My family’s road to rediscovering joy after losing a loved one.

By: Livi Carda

As my dad’s coffin lowered, all I could think about was that I would never be the same. One thing that is burned in your brain when you lose someone you love is watching them get put into the ground. I never thought that I would be able to experience happiness again. I mean, how could I? I had just suddenly lost a parent. 

I don’t remember a lot of things the year after my dad died. Scrolling through photos of memories on my phone and hearing stories from friends during that period, it felt like I was trapped in a deep fog and everything felt hazy. 

My dad died during the spring quarter of my freshman year at Western Washington University. I was at a point in my life where I felt the happiest I had ever been. I was finally adjusted to my new life in Bellingham. I was comfortable in my dorm, and I had made real friendships. I was enjoying the newfound freedom of living independently. 

I got the Life360 notification on May 2, 2022, that my mom had arrived at my dorm. I was in the library with a friend cramming for my Math 099 final when I got a call to meet her in the parking lot. Immediately, my stomach sank. I knew something wasn’t right. My family didn’t make surprise visits, as they lived an hour and a half away and had busy schedules. 

When I met my mom in the parking lot, I immediately noticed her mascara–stained cheeks. I felt my whole body go uneasy. My gut was telling me that something had happened to my dad. She choked the words out that he had died of a heart attack and was found that morning. I fell to the ground sobbing–and in that moment it felt like the world around me was moving in slow motion and all I could hear was an intense ringing in my ears. I was so dissociated in that moment, it felt like I wasn’t in my own body. 

My dad and I had a complicated relationship as he struggled heavily with alcoholism. He and I never saw eye-to-eye, especially because I was not afraid to call him out on his destructive behaviors, like when he would send me multiple unwarranted vicious drunk texts. He didn’t like that I was able to stand up for myself when he had wronged me and I didn’t like how he chose substances over his physical well-being. 

I was angry with him the day before he died. He almost canceled on taking my younger brother Jack to his soccer game since he wasn’t feeling well. This was a regular occurrence. I thought he was just too hungover to take him. Come to find out, it was early signs of a heart attack. He had cold sweats, shooting pain in his arms and nausea. He refused to go to the hospital to take Jack to his game instead. I think about it all the time. What would have happened if he had just ignored the grief my mom and I were giving him and sought medical help? He was too stubborn and needed to prove a point. At the end of the day, it felt like his inability to ask for help killed him. 

As I write this now, my dad will have been gone for more than two years. Over those two years, I feel I have completely changed as a person. The grief that I felt immediately after losing my dad never went away, however, I have learned to grow around it. 

I had a conversation with my previous therapist, Mimi Ogasawara who has known me for many years and worked closely with me for the first year after my dad died. I wanted to get her perspective on how she thinks my grieving process changed during those first 12 months. 

“It was a long journey for you to go through the grief process. Your feelings started to shift from anger towards your dad to sadness and missing him a lot. You told me about positive and warm memories of your dad returning more often. You started to realize how much your dad meant to you and wished that you had been able to tell your dad before he passed away,” she said.

“Through your grief journey, you used radical acceptance skills to accept what happened, your dad’s weaknesses and your difficult feelings. You figured that you didn’t have to like it, but you had to accept things as they were. I think that helped you to move through the grief process and grow even more. I give you lots of credit for going through this very difficult journey.” 

It was interesting to hear what Mimi had to say about how I grew throughout therapy during that first 12 months without my dad. Although I only remember bits and pieces about what that year looked like, I know that I felt every single emotion there is to feel after losing a loved one. 

People tend to forget about grief. It never goes away, no matter how much time has passed. Some days the feeling is mundane, you can push it in the back of your mind and focus on the tasks you need to accomplish throughout your day. Then, other days the grief feels as fresh as the day you found out, and the feeling of missing them is so intense and debilitating that it takes every ounce of strength not to burst into tears.

Experiencing the loss of my dad with my mom and my younger brother brought us even closer together as a family. Every year on his anniversary we all go together and visit his headstone. We bring flowers, share stories and even play Uno with him (as weird as playing a card game with a dead person may sound).

However, my experience navigating these complicated emotions differed from my mom’s and my brother’s. We all had very different relationships with my dad and our versions of grieving reflected that. 

On the second anniversary of my dad’s death, I sat down with both my mom and Jack to talk about their experience navigating the loss of our dad. 

Jack was in eighth grade when our dad passed away, and if you can take a second to remember back to when you were in middle school, it was awkward, it was challenging and you can imagine how the timing of my dad dying was not at all ideal. I remember him shutting down emotionally quickly after my dad died. He didn’t cry often and dealt with his feelings more privately. 

Now two and a half years later it meant the world to me that he was willing to share a deeper insight into what he felt throughout his grief journey and how he has worked to find happiness again. 

“I felt sad and I also felt angry because he kind of did that to himself. Like all the things that led up to his death were because of past mistakes and past shit that he did,” he said. 

Jack’s emotions towards our dad haven’t changed much over time. However, he finds more happiness in remembering the good parts about him.

“I don’t think [those emotions] changed. I think they are still the same. I think there are definitely more happy memories than there were. There is more happiness in remembering him,” Jack said.

As time went on, and Jack was able to grow around his grief, he could focus more on things that were important to him. Like school, sports and relationships. He made it a priority to find happiness in the positive distractions in his life. 

Jack is now 16 years old. He was the captain of his high school junior varsity soccer team, he’s on two of his school’s award-winning choirs and spends the rest of his time playing on a local premier soccer team. He has navigated this tumultuous period of his life with such strength and grace. With each year that Jack grows older, the more I see so many of my dad’s good qualities in him.

My interview with my mom felt more heavy than the one with Jack. My parents’ relationship suffered after my dad began to struggle with his alcoholism in 2008. Shortly after his mom passed away from a heart attack, they spent many years fighting, mostly because my dad became really angry when he was drunk and would take that anger out on those closest to him. 

“Sometimes when he was alive, I wished he wasn’t here because he was harassing me and scary,” she said while crying. He was also, the love of my life and it’s hard to figure out how to grieve a person like that.” 

One of the hardest things my Mom and I both struggle with iscomplicated grief, which the Mayo Clinic defines as, “ being in an ongoing, heightened state of mourning that keeps you from healing.” It is the process of grieving a person with which you had a complicated relationship with. 

“I probably feel more anger now, just a lot of anger and still confusion because I haven’t grieved him in the proper way,” she explained.

There are things that my mom had to step up and do after my dad died, that she feels he would be proud of her for doing. It was important for her to do it not just for his estate, but to honor my dad. 

“I think I am for sure stronger,” she said. “I think he might be proud of me because I was a procrastinator when we were married and he used to get on me for things that I wouldn’t get done,” she shared. 

My mom still hasn’t fully grieved my dad and she acknowledged that there are things that she wants to work through with her feelings about my dad and their relationship.

“I still have a lot of work to do with that,” she stated. I would say that I am blessed with the things that I have and the people in my life but I still have that part of my life that I need to let go of, be at peace with and work through.”  

As much as I wish that writing and sharing my story about my dad would have given me a sense of closure, that is the thing about experiencing the loss of someone close to you. You don’t ever get the closure and it sucks because you crave it so bad. My dad passed away suddenly, and there are so many things that I wish I could have said and changed about our relationship before he left but I can’t. I will have to work through that regret for the rest of my life. 

However, I do find comfort in knowing that grief is just an acclimation of all of the love I have for my dad, with nowhere to put it. I will continue to talk about him and share stories, the good ones and the bad because at the end of the day, that is what I can do to keep his memory alive.