How much grief?

How much grief can one heart take before being completely shattered? How much pain can one heart take before ending up crushed and giving up?

I feel like mine is beyond its limits at this point. 

Apparently, my father has been hospitalized again and this round it seems to be for the very last time: the doctors told my family yesterday to get prepared, that my dad will probably not make it another week and certainly not to his birthday in two weeks. 

His health has been steadily declining for the past two years, most dramatically over the past year or so; and this isn’t the first time that my mother has reached out to me with accounts of my father being hospitalized not knowing if he’ll make it through. But he always has so far, so I don’t know if I can really believe, or trust, my mother this time round either. There is a part of me that feels it’s one of her numerous attempts to try and regain some control over, or contact with, me. And this makes me feel both very angry and somewhat under attack. I need to reset my boundaries with her, with my family of origin, again for the hundredth time. Which is painful and exhausting.

But there’s also the genuine, untainted grief about losing my dad — a pain that is made even worse by the fact that I effectively lost, or was abandoned by, my father as a child, almost three decades ago. I’ve already lost my dad, I was never really allowed to have an authentic, direct relationship with him, and he will never really know me. 

This last thought is probably the worst, the most painful for me. 

Yes, he loves me, he always has loved me, but he’s never approved of almost anything I did or was, he’s never really known me, seen me. So how could he really love, or have loved, ME? 

And this pain for not being really, deeply loved for myself has become all-encompassing again since yesterday. The feeling, the realization, of being profoundly alone because of having been unable to build a life with anyone. I tried three times, earnestly, in my twenties and early thirties, and failed miserably all three times. There was nobody yesterday to really hold me in all that pain and grief I was feeling around my dad — there would be no one who would/could go with me, if I decided to fly over to Europe for my father’s last days and/or funeral. Once again, I’d be alone, I’d have to do it all by myself. Show up to my family of origin with a different legal name, a different voice, a different body, all by myself. 

I cannot do it. 

I so much would have wanted — needed — to be held yesterday by my non-binary friend with whom I slept in California and/or my special genderqueer European friend here. But one of them is, precisely, in California; and the other, despite being only a few miles away, is busy with their boyfriend visiting from Europe (before going back to Europe themself in a couple weeks). Would either of them take the time, make the trip, to be with me yesterday, to be with me in this grief? No, and of course not. I’m not even going to ask, it’s unreasonable for me to expect it, so I won’t. But I would need it, I would desire it. 

But I give up. There’s no point telling me that I deserve to be loved, the whole me just as I am (“das ganze Packet”, as my European genderqueer friend put it). We all deserve to be loved but I am unable to find that love or those people who will build a life with me, or unable to let that love in wholly or to give myself enough to anyone to build a life with them. All I can be is just a “sexual friend” for my non-binary friend in California if “feelings don’t get too complicated” or someone to fill a gap between their wife and their boyfriend for my genderqueer European friend while they’re here visiting Colorado. Take it or leave it. 

I give up. It hurts too much. I don’t care how much well-meaning friends say I’m lovable and deserving of love: I have been unable to find it in four decades and I am going to stop seeking it. Go back to work and exercise, as I always have done, because those are the only things I seem to be able to do sort of okay.