My dad died three weeks into my sophomore year of college on a Sunday night. Numb as ever, I was sitting in class on Tuesday.
There is no pause button labeled “life” for me to press, so I’ve let the semester continue as it did the year before. Classes go on while assignments are due the minute before midnight. I don’t even find myself wanting an extended break from being a college student while I figure out how to become a person who has lost a parent. Life keeps moving even if I don’t really know how to move with it.
There is something particularly terrible about experiencing grief during one of the most formative periods of your life, one where your personal and academic lives are deeply intertwined. This is because grief does not understand boundaries. It does not stay confined to moments where you’d expect to feel it. Grief follows you into the lecture hall and sits beside you while you take notes. It clenches around your heart in the middle of a conversation, on the walk across campus and finally settles in the sullen moments when you have no choice but to surrender to it with your defenses down while no distractions remain.
For me, this collision is even harder because my dad was a professor at my college.
His loss is woven into the community I spend my days with, and nearly every professor within my area of study knew or worked alongside him for longer than I had the privilege of having him as a dad. When I visit their desks after class, I sometimes watch their expressions change as they struggle to hold back their tears. In those moments, I am reminded that I am not the only one carrying his absence and that I am surrounded by adults who are grieving with me.
My dad worked in the newsroom, a place he loved, and this fall is my first time being there as a student. I had long imagined what this would be like: continuing to see him around campus, stopping by his office to study at his shiny blue table and making this semester one more part of my college experience that belonged to both of us. Now, his office is hauntingly empty and his presence is gone. I will sometimes find myself visiting places where I once expected to see him just to feel close to him.
I know that with this loss comes a gap in my life that I honestly did try to reconcile and come to terms with during the few weeks before he passed. Those attempts easily turned painful as I began to think of how I once expected him to be watching me when I graduate with a degree in the profession he loved dearly or that I once looked forward to swaying in his arms as we shared our father-daughter dance at my wedding one day. I think about all the things he should have gotten to do, and then I begin to think about my mother, and my heart only breaks more.
I have come to learn that this feeling is not particularly concerned with whether I have plans with the friends who aren’t quite sure what to say to me. How could they? There is no perfect sentence for the death of someone’s parent. There is no combination of words that makes it less painful. Most people have never had to stand in front of a friend who is suddenly grieving and figure out how to act. I am learning that this is uncomfortable for everyone, not just the person experiencing it.
I don’t always want to do the things I used to, and even when I do, I seem to be fine for an hour or so before something catches me off guard. What was once meant to be a fun outing becomes spoiled by a memory of the father I lost. It can come in the form of a song or a man who resembles him simply passing by, and suddenly, I feel as if I am in agony. The tears come in randomized moments, usually without warning. Sometimes it’s the first thing I do in the morning.
One of the hardest parts is how ordinary everything around me seems. The birds still chirp while the campus is still busy as ever. I hear people the same age as me converse about their weekend plans or worry about what they’ll wear for Halloween. My friends still talk about their classes, parties, relationships and every other fun thing that makes up college. I try to participate in all of it while carrying something that has fundamentally changed my life.
I have a fear of missing out on the “college experience” because I am grieving. College is supposed to be a time when you say yes to things. You meet new people, you make new memories and you stay out late. It’s the years spent becoming someone different from who you were when you arrived, but this loss has made me tired. This may be one of the hardest things to realize when you lose a parent while you are in school: the world does not stop just because yours has.
Alongside this, I have another fear that I did not ultimately expect either. I am afraid that one day I will go a whole day without thinking about my dad. I am afraid of a moment when I realize I have been so busy with classes, friends and everything else that, for a few hours, he did not cross my mind.
Remembering him feels like a responsibility, as if merely thinking about him keeps some connection between us alive. Forgetting, even for a moment, means I am leaving him behind. I know there will come a morning when I don’t immediately feel the need to cry and that there will be a day when I laugh and don’t immediately feel guilty for being happy. I know a time will come when I will go to class, be with my friends and realize that I had a good day.
I don’t quite know what this will feel like just yet, but right now I am learning how to be a college student and a grieving daughter at the same time.