My Father Died When I Was 17 and No One Was There to Catch Me.

I’ll admit that’s a bit of a dramatic title, but that’s how it felt. Except when you loose someone and no one is there is help, you don’t just free fall into space. No, in this case you are suspended like a feather in a web. People catch you in grief not so you don't float away, but to pull you through the endless night. If no one is there you stay stuck—or perhaps I’ll speak for me now—I stayed stuck, at 17, emotionally, spiritually, growing only at half speed, quarter speed, through the proceeding decades of life without a father, without an understanding of what grief even meant.

The only thing I recall receiving after my father died was a drug habit and a sympathy card from the other employees at Barnes and Nobel. One women, or probably girl, (she couldn’t have been much older then me), wrote “This too shall pass.” I remember staring at those words and it felt like, “What will pass?” Remembering my father? Does loss pass? Does grief pass? Or does it just change? I couldn’t make sense of it and I still can’t. I don’t blame her. Or anyone. We are a culture nearly completely void of all emotional literacy around death and grief, and even I was until more recently. My father's death had no wake, no funeral, no celebration, no tears. It turns out grief catches up to you, or at least it waits, patiently at the door, like a cat stalking yarn. Actually all pain waits till you are ready. We don’t get to just bypass our feelings and assume they will go away. That’s how they become ghosts feeding on our psyche and gaslighting us into insanity.

I don’t get to pretend my father was simple and that our relationship was free from harm other then this one pesky occurrence of his death-by-Parkinson's. He was my primary “caretaking” but really I was his. I was tied to a string by his side, tethered to his needs even when he didn’t realize he had any. I was his protector, his confidant, and somehow still a little girl. There’s more, lots more, but I’ll save the details cause it’s not why I’m here, but let’s just say boundaries were not real.

The bigger issue, the real drive behind my words, the other fish that is too big to fry, is that culturally we treat grief like a disease. Grief is something to “get over” rather then something that shapes us. For me grief was non-existent for 21 of the 23 years he has now been dead. When his name or life role came up it was like a blank slate staring me. I didn’t know how to react. Was I supposed to be sad? I didn’t feel sad. Was I supposed to cry? Where were those promised tears? Did the feelings not come because I had more important reasons to be mad at him? Or did they not come because my heart was broken in the "bad” kind of way? Maybe I couldn’t feel anything because I was a terrible person who didn’t care about him or anyone. I’d often say that there was no “void” in my life at his passing because he lived far away, I’d only see him a couple of times a year.. It wasn’t a real loss because he wasn’t in my life everyday…because, because, because. I had so many excuses and reasons and justifications for why my heart felt utterly and completely numb until one day it no longer was. One day I got to feel all that pain and my heart broke in the “good” kind of way.

This story about my grief journey feels so important to share over and over and over again in many different iterations and in all the updated and newly-improved ways. It feels important not because it’s my story, or because I need you to sit here while I process, but rather because it is all of our stories. I say that because it is only a mythological lie that we aren’t all in profound grief for all kinds of things we may not even be aware of. A wonderful teacher in the world, Francis Weller, writes of the 5 Gates of grief. They are:

1. Everything we love we will loose.

2. The places that have not known love.

3. The sorrows of the world.

4. What we expected and did not receive.

5. Ancestral grief.

I highly recommend a deep dive into his work and these teachings but I am only giving the synopsis here, but I bring it up to highlight the profound grief the world is holding. If you read that list and think some of that doesn’t apply, it’s just numbness, not to scare you. We have to go numb sometimes in order to survive in this world. Right or wrong, this is the world we live in and I considerate myself fortunate enough to be highly sensitive (though I haven’t always felt that way, to be sure). So as I’ve gone on my grief journey I return again and again to how much changed for me once I let this experience of loss really sink in, and that continuously makes me wonder what would be in store if our culture truly let itself grieve again.

Until recently, I would hear the word grief and think, “Yeah, I’ve been doing that my whole life. I’m sick of that work.” But it wasn’t really grieving I was doing because I was simply in a loop of commiserating misery. Grief is not about complaining or blame or self-deprecation (at least in my opinion, tell me if you think different). I just went round and round in an endless tight ball of self-loathing circles, never able to get off the ride and utterly clueless why it started. This death was not an elephant in the room because there was no elephant and no room. Looking back none of my pain was grief. There was sorrow and sadness and all sorts of uncomfortable emotion but it was not grief because the flip side of grief is love and no where was I even close to understanding the power of genuine love. Martín Prechtel calls it grief and praise. We grieve what we love and we love what we grieve. Therefore, when I couldn’t grieve what I loved, my father, I could not love him or anyone else either.

I’ll say this again, I am telling this story not for me, but for you, for anyone who needs to hear it. What do you love that you have not been able to grieve? Perhaps it’s even just the long-ago winter day when everything was still. Or the creek that is perpetually dried up due to climate change. Or the romance of summer when you were 10 because everything just felt so perfect for a moment. Or maybe it’s the pain of what you did not receive, or the bruises you received instead. Or maybe it’s something you have yet to even name.

My words around grief feel like I’m throwing stones into the Grand Canyon and hoping to make an impact. The truth is I still know so little about grief. I’ve read some cool books, I’ve shared in circles, I’ve cried around a fire. I’ve even yelled so loud I can still hear the reverberation off my friends ears. But I don’t know almost anything about grief because I was not taught since birth to praise and give thanks for every living bug, bird and spirit. I am learning how to love this big though, and every day I practice stretching my heart just as I stretch my sore arms after work. And this brings me back to my father.

I have vacillated between indifference and hatred of this man. I didn’t want him to have anymore hold over my life then he already did, so resisting my love for him felt like the kind of protection my child-self could get behind. But I’ve found that despite myself love is there. In fact, there is tremendous love for him, and through that there is forgiveness, and through that I can see the fractal-ized world of intergenerational sadness. My father is my test case, my research paper on love. My father, though dead 23 years, guides me in this world in so many ways. And the truth is, I barely knew him. I was 17 when he died but when I was 12 he moved away and I certainly didn’t get to “know” him in some bigger perspective kind of way as a child. Now 23 years later I am looking at the cut-outs of my life, and his, and trying to make sense of this impossibly complex creature called Dad.

Martin Schneider was born in Brooklyn, Ny, at the end of 1930. That made him 51 when I was born. He was abandoned by his parents for reason I will never understand, and so was his younger brother who he didn’t meet until his was..9? 12? 15? I’m unclear. Sarah Schneider raised him, that was his grandmother. Sarah immigrated to Ny (from what is called Poland, I think) with her husband and two kids, then proceeded to have a 3rd child who would be my fathers father. Sarah’s husband left her and my fathers uncle helped raised him. Martin was send to Yeshiva, a very prominent and newly emerging all boys Jewish school in Brooklyn. I’m told my father spoke Yiddish before any other language and was raised to be a Rabbi. At 16 he threw his yamaka off the tenement building he lived, swore off God, and never returned to Judaism. Or something like that.

At some point he lived in a train station because his tenement building burnt down, but I don’t know if this was before or after Sarah fell down and died in the streets, money sewed to the inside lining of her fur coat. My father eventually fought in the Korean War and somewhere I have photos he took of tanks and rolled over buddha heads piles up over rumble. Apparently, I am told, he shot over men’s heads. Always a pacifist, my dad. Even at age 20.

There is so much more I could say but this seems like a fair place to leave it for now. The biggest take away for me is to recognize the deep compassion I have for this man and what it must have been like for him to grow up being told he was “found on a garbage can.” None of this story will ever completely make sense to me, but somehow the mystery adds to the compassion, which adds to the love, which adds to my understanding of how the world is the way it is. We aren't broken, just very, very hurt. It took a long time for me to see how much my father gave me because I was fixated on what he didn't. My father gave me the gift of words, both through my tongue and pen and page. When I was 2 my first word was “boyd,” the New York accent version of “bird.” And all these years later as I write and write, and feverishly write, I know it was under his guidance. "Play with words" he'd say, much to the chagrin of an english teacher or two.

And because I can never stop on time, one more paragraph to say I will leave this piece of writing with the greatest gift we can bestow on anything in the world: gratitude. I have finally been able to give up my own habitual and instilled habit of self-loathing, and begin to finally appreciate the sheer magnitude of gratitude I have just to be alive. I have bottomless wells of love for the man who helped give me life. Just the marvel of mundane living--my breath, this light, the sound of blades on a fan--is enough to make me cry. There is nothing more profound then the union of giving life and being thankful in return, and thankful for all these moments of breath, I am.

And perhaps even some gratitude for tabouli as homage my long-ago-father who tried to force that stuff down my throat, to which I refused, only to discover the error of my mouth.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I would love to hear your words in return.