The Second Time My Dad Died
A eulogy for the both of us
All day, my stomach did somersaults. I couldn’t even go for a jog because my intestines would not allow it. A familiar, creeping, unnamed anxiety washed over me, and as usual, I tried to drown out its empty voice with wine later that night.
There is always a reason why our bodies protest our own existence like this.
I awoke the next morning with the news in an email from my uncle, the subject line reading, “Your Dad.” The body of the text, I hardly recall reading, except the first sentence, “Andy passed away yesterday.” The juxtaposition of the subject line indicating a person possessed by me — my father — and the first sentence, which referred to him as the stranger he had been to me for 39 years of my life, were all I could focus on in that moment. Andy, my biological father, whose last name I had only learned 11 months ago, whom I had only ever spoken to 10 months ago, and whom I had searched for my whole life, was gone. Again.
“Well, that explains my weird anxiety yesterday,” I thought.
As Bessel Van Der Kolk reminds us, The Body Keeps the Score.
Van Der Kolk forgot to mention in that book, however, that the body predicts the score, too.
