Through the darkness

There are moments in life that divide everything into before and after. Walking through my dad’s funeral was one of those moments. Before the coming days, I was asked to speak. I had to make up a speech about a bunch of great things about him. I had so much anger towards my father for what he had done. Now I had to write something amazing about him to be read at his funeral.

Any funeral is different when you are in the front row. I knew I had to be strong for my family, so instead of bawling my eyes out and crying out, I went numb. Hearing all these stories about how much everyone loved my dad, all I could think of was the bad. How could he have done this to my brother and me, and no one knows about it? Everyone here thinks he’s an amazing father. I felt like I was underwater at the funeral. It almost didn’t feel real. I had never fully processed what happened to my dad, because I would hide all my emotions from everyone, even myself. What was harder was hearing the constant lies, how he died from heart failure or pneumonia; it was all being swept under the rug. The truth, and I had to sit and watch the lies unfold, knowing all the things I had witnessed - the drug runs he would take my brother and me on in the city of Richmond, and let us go into what he would call a candy store while he would get his drugs. Or the times he would take us out on the boat, and the powder that was crushed up, and we would watch him roll a dollar pill and snort it with his friends. We were young, but we knew exactly what was going on. One time, my brother screamed at my dad because he was falling asleep behind the wheel, and we would quickly jolt awake. This is what we saw firsthand.

The funeral room felt heavy. I remember my brother, during the funeral, getting up and walking out because he was so mad. People just expected us to be ok.  So I did what I learned to do best: I shut down. I turned off every emotion that was begging to come to the surface because letting it all out felt too dangerous. Too real. There is a strange kind of loneliness that comes with grief, especially when you feel like you cannot express it. I was standing in this room full of people, yet I felt all alone.  The truth is, grief doesn’t always look like crying; sometimes it looks like numbness, and sometimes it looks like silence. This was me.

People often say healing comes with time, but what they don’t tell you is that before healing comes darkness. A darkness so deep it can make you lose touch with yourself.

After the funeral, the world kept moving, but I felt frozen. The memories that continued to be shared were those of such great things, while I continued to silence my feelings and my story. Maybe it was to protect the family. But what I didn’t realize was that I wasn't protecting anyone; I was actually doing more harm to myself. Through this grief and silence, I thought that it might protect me for a while, but the healing did not begin until I permitted myself to speak my truth. To remember. To hurt. And maybe, little by little…. Heal.

After forgiving my father and realizing what happened, I take the pain and turn it into a purpose.