augustinus430

I wonder every day whether I have the right to be grieving. My father passed away of a heart attack in September, 1996. He had been married to my mother for a mere two months. I was born two months afterwards. I think of memory as being the perpetually present act of the intellect that distends itself outward to encompass past experiences and expectations of future ones, forming a unified thread present to me throughout my whole life. I keep images of my family and my loved ones stored away in the recesses of my memory, and I can call them back to my mind's attention whenever I want. I know what I know, but I know that there are some things that I will never be able to know. I cannot make and recall an image of someone I never knew. If I am grieving, then, I'm grieving for a non-entity, a person of whom I can make only faint, inauthentic likenesses off second-hand report and photographs. This has been a constant thorn in my side ever since I was born, and I don't know if it will ever go away. I have no reference point for this kind of grieving, and I'm terribly afraid that it's self-absorbed and self-serving in the extreme to be so fixated on it. What, then, am I actually grieving? I can't be grieving someone I never even knew; that's dealing in the worst kind of counterfactual. Am I grieving for a childhood I spent with one less parent? Am I grieving for the self-loathing, aimlessness, ineptitude, and lack of social conditioning that come from having no male role model in my life? Am I grieving for my mother, being perpetually conscious that she suffered the worst kind of loss, the loss of a man she needed at that time more than any other? I feel as though my coming into the world at all is cursed, because of what happened a short time before I was born. I am responsible for that, in some twisted, inexplicable, entirely irrational way. It's just a matter of proximity, a death coming so soon before the beginning of a new life. I was left behind to grow up stunted and inwardly deformed and as less than a whole person because of a loss that had everything to do with me. I know that's ridiculous, but I can't help but feel that way. I apologize if this seems to be a strange angle to take on the issue. I don't really know what I'm even looking for here; my grief is not debilitating. It isn't something that throws my life into haywire, it's more an underlying bedrock of pain that provokes the odd sleepless night, the occasional fit of weeping, and a consistently negative outlook on life. It comes in waves that grow worse the more cognizant I become of what could have been. I don't really know what to do about it.