The Aftermath

I'd like to preface this post by saying that the following is something I wrote nine years ago as a twenty year old away at college dealing with the sudden loss of her dad. It's raw, emotional, imperfect and it is deeply personal to me. Though it propels me back to one of the most painful points in my life, I am so thankful that I was able to write down what I was feeling. I feel protective of the young girl who wrote it, but recently, I have started feeling strongly compelled to share her thoughts with anyone who might need to see them. On this, the ninth anniversary of my dad's passing, the timing felt right as I have found my way back to writing and in doing so, I feel closer to my dad than I have since he died. Thank you for reading.

The Aftermath

I am now in a place where I don’t feel I can turn anywhere but inward. It’s not like I don’t have amazing people ready and willing to be there for me anytime I need them, it’s just that I don’t want to be comforted right now. If feels like allowing everyone to have their turn at being sorry for my loss is a full time job. When someone close to you dies, there’s usually an immediate outpouring of love and support from the four corners of the earth. Eventually, the shock value wares off, and people go back to their daily lives – as they have every right to. Then the real work starts. You can only burden others with your grief for so long until you have to make the choice to invite it in for a drink and work out your differences face to face. Otherwise, it is just going to grow stronger until one day you’ll be late for work, forget to lock the door and come home to find that your grief has moved in, shaved its legs with your razor and eaten the leftovers that you’ve been looking forward to all day.

It’s an impossibly lonely journey when trying to navigate your own capacity to confront your worst fears. Experiencing a death plays tricks on your mind. It brings forth the rawest emotions, ready or not. That’s why some people laugh hysterically at funerals only to finally cry when they’re checking out at the grocery store three days later. It’s why I laughed through tears only minutes after learning my dad had died while attempting to tell my best friend over the phone what had happened. “My dad just died! Is that not the fucking craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Why am I laughing right now? Who does that? I’m standing in my closet because I don’t know where you’re supposed to stand when your dad dies.”

Emotions as epic as grief don’t follow the standard trajectory of the more common feelings like excitement or disappointment that we encounter throughout the normal course of business. Those super emotions are the ones that we have feared and fought against feeling our entire lives. It’s our natural instinct as human beings to protect ourselves from them, renounce them, send those brats off to boarding school so you don’t have to deal with them, but inevitably something happens and there’s nowhere to hide.

I have never in my life felt a feeling of this magnitude. Sadness seems like a new genre of comedy compared to this. I sit here on my own, intoxicating my mind with the horrific images of my father’s death. I break my heart, and break it again, thinking over and over how I could have done something- anything- to prevent losing a man who meant more to me than I would have ever imagined while he was still breathing in front of me. I don’t expect people to know how to deal with me at this point. I don’t expect them to understand how I feel and quite truthfully, I’d be offended if anyone even dared to say that they do. I get it, I’m not the first person to have their dad die. But I’m one of the few that have ever had MY dad die, and I am the only one of me who has ever had my dad die, so sue me if it feels like no one can possibly ever understand what this feels like.

I grew up with a father who, though he loved very deeply and was genuine in his affections towards me, tested his life and those in it with every fiber of his being. He led a fast paced, fatally unhealthy lifestyle that he openly admitted would not carry him past the age of 65. He was unapologetic and proud of this. Growing up and seeing this self-destructive behavior in someone I loved and still love so deeply, tormented me. I watched my dad slowly diminish his longevity over the years we spent together. I would ask him if it were even possible to try to change and he unabashedly told me that the issue was that he had no desire to.

When I went away to college and his health drastically declined, my life took a turn that sent me spiraling into the paranoia of constantly anticipating my greatest fear. Deep down, I think I always knew that I would one day wake up to find that he had died while I was hundreds of miles away. Every time I would roll my luggage out the door to go back to school with the heaviest heart, I would make sure to tell him just how much I loved him. I’d sink into his arms and a wilted, defeated version of myself would look into his eyes and know that although he loved me, it wasn’t enough to make the changes in his lifestyle that he needed. There was nothing more traumatic than having to go away from him thinking: This could be the last time I see him. This could be the last time I hear him say he loves me. This could be the last chance I have to tell him that, even will all things considered, he was still my hero.

Those moments, the ones where we both knew that no matter how much we loved each other, nothing was going to change and we just had to accept that life is not perfect and neither were we, cemented our bond. He would hold me as I cried. I played him a song by Rascal Flats that I told him made me think of him when I was away and I saw him get emotional. I know it wasn’t easy for him, knowing how much he was hurting me, but he deserved to feel guilty and he knew that. The most painful thing of all is that he too felt the immensity of the hopelessness of our situation and when I saw the tears well up in his eyes one of the last times I was with him, I couldn’t help but feel tremendously guilty for being so mad at him for so long. I think I forgave him.

I made him promise to call me no matter how busy he was. He was notorious for being unreachable, so seeing his name appear on my phone would make me feel so special and chosen. I knew he was calling because he wanted to talk to me, not because he had to. He’d regularly call me around 11pm and we would talk for hours. I knew I could ask him anything, tell him anything, and that for the first time in my life, he felt the same way about me. There was a mutual respect between us in his final months that had never been there before. I think I gained his by accepting his very adult shortcomings instead of trying to change them, and he gained mine by ceasing to protect me from the truth, no matter how awful it was. He spoke to me as if he knew his life was ending. He’d say “I’m packing up my boxes, but you’re just moving in.” It’s as if we’d reached this point where we realized that our time as father and daughter was coming to a close, so we just talked as equals when it came to knowing anything about life. That was our time and it was unconventional, but genuine; the perfect emblem of our relationship.

He had survived heart attacks, strokes and most recently, two brain procedures. The one conversation that stuck out to me, and has tugged on my heart strings ever since, was the only time he ever told me he was afraid. No one who knew my father would ever describe him as the man I heard on the phone that night. Jerry Schneiderman was fearless, invincible, a troublemaker, and a genius. He was the one that people went to for answers; a fixer. He was a perpetual father figure to many, even when being such meant he wasn’t always home with his actual kids. He was a heavy set, gold chain wearing Jew with wild and curly hair. He looked like the head of the Russian Mafia, especially in his later years when he started walking with a what I used to call his pimp cane. He was loud, colorful, crude and eccentric. He was many things to many people, but no one ever thought he could be afraid. I had asked him if he ever felt afraid of life or of death and he paused, and then I heard him say “Yes. Sweetheart, sometimes I am afraid. Sometimes I’m very afraid to die. But you know what? People die, that’s what they do.” Hearing him say those words reduced me to tears. My dad had fears of his own. He was human, and so, so real. He was willing to let me be there for him and something about that made me feel like I was the luckiest person in the world. It felt exclusive.

The last time I saw my father alive, he was feeling better than he had for a very long time and my hopes were the highest they’d ever been for his recovery. He told me that I was beautiful, called me his little Sheila face- his nickname for me because I look so much like my mother-and as I fell into his arms, as it was our routine, he said that he was so unbelievably proud of my writing and that he loved me so much. What more could a daughter ask for as parting words from her father? I had no way of knowing at the time that that moment would be the end to all I’d ever have with him. I would never look into his green eyes again or feel the love inundating his signature bear hug that smelled like insulin and olives, a combination that if you didn’t know my dad, could never make sense to you. The next time and last time I would ever see him would be as I was standing over his casket looking at a body that did not resemble or do justice to the remarkable, flawed man I had just barely started to understand. To have seen him lying there, so still and lifeless with none of the essence that made him my own, will haunt me for the rest of my life.

The room was quiet and I remember my older brother standing next to me because I was too afraid to go alone. The only noise was the sound of my dad’s watch ticking on his wrist. I watched the second hand move and I remember having the most unrealistic ephemeral feeling of hope. Maybe this was all a joke. That wouldn’t be unlike my dad. He’d pop up from the casket, eyes wide open with his infamous shit eating grin and laugh at all of us for falling for yet another of his outlandish, often distasteful, schemes. He would have adored the attention he was getting. But when that didn’t happen, when his expression remained unchanged and his cold hands didn’t reach out to hold mine, I knew he was gone. As the second hand passed to count the minutes that were no longer a part of his life, I felt shattered. I ran outside to my mother, buried my face in her body and cried like I had never cried before.

The morning my worst fear became reality was one that I have since played over and over in my mind as if I were pushing on a bruise to see if it still hurts. My phone was ringing constantly and having spent hours studying well into the morning at the library for finals the night before, I was exhausted and ignoring the incoming calls. As they persisted, I suddenly came to and looked at the screen to see that I had missed calls from my siblings and several other relatives. I stared at my phone as it rang with a call from my big sister Charleye, with whom my relationship had always been strained, and that was all I needed to know. I knew right then that choosing which call to answer would determine who was to break the news to me that my dad was gone.

With a shaken voice that must have taken all of the strength she possessed, she broke her baby sister’s heart. “Suni, I need you to come home, okay little one? I need you to listen to me and I need you to try to stay calm. Dad died last night.” My mind froze. I knew it. I knew this would happen but somehow I was still in shock. I forgot how to speak, how to cry, even how to breathe. I felt pain; unmistakable, sharp, deafening pain. The kind that makes your ears and throat feel like they’ve just caught fire. I remember gasping and trying to catch my breath while sitting up in bed, afraid I might suffocate. I couldn’t help myself. I begged her to tell me it wasn’t true. I repeated over and over that it just couldn’t be true even though every part of me knew this was exactly how it would happen. I screamed and kept screaming at the top of my lungs as she tried to stay strong and tell me things would be okay through my absolute and utterly selfish hysteria.

“I know Suni, I know. We’ll get through this. I’ll get you home right now.” I knew how hard she was trying to hold it together, after all she had just lost her father too, but she had always been the tougher of the two of us. I just kept screaming as if he had been murdered right there in front of me. I would never see or speak to him again and there was nothing I could do about it. He was gone and that was it. No single thing on this earth, no force strong enough would ever bring him back to me. You don’t quite know what to do or what comes next. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’ve been holding back or always wanted to say suddenly doesn’t matter because you will never have the chance. Everything is just simply gone in less than a second and it’s paralyzing.

Now I am in the aftermath, and it is by no means the calm after the storm. I come home some days and throw his clothes on to my bed so that his scent fills the room and I cry. I beg him to come back even though I know that he can’t hear me. Even when he could hear me, things didn’t change, so why would I expect things to be different now? It hurts me to know I can’t reach him. It hurts me to know that our lives only overlapped for a short period of time. I feel cheated and violated. I fall asleep every night playing his old messages over and over again.

Now Jerry Schneiderman is only a memory. My father, the one that loved me my whole life, is now just a thought, a picture in my mind, an echo of a voice that can no longer speak to me. I think about the fact that one day I will struggle to pull the sound of his laugh from the archives of my mind. I will have to think harder to remember the way that he stared when he had too much on his mind and I now have to close my eyes to see him smiling at me because it is no longer possible when they’re open. He only exists within me and it is infinitely less fulfilling than people with stronger faith than me try and reassure. “He’s watching over you. He’s in a better place. He will always be with you.” No. He isn’t here.

Now I fear every day that those I love could leave me at any moment. No matter how much you love someone, no matter how much they mean to you, you can’t have them forever. You either lose the people you love, or they lose you. I know how cynical and negative that sounds but it’s the damn truth. It will hurt the most when they upset you or let you down, it will leave the biggest empty space in your life when they’re gone and it will make you wish you weren’t capable of loving as deeply as you do. Loving someone the way I love my father is not something that just comes with happiness and fulfillment and old home videos of birthday parties and toddler giggles. It’s painful and exhausting. It sometimes feels unfair and frustrating. Because I loved and lost my dad, loving people has forever been changed for me and I am so much more selective of who I allow myself to love because I can’t go through this again for just anyone.

My father is the first major loss I’ve ever experienced. I have so much left to say to him, so many more milestones he should have been here for. I’m debating leaving his last message to me unheard because I want so desperately to know he still has more to say to me too. I have loved him so differently, so unconditionally and loving him has taken every ounce of understanding and maturity that I have because it would be too easy to stay mad at him forever. Through loving him, I have been taught some of the most concrete lessons in life and it constantly continues to test my character and resilience. I have had to learn to let go of every single judgment I have ever had about expectations and what a father “should be.” I’ve begun to see virtues in myself that could not have been here for any other reason than because my father put them here, messy and out of place like he left most other things, but here none the less. For now, I just have to hold on to the things that he left behind and know that even though he isn’t here anymore, he was once, and I am who I am because of that.