ten years, now eleven

10.31.2017
it is strange to me that dad passed away ten years ago. i don't really keep count of the years so it could be five years for all i know. ten years usually sounds so celebratory but in this instance it twists my throat and gut into unsure knots. when i was in san francisco, janet, whom everyone on the streets called grandma, shared about how she lost her father when she was a child and started to cry. i looked at her white hair like a foretelling of my future, staying grief. this week in class, roxana shared about the altares created during dia de los muertos - about how they signify celebration of life and how they invite re-memory of loved ones so that they do not disappear. i appreciate this; i don't know how the taiwanese culture remembers the dead. i don't know if they do, but i do know they fear the emotional pain as much as some cultures fear the dead.

it is not yet the 31st, but today i borrow from c.s. lewis' words in preparation for tuesday:

"no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. i am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. the same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. i keep on swallowing. at other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. there is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. i find it hard to take in what anyone says. or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. it is so uninteresting. yet i want the others to be about me. i dread the moments when the house is empty. if only they would talk to one another and not to me. there are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that i don't really mind so much...then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace."

some things i dread all of october: the unbearable secret which no one in the room knows, the screaming desire to tell everyone and no one; feeling like i am living two timelines at once as the present becomes irrelevant and bothersome. the compounded grief as the years move me further from the epicenter of my memory of him; like i am being moved further from shore with no mind to my protesting legs and lungs. it's cruel because the waves don't give a shit. thinking/hoping i am ready to be sad that day and never being ready.

10.31.2018

i had forgotten that i wrote this last year and never published it. it is october once more and i am reflecting (obsessing) about the impossible challenge that is teaching. october is obscenely difficult for first year teachers, but something that is giving me pause is the ethnographic work that we are doing with our adviser. i think undoubtedly my parents were my first teachers in life. because my mom and i have such a contentious relationship, i remember my dad fondly as someone who i knew i could ask for math help. i often did not want to because he would inevitably teach me ten steps ahead of what i had to know in class. even so, i could tell that he loved math. "a function is just a black box," he would try to explain to me for the fourth time. "if you put this number in the black box, something happens to it and it comes out like this." i never understood that analogy as hard as i tried.

i grieve the fact that he will never see me accomplish my dreams. i grieve that there are things i will never be able to ask him or know about him; that i have to imagine and fill in the blanks with conjectures. this year, after the first half of the month passed and my terrible anxiety and anticipation of the day passed, i found that the actual day was manageable even though i cried in every period telling my students. i'm not sure if it's because i cried it all out earlier in the month or because it's been 11 years. in some ways i hope the pain will never disappear entirely, because it would feel like a disservice to him.