Same show, same me, new name on the door. If your app says You're Not Too Much and you were looking for Different, Not Broken — you're in the right place, nothing has changed except the sign.
There's that saying that all roads lead to Rome. In my life, all roads lead back to my dad.
If there's something annoying I do, it came from him. If there's something good I do, it came from him too. I'm good at business because he was abhorrent at it — I took over his practice at 21 because it was a mess and that is not how you're supposed to do anything. He was also the best doctor I have ever met, and I don't say that because he was my dad. Sometimes those two things don't go together.
August 21st, he will have been gone for ten years. We recorded this two days out.
Here's the thing about ten years. In the first week I remember thinking there was no way we would ever get here — that I could not be a person for a decade without him, that it was structurally impossible. Except I'm here. And I have a ten-year-old who got six weeks with him, and who was six weeks early, which is a level of detail the universe did not have to include and included anyway.
There's an idea that you survive grief. That you get to the other side of it.
There is no other side of grief. It doesn't end. It doesn't stop. Some days it might as well be the day it happened, and some days are worse.
My grief is not smaller. I've just grown around it. The life around him got so much bigger that it takes up less of my brain — but he's still at the middle of it, I still talk about him like he's here, he's still in every decision I make, and he still drives me fricking crazy, which I assume is the job.
I tell you about the drive to get everybody dinner, the first time I'd properly been alone since he died, and asking out loud into an empty car for anything at all. And what was in the text box on my phone when I picked it up again. I didn't type it. I'm not a woo-woo afterlife person. I'm just telling you what was there.
And I leave you with my youngest, who asked what Pop Pop's real name was, found out how Jewish naming works, and reached a conclusion I could not argue with.
Ten years. He hasn't left. Here's to a long time more of missing him.
This one is about my dad, and about grief. If today isn't the day for that, it'll still be here when it is.
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