How To Walk With Silence

 One of the things that readers mention most to me when we talk about biomechanical death is the deep exhale - the space that you enter after the ceremonies are over, and all the well-wishers have gone back to their lives.

I remember this silent space very well. Before my father passed on, he had been sick for a time. I helped care for him during his final months, and whenever I would go over to my parents’ home to see him and help him, I would enter the side door and toss my car keys onto the ktichen table. He couldn’t see me, but he could hear me from where he sat in the great room in his big armchair. He knew by the telltale jangle of my keys.

“Hey babe,” he always said.

I never knew how much I would miss those words until I couldn’t hear them anymore ever again.

So when his service was over, and the extended family had gone back to their respective homes to resume their lives, I was left with that deafening silence. The absence of his warm voice calling out to me from that armchair. And further, that armchair - his seat - sat empty; lifeless. It’s only meaning had been to provide him comfort, and after his passing, it’s reason for being was rendered irrelevant. I felt a whole lot like that armchair in the weeks and months that followed.

That wall of silence where the absence of him was so firmly carved - a big hole shaped like my dad - was so powerful that it felt impossible to overcome it. It felt unbearable. Like something no one should ever have to do. How would life ever return to normal? What would happen to me? How was I going to ever be able to manage without him?

So that silence got quickly filled up with questions - fears, worries, doubts, grief. As I worked to clean out the house, I would imagine his body sitting in that chair, and I would replay all those little movies in my head of our conversations, our disagreements. Regret would assail me - regret at all the things we never got to do, all the things I never said, all the life he would never get to live. And following those regrets come the what ifs. What if I had managed to get there sooner? What if I had gotten a different physician involved earlier on? What if we had elected to pursue a different type of treatment? What if, what if, what if… Those what ifs will drive you to madness in short order if you let them.

After all the pomp and circumstance of the funeral had quieted,
it was seeing Dad's empty chair that made my grief feel the most raw. 

So the silence became necessary. It was uncomfortable; like eating food you know you don’t like but have to eat anyway because it’s good for you. I wanted that silence filled up with something, but not the regret and the what ifs. So I developed a love-hate relationship with that dark silence. I hated that it existed at all: that I could no longer hear my father’s voice or see his face. But I loathed the mind noise that filled it up even more. So I danced with that silence for a long time, trying to find my way through careful steps and choreographed moves around the dreadful noise that threatened to fill it up at every turn. I can’t even tell you how long I did that; I don’t remember.

Time passed in that silence.

The house fell empty. Once there had been life there; laughter, fun, Christmases filled with lights and food and joy. But those moments were now only memories.

Then, the house sold. It became the address of someone else; a family. Another father was raising his little girl in there, in the halls where I had grown. It became too painful to even drive by there.

So the house, the Christmases, my father…all gone.

But that silence was still there.

The silence - that dark lovely, hateful thing - became the place I longed for. Where once I had hated it, I came now to rely on it. It took the place of my dad; became my dad, maybe. I don’t know. I guarded it religiously.

And it’s with me even still. Even now. Fourteen years later, and I am still walking through that silence. I don’t have to work as hard now to fight off the noise that threatens to consume it, though. Now, when the silence gets filled it, its generally with memories of my dad - times laughed, funny shit he said or did, or even the memory of how he made everyone feel welcomed, no matter what.

That silence that emboded the pain of my grief has now come to be temple to the memories of my dad. And my dad lives on there - in that silent space. He is not gone from me.  

Looking back, I realize the work of trying to fight off all othose regrets and what ifs was exhausting. Grief experts (yes, there’s such a thing) would probably have several bullet points for me to read on how to process that. I don’t care. I don’t regret exerting endless hours of effort for the protection of that silence.

I loved my dad. I love him still. I will love him always. And the silence that now embodies him is dear to me, as he was dear to me, and I will walk through it all the days of my life until I, too, am here no more, and that silence will then be left to my own loved ones to walk through.

Walking with this silence has helped me measure my days, and has addeded meaning to memories that were only fleeting thoughts before. Walking with this silence has created in my life a place where I can honor my dead and grieve them, without the judgment of the watchful eyes of the world.

And walking with this silence has brought me now to this place, where I want to explore what it means to live and die, and to begin to unravel what I believe are myths that surround a part of our experience that we cannot yet define.  I hope I can help move us toward an understanding of it.