Different shades of grief — or lack thereof

[Trigger warning: grief, loss, death of parent.]

Sometime between tonight and tomorrow (I’m not exactly sure because of the 8-hour time difference) it’s going to be the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. 

I don’t really know how I feel about it. 

It seems so distant, almost unreal, belonging to another life.

All of last year’s days around this time — my father’s ultimate hospitalization, his last days, my tribulations both around him and with my European queer ex-lover, my last message to my father, reconnecting with my European queer ex-lover, my father’s death, the weekend grieving and being held by my European queer ex-lover… All of it feels so so distant, almost unreal. 

Is it because of my recent gum surgery and all the surrounding worries? And/Or all the other preoccupations or emotions or events in my life now and lately? Or am I generally feeling partly numb because of a light, generalized depression due to my having been injured and/or convalescent (& thus not in my regular work & exercise routine) for over two months now? 

I look at myself in the mirror now and don’t like what I see: unfit, with a skinny upper body and once again round thighs. Is it this — these symptoms of dysmorphia & slight depression from lack of exercise — that is numbing me now and making last year’s events and memories feel so distant, so unreal? 

Or is it simply how grief works, hitting us when we least expect it, like in May & June of this year rather than now? 

Or maybe this is an effect of the “refathering” & “reteenagering” I’ve been doing with myself, concretely for the past 3-4 weeks also by “repeated exposure” to an intense father-son relationship through TJ Klune’s books of The Extraordinaries series? 

I guess it is what it is.  

Grief is a wild, unpredictable beast and the fact that I’m not feeling it in a strong or acutely painful way today doesn’t mean that it won’t bite tomorrow — or next week, or next month, or next year. 

Or the next time I go to a Pride event with loving, open-minded fathers offering “Free Dad Hugs”…