Weeping for Delight?

It's around this time of year that I am paralyzed by a profound sadness. It's been the same for nearly a decade now, yet each year it's somehow a shock and surprise when it strikes. I suddenly think I'm sinking into a deep depression, charting my failures and dismissing any successes. If I rambled on about my daily dilemmas, any mental health professional would be quick to diagnose me with generalized anxiety. But then, just as I'm reading through articles in The American Journal of Psychiatry and comparing myself to test subjects, I realize why the simplest chore seems like a herculean task, why I can't bear my own reflection, why I loathe my very existence.

Just this morning -- when Michael Alexander and I were stuck for some 10 eternal minutes in an elevator that was being repaired -- it was easy to believe the world was conspiring against me. Then it happens again like it does every year. Just as suddenly as I'm hit with sorrow, I'm struck by the sobering reality: I miss my father. He died June 21, 2002. (He was hospitalized for the first time in his life on Memorial Day weekend two years earlier.) It's not as if I forget that date. Or him. He permeates my every thought and feeling, especially when I think of the grandson her never met. Any bullshit about how it gets better as the years go by just makes me hurt more. I don't want it to "get better." I want my dad.

That month or so leading up to Father's Day is staggering. The cards come out the day after Mother's Day and every ad is urging you to buy for dad or a grad. It's inescapable. At least now I have two fathers-in-law and my son is blessed with two living, loving grandfathers. I start trolling for cards that day after Mother's Day, looking for my father's-in-law while inevitably finding the perfect one for my dad. I remember the last one I gave him on June 16, 2002. I sealed it with tears.

It's a punch in the gut -- twice. First when I enter this stage of intense self-loathing and self-inflicted suffering, and again when I realize it's just a phase of mourning. Perhaps I create pain to mask the real emotions, the immeasurable loss, the regret that I wasn't there the day my father died. The lost days, hours, minutes I could have spent with him. It crushes me to think that I chose work over his death bed. When that regret hits, it's like an avalanche. I regret everything I didn't do for people I love and worry that I continue to make too few sacrifices.

I'm cutting this short for fear I will wallow to deeply in my mourning. My father wouldn't want me to cry. "Be strong, Tash," is what he'd say, even as he fought back his own tears. He was a tough guy and he taught me to be one, too. That makes this even tougher. Brother Mike gave me many books to read for many different reasons. Some he called "life texts." Khalil Gibran's The Prophet was one of those. Maybe it's time I re-read it.

"When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight." _ Khalil Gibran