My father died.
I am supposed to feel something clear. Sadness. Relief. Loss. Something definite that I could put words around and share and have received in the way grief is supposed to be received.
Instead I feel: complicated.
He was my father. He was also a former abuser who became a different person in the last twenty years of his life. He caused real harm when I was young — harm I spent decades working through, harm that shaped my patterns and my nervous system and my capacity for trust in ways that took years of practice and therapy and honesty to begin to untangle. And in his last years, he was trying. Not fixed. Not healed from all the damage he had caused. Just different. Showing up differently. Trying.
How do you grieve that? How do you mourn someone who hurt you and then changed? How do you sit with “I loved him and I’m angry at him and I miss him and I’m relieved it’s over” all simultaneously, when the culture around grief wants a clean emotion it can receive and acknowledge?
Mark Epstein, in The Trauma of Everyday Life, writes about grief as something that requires willingness to face what is actually there rather than what we’d prefer to be feeling. Real grief is not a predictable sequence of clean stages. It is contradictory, non-linear, and often includes emotions that don’t fit the social template for loss — relief alongside sorrow, anger alongside love, the specific grief of mourning a relationship that could have been different alongside mourning the one it actually was.
Equimundo’s State of American Men research found that more than half of people feel “no one really knows me.” In complicated grief, that isolation deepens — you are holding contradictions that don’t fit the stories people expect, and so you hold them alone.
My father died. That’s complicated. And complicated is honest.
