There is a strange, hollow irony in sharing a final date with a legend. While millions share digital tributes and recount stories of a martial arts icon, I am sitting in the quiet of a life that has been fundamentally altered. My father wasn’t a movie star, and we were really not that close, but there still seems the need to pay tribute. Failure to do so feels like an insult to the human experience as a whole.
What makes this grief particularly difficult to navigate is the silence that follows. There will be no funeral. There will be no family gathering to share stories, no room full of flowers, and no collective mourning to help shoulder the weight of this goodbye. There will not even be a social media post. The decision to forgo these traditions leaves me in a state of emotional limbo. It is for this reason I will add my thoughts this to this semi-hidden personal blog that we seldom contribute to any longer (but maybe we should?)
I feel a profound sense of sadness that I can’t quite place. Without the ritual of a service, I don’t know what to do with my hands or where to put my thoughts. How do you honor someone's life when there is no designated space to do so? I find myself drifting between numbness and a sharp, stinging loneliness.
If you are reading this, please know that grief doesn’t always look like a crowded room or a black suit. Sometimes, it’s just a quiet room and a heart that doesn’t know how to feel. I am still figuring out how to say goodbye in the silence, but for now, I am just letting myself be sad. Rest in peace, Dad.
This is for all the things that went unsaid and for all the fucking things that we never should have uttered.
