The Unexpressed Love called "Grief": A 17-Year Journey
This year marks 17 years since my father passed away. That means I've actually lived longer without him than with him. It's terrifying, yet surreal, especially considering how much time I've spent obsessing over him and his death. If you’re just starting off with my journal blog, I lost my father to cancer the day before my 14th birthday. Luckily or unluckily, it was the first ever death I had experienced in my life and I struggled to cope with it. Every time I tried to speak about him, my tears would overflow, it didn’t allow me to process it.
But recently, I've finally come to terms with his death and this grieving period.
Quick spoiler alert; the grieving period never ends, and it never should. We live with grief and that is my conclusion.
I want to share a quote by Andrew Garfield, the first of many quotes you'll find here in this journal entry:
"This (Grief) is all the unexpressed love. The grief that will remain with us until we pass. Because we never get enough time with each other. No matter if someone lives until 60, 15, or 99. So I hope this grief stays with me. Because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell her. And I told her everyday, we all told her everyday. She was the best of us." (Interview link)
This quote perfectly captures where I am now. It didn’t matter that my dad didn’t live until 50 or 70. I am grieving because I loved him, so much and 100 years wouldn’t have been enough. My partner often says to me, people die twice, once when you die physically and second when you say their name for the last time. It took me 17 years and countless journal entries to reach this place, where I truly feel that grief is an everlonging process of us missing the people we love, and all we can do, is to remember them and cherish the memories we have.
Now how did I get here? Oh yes, of course I’ve had many cry sessions, drunk sessions, angry sessions, lonely sessions but it was never until I started accepting three crucial things. I want to share these, hoping they might offer a sense of sanity, connection, or comfort to anyone else navigating grief.
The Three Pillars of Acceptance in grief
The three things I accepted were:
Regrets
Trauma
Time Passing
Of course, people say that there are the usual five stages of grief you must go through to move forward with your life.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
While true, simply knowing these stages didn't make my situation better. The truth is, I had a lot of complex emotions to unpack and these five stages didn't make me feel part of a grieving community, or even a bit more "normal."
This is why I started journaling and I found myself focusing on these three topics. Regrets, trauma, and time passing.
Regrets
"What” & “if." Two seemingly harmless words in the English language, but put them together, side by side, and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life. Let me overshare my "what ifs" that haunted me:
What if, the first night my dad told me he had cancer, I had actually cried in front of him? Would he have felt better? More cared for? Would he have truly felt my love? Instead, I just said "OK" and started humming a song. I started humming a song (!) in front of my dad, who had just told his 13-year-old daughter he had cancer. I wanted to let him know it was okay, that it was just a disease that would go away, and that I wasn't phased. For some reason, I thought if I acted like it was nothing, it would be nothing. But instead, I'm stuck with the regret that I might have made him feel less than he was. My only sukui (salvation) is that after I hummed, my mom took me to my room and talked to me. That's when I cried and admitted I didn't know how to feel or react. I saw my dad listening to our conversation from the small gap in the door. I desperately hope he knew how devastated I was and that I wished I had reacted differently in front of him.
What if (a month before he told me he had cancer) when he asked me to go on a trip to Bali, I hadn't said no? I bluntly told him, "I'm busy with school." But what if I had gone? Would we have had a final family trip, a memory we'd cherish to this day, solidifying our family bond?
What if, when he lost his hair from chemo, and I was second to take a bath, noticing the bathtub full of his hair, I had said something comforting to my dad? My dad asked me, "Is it okay? We can make you another bath." I just said, "Oh no, it's totally fine." Couldn't I have said anything better to make him feel better?
What if when I came home from school the night my mom just fell down crying, saying, "Dad is in the hospital and he might not be coming back home ever again," I had understood the severity of the situation? I was numb; I didn't know what it meant.
What if after he passed, I had stayed close to my friends? Why did I have to push everybody away and try to be alone?
These are just a few of the many regrets I carried. I finally realized I could accept them after admitting them and acknowledging that I did my best at the time. That was me, and I can't turn back time. That was genuinely the best I could do.
2. TRAUMA
I think funerals are a social issue. In what world is it not psychologically traumatizing to see your dear friend, acquaintance, or family member in a casket the day after they die, place a flower next to them, burn them, pick up their bones with chopsticks, and place them in a small vase?
It's WEIRD. Nothing about it is normal.
This person was alive just yesterday. My dad, I remember he finished a full cup of Tully's Iced Cocoa the day before he passed in about 15 seconds. I remember thinking, "Wow, he's doing so well." Fifteen hours later, we got the call we never wanted to receive. The hospital told us to come immediately at 3 AM. Thankfully, he was still with us when we arrived. After an extended amount of morphine to relieve the pain and a few hours later, I watched the light leave my dad's eyes. I saw his mouth wide open, his eyes staring up at nothing. As I screamed his name, the doctor came in to tell us he passed at 12:24 PM. He came in again to correct himself: "Oh, sorry, it was 12:27." We then went down to this hidden dead body area in the hospital that I never even knew existed. From there on, it was all conversations about the funeral. Who's coming? What's the venue size? What about the casket? The playlist? It's crazy how, until a person passes, everyone is all hands on deck, desperately trying to prolong life. But after they pass, it becomes so incredibly operational.
It took me a long time to actually verbalize what had happened, what I had experienced, and to realize that none of it was normal. This was a living person, my dad, who had passed, and the overwhelming operational aspect of it forced me to feel numb and succumb to the tasks that needed to happen.
3. Time Passing
I promise, this is the section that gets a little happier and less... "trauma dumping."
They say that time heals pain. I never believed it, but I do now. No matter how long it takes, you will heal from past pains.
The biggest reason I feel this way is because I met the love of my life, Toshi. He's been through a lot in his life, and I'm able to connect with him because of the growth I've experienced from the regrets, the trauma, the pain, and the kindness I've gained after my dad passed.
After my dad's death, every person I met, every success I achieved, every beautiful occasion—I know it happened because my dad passed. It's like the butterfly effect: a small change in initial conditions, like a butterfly flapping its wings, can theoretically trigger a chain of events leading to a hurricane. A family member passing has significantly rippling effects, and I know that everything that happened after his death happened because of him, even the positive things. But it was never enough to make me not want my dad back.
Then I met Toshi, and I knew that if my dad hadn't passed, I wouldn't have met him. He is the first thing I've gained that makes me not want to go back to an alternative universe where my dad was alive but Toshi wasn't in my life.
It's not just about losing someone. With time, we meet new people, we go through hardships and triumphs, we build new values, and we become the people we are today. We just have to trust time and hope we'll get there someday.
Now, Toshi and I are married and expecting a baby... just kidding on the baby part, but maybe someday! And when that day comes, a new life will be born because of who I am today—shaped by all the regrets, the trauma, and the passage of time.
As I write this today, I also wanted to mention the passing of another dear person in my life. Not my dad, but someone else who I had the pleasure of seeing almost everyday for the past few years. It was a sudden passing. Another life gone, another family experiencing grief.
When I was on a run the other day, I saw the police station sign that read "死亡1件" (1 death). You know, the police station signage that shows how many accidents there were that day and how many were injured/killed? It's just a number to most, but it represents an unknown family going through immense pain. Similar to those that we hear on the news, every single day. These are just statistics we hear about, but imagine how many people pass, how many friends are quietly grieving without us knowing.
With that, I'd like to share a final quote I saw on a bathroom wall at the library when I was 15:
"Today is the tomorrow of the person who wanted to live and died yesterday."
Live every day thinking it's your last. Life is too short and treacherous.
In memory of my father, Jake
The photo is from a day after parents school day. I remember not wanting to go to school this morning, but my dad made it a great day.
Now, thank you for making it to the end of this journal. If you are going through grief I wanted to share my playlist that got me through the toughest times.
Below is Ed Sheeran’s Eyes Closed. There’s this blue creature in the music video. I think it' represents the grief that we all live with, and when we close our eyes, we are able to live with the ones we lost. but we just need to realize, even when we open our eyes, our passed ones are still with us, just in memories, and that’s grief. Carry grief, wherever you go, because it’s so beautiful and makes us humans.