So here we are again. October.

Every year, I almost want to skip the month completely. Ironically, it’s the month of Canadian Thanksgiving, and I am thankful. I’m grateful for so much in my life. But two things can be true at once, because October also carries October 18th, (2001). The day my dad died.

That day is encased in concrete in my mind. I can go right back to where I was when I got the call, and how I felt. I’ve relived it almost every year since.

Now I understand a little more about why that moment stayed so vivid. As someone who also works with people through trauma, I know that under extreme stress, the brain shifts into survival mode. The amygdala sounds the alarm, fight or flight takes over, and the memory isn’t stored the way ordinary memories are. It gets held in fragments, frozen in place. I was trying to take in something I couldn’t comprehend, and almost immediately, there were things to do.

My dad had died suddenly of a massive heart attack at 59. There was a trip to Trinidad. A funeral. My mom, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s the year before, needed me, and she came to live with me. I had my son to raise. I went from having a dad to not having one, and I just kept going through the motions.

There was no room to grieve. So my grief went into suspense.

This year marks a quarter of a century. I can’t even take in that amount of time. So much has happened.

On a tombstone, there’s a dash between the two dates. It stands for everything that happened while someone was here. But I think there’s another in-between, the one we live in after they’re gone.

That’s where I’ve been.

He lives rent free in my head. I know he’s gone. I’m not in denial. But I don’t live as though he’s gone either. Suspended grief. That’s what it feels like to me.

When memories come, I let them in. What I don’t let in is the plain fact that I won’t see him again. Not in this lifetime.

Twenty-five years later, trying to unravel all of that seems absurd. I’m not even sure that makes sense. Here I am, trying to rationalize an intense emotion.

Sigh.

And here’s a strange thing to admit, as someone who helps people with grief: I’m not sure “processing” is the word I want to use for it anymore.

What are we asking ourselves to do when we say that? Understand it? Accept it? Reach a point where it doesn’t hurt? I can understand what happened and still find it inconceivable that he’s gone.

I think we focus too much on getting through grief. On forcing ourselves to deal with something that is, in itself, too much. And sometimes we do it because our grief makes other people uncomfortable.

A death with no warning, or a long, drawn-out one. Both are horrible. I’ve lived through both. Maybe I don’t need to force myself to feel all of it at once. Maybe I never did.

Maybe that’s what I give people. A safe space to understand that they aren’t supposed to get over someone they love. That they can take their grief out whenever they want, sit with it, and put it back when they need to keep living.

As for me, maybe keeping some of it suspended was how I managed. I had people who needed me. I kept going. This became my normal, and I’m okay with it.

Because here’s the other side of living in the suspense. The good memories got stored just fine. There are so many of them, and they outweigh that one horrible day.

I don’t make him a saint. He had plenty of flaws, and somehow those flaws brought us closer, because I’d point them out.

“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” he’d say.

And I’d shoot back, “Yes, send me to school to be dumb.”

The knowledge he gave me in our 31 years together will live far beyond those years. I get to tell my son the stories. The funny ones. The imperfect ones. The ones that let him know who his grandfather was.

So for us, he lives in the dash.

October 18th will come again, and I’ll feel the dread building as the 18th gets closer. I’ll get through that day alone, the way I always do. Then I’ll pocket it away. It’s like that movie, Same Time, Next Year.

Rinse and repeat.

That’s okay. It’s okay to sit in that melancholy.

And for all of us, let’s make that dash count.