Posted on by shirindawna

lesser of two evils?

my dad died last year after a three year battle with cancer.

he bounced back from two major surgeries only to watch it come back. and ultimately, take over his body.

he died on a wednesday morning in a big bed less than an hour after i said my final goodbye to him. my brother was at his side.

i hear people discuss which is preferred: to lose a loved one unexpectedly, in a suddenly your life is very different moment…not giving you a chance to say goodbye. or i’m sorry. or i’ll be seeing you…

or is it less painful to watch your loved one slowly fade from this life to the next, often in pain, sometimes great pain, breaking your heart over and over? yes, it’s painful…but it’s a chance to say goodbye.

i’ve had that debate myself and i never come to any conclusive decision…what’s easier? which hurts less? i finally came to the conclusion that i had a little bit of both. i knew my dad had cancer for 3 years…and for 3 years, we managed it. he lived with it. we changed his diet. we changed his lifestyle. we bickered. we took a cruise. we debated. we had dance parties. we learned together. most of all, we loved.

3 years of fighting…and a miraculous recovery from a terribly invasive surgery only to find that 6 months later the cancer was back and stronger than ever before. the doctors all said the cancer was going to take his life. they suggested hospice. we thought they were wrong.

didn’t they know how strong my dad was?
didn’t they know how long we’d been fighting this battle already?
didn’t they know about how he was a miracle and nothing could beat him?

his decline was rapid (something that is bittersweet). within a couple months of this news, he was gone.

i can’t pretend i didn’t feel the balance of the universe shift as i watched my brother help change my dad’s diaper. or from helping lift him out of bed in his final days.

i could see him fading, but after 3 years i was still holding on to a modicum of hope that he would miraculously recover. leading up to the moment he took his last breath. even though we knew it was coming, it felt like he’d been taken in an instant, a tragedy unforeseen, unpredicted. and certainly, i was unprepared.

lesser of two evils? i can’t speak on that because i don’t believe there’s a good way to lose someone you love.

i do believe the time together changed us for the better. it made us more aware of each moment we have with the people in our lives.

my dad always saw the possibilities in every challenge. he was (overly) optimistic and valued love over all else. i see these traits in myself.

in the end, when cancer stripped my baba of his health, these ideals were something it could not take, something so strong that they outlived even him.

Posted on by shirindawna

forget me not.

i was about 10 years old when my parents split up.

my dad moved into his own house a mere 6 minutes away from my mom’s. it was ideal…in a not commonly ideal situation. i didn’t really mind their split. it just gave me an extra bedroom and a place to escape from whichever parent i needed to get away from (read: my mom…never ever my dad).

it was 1991 and posters were way cool. so, my dad and i popped on over to the nearby wherehouse and bought the gem pictured above. as soon as we got home, i put it up on my door. i loved it. i loved the heart in the rose stem. i loved the wild make-up. (don’t judge me, it was the early 90’s)

eventually i grew out of the poster. my dad never took it down though, even after i switched to a different bedroom in his home. and for years afterward, i would hear him tell the story to other people that i picked out a poster with the words ‘forget me not’ on it…he interpreted it to mean that i feared he would forget me. which couldn’t be further from the truth. i never corrected his story. i loved his version. i loved his interpretation of my childhood whim.

he told the story up until he was no longer able to speak…he even told it to me sometimes “remember when you said ‘forget me not?'”

just like i loved his interpretation, i hope he loves mine.
of bringing him forget-me-nots.
it just seems appropriate.

Posted on by shirindawna · 1 Comment

a year and a day.

i woke up (not so uncharacteristically) early this morning.

like every sunday morning, i thought about what i would be doing with my dad today.

i plopped down at my computer to write and found myself flooded with thoughts of him, but couldn’t find the right words to convey my feelings.

i started rummaging through old files and found this, dated 4/13/12:

i woke up this morning and planned to go to the gym, but instead i started to write…

and i wanted to write about the thing that i had been avoiding writing about: my dad’s cancer.

sunday was always our day. my brother, him, and me. it seemed appropriate that sunday would be the day i’d confront my dad’s mortality and put my thoughts to paper.

but i couldn’t do it.

and i became frustrated.

and so instead i cried.

i hate how easily the tears flow when the words won’t.

and while the overtones are sad, it didn’t make me blue.

sure it’s sunday, and sure it’s the day i miss baba most, but that’s ok.

i can’t change it, and that’s ok.

it wouldn’t change the fact that I still miss my dad almost a year later. or that i would still miss him a little bit every single day. it also wouldn’t change the fact that at every bit of laughter, every soccer game, every sunday, every fight with my mom, every accomplishment, every disappointment, and everything in between, i still close my eyes and wish that he were next to me. and, well, that’s ok.

on a recent trip with my girlfriends i cried to my best friend about how i missed my dad and she said ‘that’s ok.’ so simple. and so oddly liberating. i don’t think she knows how her two simple words impacted me…giving me permission to feel how i feel. even when it doesn’t feel appropriate.

so it’s sunday, i miss my dad. and i’ve learned that there is no right way or wrong way to grieve, there is only your way, and there is my way.

Posted on by shirindawna

feelings fade.

i’ve been deep down in the depths of a funk. i keep trying to pull myself out and somehow keep falling back in. at first, i tried to blame the weather, but it’s more than that…it’s heartbreak.

not over a boy (though i have had my fair share of those), i miss my dad. friends tell me my feelings are normal and it’s natural to feel this way, but i can’t help but feel guilty for being so sad recently. i know that loss is an inevitable part of the human experience and i am SO fortunate and grateful for everything i do have. which led me to thinking…about heartbreak in general. and my experiences with it.

supposedly, every woman wants a bad boy*, and i’ve certainly had my share. there was the dark haired blue eyed screw up in hawaii, the boy with tattoos instead of morals, the alcoholic who i watched deteriorate before my eyes, the chef who fought instead of cried, and the kid who womanized and then moved across the country.

i finally quit bad boys cold turkey after jb, the unemployed alcoholic with a great sense of humor and dreams of owning a bar. a few years ago, the two of us enjoyed a hilariously tumultuous time together, rehashing the in-and-outs of his suckjob career and pondering why life, mostly his, was little more than an enormous pile of elephant droppings. instead of a girlfriend, i became a backbone, a shrink, a cheerleader, a roommate. what really ended things was my dad’s diagnosis with cancer and the realization that i was wasting my time with someone with whom i couldn’t envision a future.

truthfully, i was a bit sorry to see him go. he drank. he bellyached. he spiraled downward. he left town.

and later, in the days after he moved, i would get calls from jb. since our split, he’d thought a lot about me. of course, i should ignore his calls…but he sounded so sincere that it left me wondering why bad was so hard to shake.

is it because we believe we can save these guys? or is that we’re still a bunch of cave women pining away for the beefy and strong? we want men who can defend us when necessary against spiders and catcalls and this mean ol’ grizzly bear called life. but we also want someone who isn’t afraid to burrow down deep into the dirty muck of his own soul, to bring up the pain there and share it with that one special gal. in relationships, women want to feel together, to suffer and prevail as one. shared feelings equal intimacy. if there’s anything bad boys seem to offer, it’s a well of steamy emotion.

and intensity. good guys may challenge our minds, but bad boys test our mettle. a significantly more erotic interplay.

but there’s a fly in the ointment. these boys rarely heal. they just keep fighting, getting tattoos, puking up the bile of their own internal suffering and dribbling it into the lives of their worn-out girlfriends. bad boys don’t care about a woman’s personal crap because they’re too busy continually stepping in their own.

a man who deals with his issues is hot. a man who’s conscious of other people’s feelings is positively breath-taking. and a man who transcends the pain of his own life story? give this dude a medal.

i stood at that defining moment where i could either move toward emotional redemption and romantic health, or get sucked back into bad boy-ism and a life of needless distress. and then, i deleted his messages.

so, as i struggle to pull myself out of this deep well of sadness i remind myself that happiness is a choice…and although i can’t help but miss my dad – i can choose to remember him with a smile. and if the occasional tear slips its way out, then i choose to not feel badly about it. i just need a little time until the sad fades into the background.

*situations have been condensed & altered for anonymity’s sake