Grief Diaries, Day One: The Enormity of Grief
Hello Tumblr, I am back.
When I started this blog, I was 30 (!). I was a grad student - hence the name: grad student drone; I was trying to finish my dissertation; I wasn't yet married to MOTL and thoughts of children were completely out of my radar. I blogged fairly regularly, then intermittently, and then rarely. The last post I made was in October, 2017. At that point, I was a year plus into a tenure-track job, I had one kid and was knee-deep in my first year of therapy, after suffering from a debilitating bout of postpartum depression. I thought I'd blog again, but always had something else to do: whether it was hustling to get tenure, realizing that the hustle was misplaced and that the rules were rigged and that academic meritocracy was a myth (all of which I speak about with awesome guests in my podcast, Academic Aunties), trying to survive a pandemic, and - quite honestly - trying to find an identity outside academia. The years since were also full of lots of love -- MOTL and I now have two kids! -- but also a lot of heartbreak, including pregnancy losses and the loss of loved ones.
And it is loss that brings me again to this blog. You see, exactly a month ago today, on June 30, 2024, I lost my dad, Leonides Fulgueras Tungohan, who was 73 years old.
Here he is, at 28, posing with a cig, with shaggy black hair, a precursor to today's shaggy, K-pop hair styles:
The loss was unexpected: my dad had health conditions, including gout and diabetes, but he wasn't terminally ill. Our last conversation was me, kissing his cheek, and telling him "I love you" and asking that he "drive safe" after he and my mom drove away from our house following my kids' dance recitals. My last sighting of my dad was when he was walking behind my mom while my mom and I Face-Timed, wincing in pain as he tried to walk to the couch. "Your dad is having another gout flare-up," my mom explained. I didn't think anything of it. When my dad peered into my mom's computer screen and saw that my kid, SG, was there, he brightened up, as he always did when he saw my kids, and said hi.
To say that these final moments haunt me is to make a huge fucking understatement. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that the last month has been a blur. It has been a month of complete and utter heartbreak.
I vacillate between two modes: debilitating, heart-wrenching, absolute sadness or run-of-the-mill sadness. When I feel the former, the enormity of my loss sometimes hits me, so hard, that I have to grip something -- a ledge, a chair, a table -- to keep from falling. When I feel the latter, I'm only kinda sad because I get caught up in day-to-day tasks, such as putting my kids to bed or doing the laundry. In these everyday mundane moments, my sadness is like a low hum -- it's there, in the background, but not so painful that it becomes debilitating.
Whether it's the former or the latter, there isn't a second in the days since June 30 that I am not sharply, keenly, viscerally aware that my dad is no longer here. It takes monumental effort to tamp it all down because when I allow myself to feel the full range of my grief, I collapse. And I can't collapse, not when I still have to live, not when there's so much shit to do, because what is most cruel about death is that with death comes a lot of work. Work that tends to fall on women. Work that tends to fall on eldest daughters. Work that is layered on top of the other work that we've got to still do, from paid work to social reproductive work.
One of my lowest moments in the last week was needing to find space to grieve, by myself, without interruption. And so I bought a ticket to watch a movie - Fly Me to the Moon - by myself. Sitting at the very back, watching couples and friends in front of me murmur and laugh among themselves, I could finally, in the dark, just be.
Having a space to just be is also why I am returning to this blog because it provides me a space to process and find a bit of a reprieve from all sorts of expectations. It's also a way for me to remember my dad, to think of him, to place my memories of who he is in written form. This is also going to be an experiment for me because I want to see just how the next year will be for me. A friend, S, who also lost her dad a few years ago, told me that grief is all-consuming in the beginning but that eventually, you make peace with it and that grief will almost be like a friend, who is always just there, whose presence you just get used to. So my commitment, on day one of my grief diaries, is to track whether I will ever make peace with my grief. Will grief be a friend who is always just there? Because right now, grief is (still) all-consuming and doesn't seem to want to give me a break. Grief isn't a friend yet. Grief and I haven't made peace yet. I have complicated feelings about grief: I want grief to just leave me alone, to stop suffocating me in its pervasiveness, but I also want grief not to ever leave. Because I fear that if grief leaves, does that mean my dad and my memories of him does too?
Along the way, I might write about work and my efforts to truly pivot away from prioritizing work over everything: if there is anything I now know, with absolute clarity, is that life is fucking short, and we all need to prioritize what matters. I might also write about my kids as they deal with the loss of their grandpa, about how my family and I reconfigure our lives to see what happens next. I will also write about the (gendered) work that accompanies death and dying and how the business of death is so grossly capitalist. Hey, I'm a researcher! I can't turn that part of my brain off!
We will see how this year goes. And if you're also working through your own grief, and want to process things with me, maybe we can do it together?
