On processing...

I've decided, in the tradition of my father, to use this space to share various thoughts and musings and also stories about the incomparable Mr. John Riggs which I think are worth telling (some of which I am surprised he apparently never told himself).

It's been a little over a month, as of this writing, since I held dad's hand and watched him take his final breath. Everything that was mortal of the mighty John Riggs has now been reduced to a pile of fine, beige-colored powdery ash which has been split evenly between me and his wife, Laurie. The funeral is over, the well-wishers have returned to their normal routines, and I am left now to "process."

I read somewhere that writing about what you are feeling can help "the grieving process." I don't know if that's true. I suppose that is part of what I am trying to find out.

There are moments when the thoughts and memories become so numerous, so tangled, that I don't know what to do with them. Perhaps putting them into words gives them somewhere to go besides endlessly circling inside my mind. Perhaps there is some comfort in taking this enormous, shapeless thing called grief and examining it one thought at a time.

I wrestle with the term “grieving process.” At least, I wrestle with it in the context of dad and me. Our relationship was unlike any other father-and-son relationship I have personally known.

Now, I am sure there are many fathers and sons who have shared something similar. I know we could not possibly have been the only ones. But I haven't known them. And I know that what dad and I had was exceedingly rare. The greatest blessing of my life was the sheer stroke of luck that I was his son.

We were best friends, collaborators, co-workers, and a team. We were the one constant in each other's lives through all the ups and downs. Wives and girlfriends came and went. Family members died. Living situations became complicated. There were financial struggles, setbacks, disappointments, and periods when it seemed like life was determined to make things as difficult as it possibly could. Through all of it, dad and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder shaking our fists at whatever fate threw at us. We supported each other. We carried each other. When one of us was struggling, the other was there. We created things together. We solved problems together. We dreamed up ideas together. When he had some wild notion that needed bringing into existence, I was right there ready to figure out how to make it happen. And we were always on the same page about it.

In so many ways, we seemed to be extensions of the same soul.

One only needs to look around my house to see just how intertwined we were. Every corner holds something connected to the two of us: a picture of us together, a knick-knack from some adventure we shared, a painting he did, some tool or piece of equipment I bought to help him bring one of his crazy ideas to life, a pile of DVDs we produced together. The list goes on and on.

When I look at every skill I have honed over the course of my life, I realize that almost all of them came about because dad needed help with something. Carpentry. CNC routing. Laser cutting. 3D printing. Camera work and video production. Photoshop. Webmastering. I learned them because, somewhere along the way, dad had an idea, a project, or a problem, and I wanted to help him make it happen.

Now that he is gone, I find myself trying to return to those same hobbies, only to be crushed beneath an unbearable weight of sadness. Each one carries thoughts of him with it. Every tool seems to spark memories of why I learned to use it. Every project reminds me of the person I was doing it with, or the person I hoped to show it to when I was finished. As I sit down to create something, to try to do something constructive, the same terrible thought keeps repeating in my mind: "This isn't fun anymore."

Life, in general, is not fun anymore. I am told this will ease over time. Really? Will it?

By what "process" can the loss of part of your soul be properly grieved? Learning to live with pain and loss is, of course, nothing new to anyone who exists for any length of time. But learning to live without drive, without motivation, without that nourishment of the soul that once gave life meaning - what is the "process" for that?

Should the sun suddenly one day extinguish, does a plant go through a "process" of grieving the absence of the nourishing light it once provided and somehow find a way to go on? Or does it simply wither away?

Perhaps that is what I am still trying to understand. When someone has been so deeply intertwined with your life that they became part of the reason you created, learned, dreamed, and moved forward, their absence is not merely a wound that must heal. It is the disappearance of something that sustained you. And when the light that nourished so much of who you are is suddenly gone, how are you supposed to know where to turn to find warmth again?

Ah, but dad's voice inside me pops up and says, "My boy, the analogy is not really apt. Your pops has not been extinguished. Far from it."

There is a viewpoint that he lives on in his books, his inventions, the paintings he created, the memories he left behind, and in the countless lives he touched. And, perhaps most significantly, that he lives on in me. I can see the truth in that.

So much of what I know, so much of what I can do, and so much of who I have become was shaped by him. His ambitions gave me reasons to learn things I might never otherwise have learned. His curiosity became an invitation to explore. His ideas gave me things to build, problems to solve, and skills to master. I know I am like him in many ways. I always told him that all of the best parts of me came from him.

But I am still learning how to live without being able to turn to him and say, “Hey dad, look what I did.”

I must accept that now my motivations, expectations, excitations, fixations, herniations, aberrations, conflations, and depravations are now my own and no longer shared.

Of my dearest father, the best man I've ever known, all I can do now is remember him, and try to put into words what it meant to have him here. I will try to focus on the extraordinary blessing of having had him as my father, and hope that, in some small way, that gratitude can begin the "process" of easing the pain that comes with having to continue on in this messed up world without my best friend and strongest ally beside me.