Grief is the hardest. Because it isn’t one emotion, it’s a dozen emotions in one: sadness, anger, loneliness, regret, hurt, longing, the pain of something gone, the unfairness of what won’t be that should have been, the lingering memories, disbelief, love, laughter, all at the same time.
My siblings and I were there as our father passed, surrounding his hospital bed, watching the — honestly — horrific final moments as the medication ceased and the machines turned off.
We went back in after they’d ‘prepared’ him and hit a wall of shock at how much he’d ‘sunken’ in only an hour. He’d aged 30 years and didn’t look like himself.
There were buckets of tears, yes, loads of sniffling and stifled wails. But there was idle conversations in those final hours, too. Making plans for ‘afterwards’ while the ventilator was still inflating his lungs for him. We ordered his urn while sitting next to him. It was surreal, but it’s what people do. You talk, you plan, you joke, reminisce, and cry.
Yet none of the moments of that long day, none of the images of watching my father fade, none of the stark memories of his passing struck me worse than after my sister and I had taken up post on either side of his bed and lifted the sheet to cover his head.
Because that was when the nurses handed us his belongings and we had to leave.
Just leave. Walk away, exit, drive to his empty house like he weren’t abandoning him and emotionally wrecked in a hundred ways.
And that was the moment, the image, the iconic second of heartbreak which still sends me into aching tears.
My father’s boots.
If they’d been tennis shoes, it wouldn’t have hit so hard, but it was his cowboy boots. Black and tan leather, hanging limply from my brother’s hand as he walked out the hospital doors, that utterly destroyed me.
They were a snapshot of the man my father was. Big, beaten up, dusty, several sizes to large for me or my sister and too small for our brother. His country style, his working man life, the edges worn thinner from his bowed legs.
We didn’t know what to do with them, but getting rid of them in any way felt like a sin. We used them at the funeral as flower planters, matching bouquets standing on either side of his beautiful urn.
I had trouble looking at the display. Every time I did a fresh wave of grief blurred my eyes and emotions to mush.
No one could ever fill my father’s boots.
ZoeGraves 