and that means neither you, nor I, nor anyone else have ever been or will ever be alone in our pain and loss.