Grieving through the "firsts"....

My Dad died in mid-October 2008. Fully a year ago.

"They" say that the first everything is the hardest after someone dies. First holidays, first birthday...you name it....if it's the first after the death, then it's the hardest.

Well, I am not disputing "them". But I will also say very honestly that I feel like the first holidays without my Dad - i.e., the holidays of 2008 - were a cake-walk compared to this second wave of grief that has swelled up this year.

Maybe it's because he died so close to Thanksgiving and Christmas...so that initial hazy fox with which grief blankets us in those first weeks or months after someone dies carried me through the holidays relatively unscathed....

Whereas someone whose loved one died early in the year might experience their first holidays without the loved one with more sadness and missing.

Now, a year out, I'm much clearer in my head....and the holidays this year, I'm finding, are a whole different ball of string. Seems like THIS round of holidays is felt with the same kind of magnitude normally reserved for the first round that "they" warn you about.

So it's sort of like when tissue goes into shock...the nerves sort of numb-up....and then, later, when stuff starts coming back to life tissues and nerves connect we are thrust back into the acute awareness of the pain that comes with healing.

I keep clinging to the fact that grief is a process - although admit to really wondering when I'll see the light at the end of this tunnel.

Mostly, though...I just miss my Dad.