Family Stitches

Since hearing of my dad's cancer diagnosis I've been thinking a lot about family dynamics. Particularly my own responses to family situations.

I confessed to a friend one night last week that I'm not particularly good at predicting my own reactions to emotional pain. I tend to be a bit too optimistic about how I'm going to react when something bad happens. I know that I'm going to hurt, I know that I'm going to feel the restless, stinging ache of loss but somehow I convince myself that it's not going to be so horribly bad. I tell myself that if I'm just stoic and patient it will all be alright.

I'm at least right about one thing. Loss does eventually ease into something manageable. It just always takes so much longer than I think it should.

All in all I think I've dealt with the loss of my family pretty well. The ache is mostly gone. It's only when quirky little things happen that I feel the sting – when I run through the McDonald's drive-thru for lunch and sneak french fries out of the bag like Dad and I used to do when we took lunch home for everybody else. He used to say that if we took some from all four crinkly paper envelopes of french fries that nobody would notice.

I feel a little piercing when I see a playhouse in the neighbor's back yard as I drive by. I remember the overseas shipping box that Dad brought home for us to play in. He put a real, miniature screen door in so that we had a proper "house." We salvaged items from the garage to serve as furniture and this space became our neighborhood clubhouse.

Yesterday I saw Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench on TV and felt a twinge of loss. Dad and I used to watch Cincinnati Reds games together. I don't know how much I loved the game of baseball. I just know I loved hanging out with my dad.

Families are sewn together with threads all around the edges. I used to believe that it would be possible for me to unpick these tiny stitches whenever I needed or wanted to. But lately I've begun to realize that no matter what our circumstances are, no matter how badly we might desire to unravel ourselves out of that cloth that we were woven into, we can't.

The stitches are too small.

They are pulled too tight.