Two years later

And I can tell you: the feeling of loss is still incredibly present. It is even stronger than it has ever been. The first year you live in a kind of haze, you do everything for the first time ‘without’ and yet somewhere in the back of your mind you walk around with the idea that if he were to suddenly walk through the door now, that would be the most normal thing in the world. As if the five months in which you have constantly been in and out of the hospital and have seen someone become deathly ill were a flicker of your imagination. You start keeping track of the days since you last saw someone. Not necessarily a strange habit in my family; after all, we were used to living spread out across this globe, so counting the days until you saw someone again was the normal course of things. And saying goodbye to people is a routine that I have basically mastered since my birth. Perhaps too well, but that’s what you get when you have to pack your bags every few years and head off to another country. Only this time it is completely different, because those reunions I always have with my friends abroad, I won’t have this time with my father. And that idea, now that we are two years further along, has not fully sunk in yet. That intense blow is still waiting for me somewhere in the starting blocks.

Yes, there have been moments when things were less good, like that time when at the most random place a song was played that was also heard at his cremation, but today is different. Today is downright awful. Two years feels way too long. Call me crazy if you want, but I would so much like the pain of loss to still be fresh. That I could now say that I saw him just last week – whether he would be fit as a fiddle or lying in some damn hospital bed with an abundance of IVs in his frail body.

Yesterday, two years ago, came the hellish phone call including a car ride (which felt like it lasted an eternity) to our Belgian neighbors where my father was unexpectedly dying. By the way, I have also learned that in the case of cancer you should never use the word ‘unexpectedly’, but that’s exactly how it felt, because the chemo was going well as far as it can go. Taking into account the possibility of death was strictly forbidden by my father, so it was never discussed.

Saying goodbye to sixty years of having lived an extraordinarily special life and thirty-three of those which he would undoubtedly say were the most beautiful (because secretly he was a hopeless romantic; after meeting my mother he could not go a day without her) and twenty-six where I have been a part of. The number two actually pales in comparison to all of this, but in those two years are a shitload of stories that I would have loved to share with him, but it is what it is.

Surviving after the death of a loved one. It’s definitely not a walk in the park.