Grief time

I’ve spent the better part of the past 3 months grieving the death of my Dad. I’ve noticed two different phenomena as it relates to time:

1. Time slows WAY THE F*CK DOWN, basically to a crawl, when you’re grieving.
2. I can now see a little countdown clock in just about every memory of my Dad.

The first one has, at times, been pretty jarring. I remember posting a memory to my Instagram stories from July 30th, 2010 and thinking “HUH. I wonder why I’m seeing a memory for July 30th when it’s only June.” It was, in fact, July 30th. Every day for that first month or so felt like several days in one.

And fairly recently, I was out for a walk at my favorite park and was literally shocked to see fall colors on the trees. This happened on September 19th which, in the Midwest, is actually a pretty reasonable time to start seeing those fall colors appear. I was well aware that it was mid-September, and even knew that fall was starting in a few days but still wasn’t expecting it to actually be fall. In some weird way, after the longest summer of my life, my brain was not ready for said summer to end. And I get that.

My Dad died on June 28th, which was one week into summer. Obviously it didn’t take long for a month that he didn’t live in to start, but a whole new season where he no longer existed was apparently too much for my brain to fathom.

Another way this came up recently was last weekend being the end of the Detroit Tigers’ season. This year’s regular season started on March 30th, my Dad’s 76th birthday. My Dad was hospitalized for most of April and May. The hospital doesn’t splurge for anything better than basic cable so I got a subscription and downloaded the right app on my phone so we could watch games together when I visited. We watched most of the first half of the season together. The season that we started together coming to an end without him felt like one less way we were connected. It hit me like a ton of bricks to realize I could no longer watch Tigers games at night, subconsciously pretending that my Dad was watching the same game out there somewhere.

The second phenomenon is just what it sounds like. Whenever I see an old picture of my Dad, or reminisce about a fun memory we shared, my brain immediately does the math to figure out how much time he had left in that moment. I don’t know exactly when this started, but the most memorable instance was when I found an old ticket stub from the first concert I ever attended, which my Dad took me to – June 26th, 1998. 25 years (and 2 days) before he died. I was 17 years old, between my junior and senior years of high school, and my Dad was only 51. Something about the fact that we had NO IDEA we only had 25 years left together that night just stuck in my brain.

I’ve found myself looking back on all kinds of significant dates, counting down. As I do that, I can hear the ticking cow bells from that old Chamber Brothers’ song slowing down. 3 years and 8 days after I moved back home to Toledo. 100 days after my brother and I took our Dad to Spring Training in Arizona. 90 days after my Dad’s last birthday. 38 days after my last birthday. 10 days after his last Father’s Day. 12 hours after our last Tigers game.

And now, it’s been exactly 100 days that he’s been gone.