The Third Loss

I've written, at length, about the loss of my son. A loss I still can't fully acknowledge. My creative brain and my heart aren't ready to sync with my logical brain. I know. I don't believe. Those are two different organs right now, doing two different jobs.

I've also written about the loss of everything that was supposed to come. The future I built in my head without ever meaning to, the way every parent does. Ryan's first year of college. The cross-country move. Someone he'd meet and settle down with. Grandchildren I already knew, somehow, I would spoil rotten. All of it gone in the same instant, even though none of it had happened yet. You can lose a future tense. Nobody tells you that.

But I haven't given enough thought yet to grieving myself.

For 22 years, my identity has been Dad. Not a role I fell into. A role I built, deliberately, the way you build something you intend to last. An imperfect role model who would do anything for his son. Ryan's rock. I took that seriously. I worked at it. I was proud of it, prouder of that than almost anything else I've done with my life.

That version of me had a shape. He had a job every single day: show up for Ryan. He had a compass: what does Ryan need. He had a future written into his bones, decades of it, stretching out past the point where I'd be the one needing him instead of the other way around.

I know, logically, I am still Ryan's dad. People keep telling me that, gently, like it's supposed to be a comfort. And I understand why they say it. But it's not the same, no matter what the experts write in their books about grief. I will proudly preserve and share his memory. But being his father in memory, in tribute, in the past tense, is not the same job as being his father in the present tense, texting him back, worrying about him, watching him become who he was becoming.

The title survives. The role doesn't. Not the way I built it.

I miss that guy. The dad. The one whose whole compass had a fixed point to aim at. He gave me a lifelong purpose, a standard I measured myself against every day without even noticing I was doing it. And now that fixed point is gone, and I'm not sure yet what replaces it, or if anything can, or if anything should.

So this is the third loss. Not just Ryan. Not just the future. Also the man I spent 22 years becoming in order to be his father. He doesn't have anywhere to go anymore. He doesn't have a job today. And I don't know yet who I am without that job, only that I'm not ready to find out, and I don't think I have to be, not this soon.

Maybe grieving myself is its own kind of grief that needs its own room, separate from grieving him.

Maybe they overlap so much it's impossible to pull them apart. I don't know. I just know it's there now, underneath the rest of it, and it deserved to finally be said.