Every Day Grief

I talked to my dad today. I wanted him to know I'm still cancer-free. The funny thing is, I was cancer-free for years and that wasn't something I had to tell people. Now that I've had it, it's a bigger deal.

My dad talked about how he is wondering if my brother will ever build a house in my mom's land. Right now, my step-father lives there. Dad mused that when the step-father dies, perhaps Dad could move down there and build a house.

Without thinking, and with much passion, I told him that he SHOULD do this and he should build a house that looks like a modernized version of the one I lived in as a small child. I suddenly knew I wanted this to happen so much, even though my dad probably could never move there and that will never happen.

As I've mentioned before, I think about that house every day. I often rebuild it on Sims. I think about the ways I would redo it if I had it. When someone sent me a picture of the interior of it, I obsessed about every detail. I basically had to make myself stop looking at it because it was making me too sad.

People act like grief is something that just passes after a while. In some ways it does. In other ways, I believe that the things or people we lose are so much a part of our identity that we're not only mourning the loss of the thing (or person), we're also mourning the loss of that part of us. It's a kind of grief that never completely heals because we have no idea how to fill it.