Matthew Osborne
I have learned a lot of things over the last two-plus months since my father passed away. It is uncharted waters for anyone who loses a parent for the first time, but one of the biggest things I have learned does not necessarily have to do with me.
When dealing with grief, one often looks inside to try and understand the feelings that you have never faced before. But I am learning quickly that everyone deals with that same grief in different and unique ways.
The weekend that my father passed, I received a lot of phone calls, texts and in-person well wishes from a wide swath of people. Two calls stood out, as my father drifted apart from his own brother and his best childhood friend over the last decade and change.
Both men reached out to me to tell me how sorry they were that we lost Pops. I accepted their condolences, even as I wondered why they couldn’t have called sooner, perhaps while he was still with us.
Maybe there was something they could have settled up at the end. Maybe there wasn’t.
As my father grew sicker, I hesitated to contact these men because I did not want them coming back into his life invited and/or out of guilt or obligation. If they were going to reconcile with him, I wanted them to do it on their own.
They never did.
But that weekend, one of them sobbingly asked forgiveness and expressed remorse. The other was not as open about it, but wanted to take a meal with me. I accepted both, partly because I was so shocked and grief-stricken that I did not know what else to do.
The other reason was that, like Carl Weathers always says, I wanted to “be peace.”
But as I said, not everyone likes peace. Not everyone can handle peace in the face of crippling grief they cannot understand.
We’re having my father’s celebration of life in September, and not everyone is welcome. I tried to be all-inviting, all-embracing, but some of my closest family members did not agree with me. Some of them expressed that sentiment in the plainest, most colorful metaphors possible.
And everything they said was true, and I understand. But I was not ready to push anyone away at this time in my life when I am trying to work this all out.
I had lunch with an old friend of my father’s who I had not seen since I was 10. It was a great meal with sharing of stories that we both had missed over the years, and I thought it would do me so good in the long run.
It has not, though. I have tried to be peace, but I have yet to find peace. That probably takes a different amount of time for everyone, but perhaps the celebration will be the closure I need.
While I never meant to offend anyone in my family by inviting lost members of the group to suddenly drop back in, I did so out of the concept that anyone who ever loved my father had a right to deal with the loss in their own way. And just maybe, they needed someone else, too.
But I have learned that with grief, as in life, balance is key. They say “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
I think the path to peace is the balance of both.
Matthew Osborne is the editor of The Northeast Georgian. Reach him at 706-778-4215 or editor@TheNortheastGeorgian.com.