In the days immediately following my dad’s death, I was in such a fog. I still dropped the kids off to school and did pick up. My employer invited me to work as much or as little as I wanted but I was a freelancer, so I wanted to keep working but I chose mindless tasks I could get done without the full concentration of my brain. I still would find myself overrun with tears. Anyway, I just remembered, there was once day when I was walking back from dropping off the twins, it was raining and I passed a dad I knew but not particularly well. We don’t even always say hello but this time he stopped and said.
He said he was sorry to hear about the loss of my dad, and I said thank you. He said he lost his father a few years ago too (I think that’s what he said. Or he might have said he lost him when he was much younger.) I said, how do you get over the loss of your dad? And he choked up and said “I don’t know.” I have no idea, I think he said. It’s happened many years ago and I am still f#ed up about it.
That was it. It was very generous of him to share that with me. We still run into each other on occasion and we still don’t always say hi. It was just like this random other part of life that doesn’t interact with regular life, but it was also wild to witness what someone else might be going through beneath the surface.