Tomorrow I'll Show You How to Eat an Apple

I gave him an apple to eat while I had some cereal. He often doesn't have anything to eat until he gets to work, which isn't until about lunchtime, and I am trying to break him out of that bad habit. And if the way he ate that apple was any indication, it looks like it won't be a very hard habit to break.

Usually, when someone eats an apple, the entire core, top to bottom, is left behind, in a sort of double-concave shape. Not this guy. He ate pretty much everything but the area immediately surrounding the seeds and the seeds themselves. I laughed and fondly remarked that I had never seen anyone eat an apple so thoroughly. It amazed me, and I wanted to see it again.

Fast-forward to late night of the same day. We were in bed, about to sleep, and I was crying. He assumed it was because of my Dad, and it was--partly. But it was also partly because of him. The aftermath of my grief (or perhaps it is still ongoing grief) has somehow made me emotionally off, and I don't think I've been very good at showing him (or other people, for that matter) my love. This pains me because in less than a month, I will lose him too, in a way, as I will be leaving for Boston. I lost my Dad without being able to spend with him his last moments and say goodbye; I don't want to lose him in the same way: without being fully present and completely emotionally available to him during the time we have left.

If only it were so easy to fix my emotional state. Unfortunately, it is less like a broken car and more like a wound: you do not fix it; rather, you wait for it to heal.

A caress from a caring hand helps too. It may not directly heal the wound, but it does make one feel better.

Stroking my hair, he gently shushed me and and, "Don't cry." And then, to make me feel better, "Tomorrow, I'll show you how to eat an apple."

My Current State

I thought I knew what heartbreak was. But nothing breaks hearts like death does.

It's not just my heart that's broken. It's my entire world. When your Daddy dies, it's not just one circumstance of your life that changes. Your whole life does. Everything and everyone else around you stays the same, but somehow, the world is vastly different. Maybe because you are different, and so your relationship with a world otherwise unchanged is different. Or maybe the sameness of everything else adds to the strangeness: how can the rest of the world remain the same, how can life go on as it has, when a huge, gaping hole (in the shape of my Dad, or perhaps in the shape of my heart) has been torn into it?

This is, by far, my biggest heartbreak, and it is one that I haven't the faintest clue how to heal from.

I see people who lost their fathers months, years, decades ago, and they seem to be okay. I wonder, are they really okay, did they really manage to find a way to heal? Or are they, like me, simply on anesthetics to enable them to function in spite of the wounds?

How long can one anesthetize one's emotions before paralyzing them altogether?

How can I function without turning into a zombie?

You keep your emotions at bay, and you keep pushing them away and barring them from emerging to the forefront of your consciousness and saying, not now, not now. But you push them too far back, too many times, and they never return. And gone along with them are all the feelings, all the sensory memories, everything intangible you had of your Dad. He becomes someone in a photograph, a name, someone you know existed, your biological father. But he ceases to become your Dad, because you lose the emotional connections that made him your Dad.

And I don't want to lose my Dad again. You lose him once, your heart breaks. You lose him twice, you lose your humanity, or at least a big part of it.

I have too much to lose. And so, I must find a way to heal, properly, without numbness, without forgetting.