February 6, 2025
405 days without you
Hey Dad. I miss you. I love you. I wish I was talking to you face-to-face; there’s so much I want to tell you, so much I just need to let out. I guess this will have to do.
It’s a tough week over here. Your birthday, the anniversary of Grandma Jacque’s passing, and the anniversary of Grandma Florebel’s passing all within 5 days—oof. Sometimes it feels like a cruel joke to pack so many painful days into one week, but I’m getting by. Monday was your birthday, and I made it through, like I always do. You would have been 56. It helped that I was in the office, so I wasn’t focusing on it—the birthday you should be celebrating—all day. Everyone went to Mom’s house for dinner (my idea—proof that I’m trying to figure things out with the family), and I would be lying if I didn’t say it was hard. After Alec, Sarah, and FJ left, Carter, Mom, and I sat and watched old S-O marching band shows. We watched the parade of band’s from my senior year, and we found you in the bleachers. You had your arms folded and you laughed with someone in the stands. It was jarring how quickly I recognized your mannerisms that were once so normal to me—the way you clenched your leg muscles without thinking about it or the way you would clap with your big hands with no rhythm or reason—that I haven’t seen in so long. I made us rewind and watch you simply standing in the bleachers five times just so I could watch you again. So I could watch you be alive again. Now that you’re gone, I am so hungry to see, hear, and read every new (or old) thing about you. I want to hear every memory from someone else’s perspective, see you in the background of videos I’ve never watched, read a note I didn’t know you jotted down. I’m desperate to learn and soak up every last “new” thing about you because that’s what keeps you alive in my mind.
I made chocolate bundt cake for your birthday, the really good one I made for our Omaha trip. I don’t make many bundt cakes anymore. No one ever asks for them.
I’ve found recently that I want to change nearly everything about myself. I know you would tell me not to because you loved the person I was, or still am, but I think you would understand. I want to change my hair, get another tattoo, get another piercing, lose weight, be unrecognizable. It’s not because I’m ashamed of who I am or what I’ve been through. In fact, I’m pretty proud of all I’ve lived through in my short 23 years on this earth. It’s more so like I want to shed everything I’ve been carrying around for such a long time. I want to drop the heaviness, the sadness, the quietly crying myself to sleep trying not to wake up Carter, the feeling like I need to cut myself every time I shave my legs because it’s a pain I can actually control (in the off chance anyone is actually reading this, please don’t worry about me. I’m not suicidal, and I’m working through this in therapy and I have good community to support me). I know that changing my physical appearance won’t actually change any of these things. A lot of these things will take years to process through, and I don’t know if actually changing who you are to core your is possible. But I do want a change, whatever that may look like.
Because this is my year of not really caring about anything and just going with whatever God gives me, I feel like I have nothing to lose. It’s just a piercing or a tattoo. It’s just hair, it will grow back (remember when you said that same line to me when you were sick?). I should use a beautiful analogy about how I’m going to emerge like a butterfly from her cocoon or how I might be turning from an ugly duckling into a swan, but I don’t think any of those analogies are quite right for this. I just want to shed the darkness and heaviness that has been weighing me down for as long as I can remember. It’s like a hard shell I can’t seem to shake off my back. Grief and depression and OCD and trauma—these things things don’t easily shake off. They stick their dirty talons into you and hang on for dear life. Again, I know changing my hair won’t immediately solve all of my problems and make me a new person, but it can be a physical reminder that I am growing and changing and I won’t be the depressed girl for forever. I know God is using my story (your story, really) to shape me into the woman, wife, and servant I’m meant to be. But growing comes with a few growing pains, and I’m just out here trying my best to take them as they come.
I chatted about body image an
Happy Frid
