Grief. One minute you think you are passed the worse, and the next an ordinary moment ignites something inside your heart that burns so painfully, you wonder how you will make it to the next breath.
“They” say, that time heals all wounds, that in time the pain will not feel so fresh, so raw – and you will move forward. The proverbial ‘they’ lie. There may be longer spaces of time between thinking about the loved one lost. Then you start worrying you will forget. Their voice. Their touch. Their eyes in certain moments. You worry that not thinking of them means you are losing them even further into the deep abyss of death.
Today, it was an old, terribly ugly fan. The kind of fan that is silver and tall and way too heavy with some sort of thick concrete base that was deteriorating leaving debris all over my bedroom floor. In the last few months it only oscillated while simultaneously making a screeching noise that gave away its every turn and made it impossible to sleep. A fan with screws that were stripped making it no longer adjustable. And most lately, a fan that would take a good 10 to 20 minutes warm up enough to actually turn on and spin the blades, the motor humming inside with indecision about whether it had enough life left to blow at all, probably a fire hazard.
An ugly fan that my dad kept in his wood workshop for all the years I could remember. Outside in his garage he would create his masterpieces, tinkering with wood and stain and cutting grainy boards with notches and bends until everything fit just right. Every time I saw him, I would walk into the garage and he would greet me with one of those hugs only a dad could give. Then we would talk while he fiddled, me admiring his work and worrying about the bleeding coming from some place on his arm, hand or finger. Without fail, he would have the fan on, swirling manly scents and saw dust, man glitter – all around the garage. Undertones of his sweat, not the kind from too much exercise or not bathing – but rather from the bake of the afternoon sun beaming into the shop and warming his skin the way an oven baked bread. The same smell that would linger on my clothes after his hugs. It smelled like my dad. Like home, in the way only your parents can smell. And there was the trusty fan wafting the incense around the garage, and in my heart.
I couldn’t throw that fan away, so I dragged it into my bedroom and hoped that somehow the coolness would comfort me in the same way that my dad did. How could I throw it away?
How could I toss it, even though it was most likely a fire hazard and deteriorating right in front of me? Why would I keep it, when it was long passed its expiration date? For weeks now, its just sat there – the big head of the fan staring at me while I slept, holding space in the corner of my room. Recently, afraid to turn it on and sparking a fire, I decided it needed to go. But how do you let go of something like that?
And that’s when grief – she came back and slapped me upside the head as I was dragging it to the trashcan. I knew I could no longer turn it on and smell the familiar mix of sawdust and sweat, and yet I was torn between keeping the relic, perhaps hoping that it would keep me closer to the man I lost. Part of me knew it wouldn’t, that those memories live in my heart – and yet another part of me felt like letting it go would only cause more amnesia, more forgetting, more distance between my dad and I.
That’s what grief looks like to me. A sturdy old metal fan, with rusty spots and squeaking in places WD40 can’t reach, that somehow lost its ability to diffuse the magical scent of home, no matter how much my heart begs.
Simply, Stef!
