The Last Illusion

The deepest pain I’ve felt in life is loss.

In it, there is nothing to say. Only change to be felt.

But I did not want this change.I wanted my Dad.

The strange thing about losing someone who’s still alive is that though I can drive down to his house at any moment, he doesn’t seem to be there.

The effects of glioblastoma are difficult to explain. It is not only a disease of the body. It is a disease of the mind. And the mind of my father was the most beautiful.

In my fondest memories of him, we sit together in old leather chairs, talking about religion and the stars.

We would debate the true meaning of life, who God really was, and how we could find him.

Two people sharing the oldest questions humanity has ever asked.

That is what bound us.

And without that, I felt alone in them.

I felt alone in life.

So, I fled.I started looking. Looking for what, I didn’t know.

Maybe I’d find the answer.

I cannot describe what it is to watch the slow pain and decay of the person you love most. To scream at the world and ask why it had to be this way.

And though I feel like a total nerd saying this, I think grief is best depicted in Star Wars.

I was Anakin, doing everything I could to save Padmé.

To save myself from the truth.

The tragedy of Anakin was not that he loved too much. It was that his fear of losing what he loved most became stronger than his ability to accept reality.

I tried everything. The distractions. The drugs. The endless searching.

The most devastating of all was trying to revive him in another.

There’s a reason those stories never end well. To bring someone back is to sacrifice yourself in the process.

And I did. Denial will take you to the dark side.

And I’m beginning to see what it’s done to my life. I see the purgatory I placed myself in.

I put my own life on hold, believing that if I searched hard enough, fought hard enough, or loved hard enough, I could find some antidote. Some cure.

But this is a fantasy. And it cannot be done.

I’m lifting an old, elusive shield I had stretched over my heart. And God, it’s painful.

But I placed it there for a reason. It protected me from the truth.

Yet underneath it, I’m beginning to find that my life is still there. What I must accept is that my father, in the way I knew him, is not. 

Grief is the great awakener. It is to confront the ephemeral nature of our world, and the ephemeral nature of ourselves.

And I must unravel this truth alone. No one can do it for me.

Because to accept death is to accept life.

And I’ve arrived at the new start of mine.