Some musings on grief

we will get back to baking and food soon, I promise

ok this post is maybe a bit heavy, I go through grief stuff about my dad and I also touch on my grief around Palestine and the ongoing genocide. just wanted to give a lil content warning off the top since this newsletter is ostensibly about baking, but is also, as you know, about whatever I want it to be about. ok love you and thanks for reading.

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I have been missing my dad a lot recently. Not that I haven’t missed him every day since he died but I have just been feeling it more intensely as of late. Grief, as I am sure many of you know intimately, is not a linear thing - to quote Sheryl Crow, it is a bit of a winding road. Some days I can listen to a song that really reminds me of my dad and it will make me feel happy and nostalgic and other days I have to turn it off or I will lose it. Currently the losing it times are feeling like they outweigh the other times, and while that can be hard it is also not bad. Thinking about dad and remembering him in a way that feels clear to at least me is something I hold very dear. But I have been feeling the loss in that fresh way that seems to come up every so often and I know that it is connected with all of the change that has happened in my life within the last several years coming together and culminating in what feels like The Biggest Change.

I am the kind of person that used to call my dad for advice about almost anything, and especially about work things. He was pretty good at talking me off a ledge or reminding me to keep my cool or just telling me that everything was going to sort itself out because a job is a job is a job in many ways and he had had a lot of them. I miss the calm reassurance and the logical advice from someone who had witnessed every shitty job I ever had, who watched me work several jobs at a time, and who used to watch the news with me in the morning when I came home from working nights at the cookie factory during a summer when I was in university. I think part of what is really hard right now is that everything is totally and completely different for me than it was when he died and it feels fucked up that he doesn’t know about it. Even though I was not happy working in tech, I feel a nostalgia for the person I was when he was alive, the last person he knew me as. He doesn’t get to know this new version of me and that feels painful.

The kind of funny thing is that the last summer dad was alive, I got unceremoniously laid off from a company I worked at for 5 years with 15 other people for a “restructuring” or whatever. I was running late for work that day and our head of HR sent me a Slack message asking me to meet her in a boardroom as soon as I got into the office. And even though the previous Friday my boss and I had had a meeting where she told me I was doing amazing and that we would be headed back to San Francisco on a client trip soon, I knew what the fuck was coming as soon as I walked through the door. As soon as I got my severance package and was escorted out, I called dad. He was not doing very well at the time, the cancer was in the midst of delivering its final blow, but I still needed to hear him tell me it was going to be fine. And he did. And then I became obsessed with not being unemployed when he died, so instead of doing a career change at the time, I just took the first tech job that was offered to me.

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. And anyway, this all happened in 2019 and I think you may all recall what happened in 2020…the past really does do that thing where it only exists as such.

I tried to commune with dad recently because I was in the house where he died so it seemed like maybe that would help. It didn’t really. I think the communing is just the work of memory and connection and, oddly, staying present - it’s easy to get stuck in the past, or different versions of what the past could be that would put you at a totally different present - it’s not good to go too far down that road. I’m basically writing this particular newsletter/blog thing as a way to commune with him anyways, like if I tell all of you it will get back to him and he will know, he will have heard it through the cosmic grapevine and all will be well. Hopefully that’s how it works and please don’t let me know if it’s not.

I have been trying to finish this and just post it for weeks and weeks at this point. Every time I sit down to think more about time and grief and memory, I can’t help but get caught up in thinking about Palestine and that collective grief overwhelms me. Every time I hear about someone who has lost their entire family, a whole lineage of time and memory and real human beings who meant everything to each other - it feels like I am hearing it for the first time and it devastates me all over again. So, grief on a collective level is the same as grief on an individual level; there’s probably something to learn from that. It feels just as crazy to me that the world just keeps turning and things keep happening and we all keep living our lives in the face of any of this - personal loss, collective human loss - at least one of these things, we have some control over, or at the very least it feels like we should be able to exert control. It makes endless sense to me that people have gotten on a boat they know will be intercepted by Israel, have flown to Egypt to try and cross the border, have lit themselves on fire!!! Because in an instance where you feel like you could stop people from dying, wouldn’t you want to? Wouldn’t you want to do anything you could?

Hard to know how to end this particular post. I wish I had some kind of grand conclusion here, but I clearly do not. All I know is that right now I am here, communicating with you, but that someday I won’t be. And while I am here, I’d like to feel like what’s left of our collective humanity isn’t being sucked dry by the vampire that is capitalism (shoutout to Marx). BUT! We are still here, and that is half the battle.