This morning, I had to pause unexpectedly in the rush to get myself and my kids out the door to work and school.  Right in the middle of the chaos of it all, as I reached out for my toothbrush, I was overcome by my grief and longing for my dead father and I spent 4 minutes sobbing convulsively in my bathroom.

I knew I was sad this week.  All week I’ve been feeling it.  On my drive to work this Tuesday, I could feel the physical weight of grief in the pit of my stomach, like a lead ball pushing down in the same general place that I carried my babies.  Riding the smooth curves around Lookout Mountain, I wracked my brain to discover the source of my sadness. 

What was the date?  Did something happen this week in my personal history that my conscious mind had forgotten?  No. 

Am I struggling with something at work or in my relationships with Ben or the kids that is eating at me unawares?  No. 

Why was I feeling this sensation of loss, seemingly out of the blue?  Maybe it was just the song on the radio, I thought, or some kind of emotional blip with no relationship to reality.  I tried to put it out of my mind and move on.

And now, two days later, clearly I was not able to move on.  This was no blip.  I was sobbing in my bathroom on a random Thursday morning.  But why?  Still heaving, I assessed my longing and was shocked to discover that it was for my father.  I was crying for him, for the loss of him, for the fact that it’s been nearly six years and he’s still not here, will never again be here.  His hugs, the shape of his hands, the warmth of his voice, his random knowledge of trivia, the felt-tip pen and blank index cards carried in his breast pocket – all gone. 

But, still, I wondered, why now?  Why is it hitting me so hard right now?  Granted, my father has been on my mind a lot these past few months since Fred, our fifth grader, keeps getting assigned these ridiculously impossible science projects.  He had to build a car powered by a mousetrap that would move forward at least two meters.  This week, we’re trying to heat a gallon of water in the sun to 100 F without the use of glass or electricity.  These sorts of projects stump me and Ben and frustrate Fred.  But they’re the kind of things my father would have gloried in.  If he were here, he would have taken over and engaged Fred in the work and figured it out.  And he and Fred would have laughed together in the midst of it (whereas Ben and I end up cursing or crying or both!). 

But the science project didn’t really explain the sobbing this morning.  There have been previous assignments, multiple times this academic year when I have deeply missed my father’s expertise in this area.  But I didn’t end up sobbing in my bathroom then.  What in the world was going on?

So, I traced the emotion back further, followed the grief deeper as I cried and surprised myself when I discovered its source.

Earlier in the week, a friend suffered a miscarriage and shared that news with me.  My heart broke for her and her husband, for the lost life, for their pain.  And I thought immediately of my own baby, the one never born, the child I loved and never held.  I knew right away that my friend’s loss would uncover my own and, in part, I welcomed that pain.  It hurts, of course, but that kind of pain is also its own comfort: a reminder that that life lived in me – however briefly – and my love for that child remains.

What I had forgotten is how closely the baby’s death inside my womb is linked to the loss of my father. 

It’s like one of those Victorian English homes where a cord in the drawing room rings a bell downstairs in the servants’ quarters in a totally different part of the house.  I expected my friend’s miscarriage to trigger the grief of my own but I had forgotten that pulling on that particular cord triggers the pain of my father’s death too.  And because I didn’t hear it ringing at first, because I kept trying to ignore it and push it away, that bell of grief just got louder and louder until it caught up with me in the bathroom in the middle of a morning’s mayhem.   

But when I finally let myself feel it, even though there wasn’t really time, even though it was deeply inconvenient, that old grief was the friend to me that it has become in recent years.  I said hello to it, acknowledged it for the sign of continued love for my Dad that I know it to be, sent a special prayer of thanks to God for the gift that was and is my father’s love for me.  I spoke a silent word in my heart to the dearest of dads and told him that I wished he could just take over the damn science projects already.  And I cried a little more and sighed and smiled.  All in four minutes. 

And then I brushed my teeth.