Whenever it was time for my daughter to go back to college after a visit, or for us to leave after we visited her, my wife always cried. For a short while, she was overcome by grief. I was never happy to be apart from my daughter, but I never felt the same grief. I never quite understood how my wife felt. I told myself I was totally focused on her being on her own and doing well. I was proud of her for that. Perhaps that was why I never felt the same grief that my wife did.
Or maybe I just wasn’t capable of feeling anything.
Our daughter recently got married. It was an eagerly anticipated event. I had a knot in my stomach for weeks in advance. I lost weight. And in the last few days before we left for NYC for the wedding, I had difficulty thinking about anything. It was the biggest day of my life.
Arriving in NYC was a relief. My wife and I busied ourselves addressing the few pre-wedding tasks left to perform. But in truth, there was very little for us to do. This left us with much more free time than I was expecting to have. Normally, this would have been a good thing. I love big cities, and we took long walks in the park, spotted the ducks in the Central Park Reservoir, visited the Met, and the MOMA. This time, though, doing all of these things I normally love rang hollow. There was a heaviness, like I was walking to get away from something. I found solace in a small art supplies shop in the Art Students League of New York and bought myself a few paint brushes to distract from the gloom.
I was not expecting sadness this weekend, and in the moments away from the celebration, it was hard to understand the gloom. What was it?
The darkness went away during the wedding itself. Not only did it go away, but it was replaced by moments of pure joy, moments that moved me deeply and that I am grateful for. It was a rare experience in life, one that comes with high hopes and expectations, and exceeds them.
I was in my tuxedo (I looked great), my wife in her gown, and my son in his tux (OK, we all looked great), piled into a big black car for the drive downtown to the wedding. The surprise and happiness of walking my daughter (she looked best of all) down the aisle while Harry Connick Jr.’s “It Had To Be You” played. The one with the big flourish in the beginning, of course. My daughter found me when the last song of the night was played (“Just Like Heaven” by The Cure, I love that song, so does she apparently), and we sang and danced together. These were emotional moments for me.
These were the feelings of intense joy that weekend, that came along with the sadness. Normally, I struggle in social situations, but the evening flew by quickly. I barely sat down.
When I was younger, not young, but younger, I had a terrible saying I used to believe in: “Feelings are something that should be held down, deep inside, with a heavy weight placed on top of them so they don’t get out.”
It seems incomprehensible to the current version of me, enlightened and awoken by several years of therapy, that I said that out loud. Many times. To my family. What is worse is that I believed it.
I don’t believe it anymore. There was no particular moment when it stopped. It went away gradually over time as I worked with my therapist to talk about my feelings for the first time in my life. The process has helped in many ways. Among them, I learned self-awareness, and I discovered the container I had grown up in my whole life, which molded me.
Now I am largely free of that mold. I am free to feel things. This includes moments of joy, like at the wedding, that I would never have felt the depth of before. It also includes the other side of the coin, the grief and sadness I never allowed myself to feel.
On the Monday after the wedding, we flew home. This is when it hit me the hardest. Waking up early that morning and driving to the airport in the dark and rain is when it finally dawned on me. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go home. I just wanted to see my daughter. I finally figured it out. This was grief.
This feeling that my wife had experienced so many times in the last 10 years since she went away to college and moved away, that feeling I didn’t understand, was grief. It was grief over the loss of my daughter, growing up, and leaving. It took a long time to land, but it was finally here.
This new version of me, who feels everything, must have finally had space for this experience.
We landed early enough for me to work in the afternoon. In my office at home, where I normally need quiet, I could not stand to be alone. I asked my wife to sit with me.
The wedding changed nothing about my relationship with my daughter. I am not the Steve Martin character from “Father of the Bride” who has to adjust to his daughter’s sudden and unexpected departure. She moved out a long time ago. I kept thinking about the end of that movie, though, where he can’t find his daughter in the crowd before they drive off for their honeymoon. It made me appreciate even more that she took that moment to find me at the end of her wedding while The Cure played. It meant a lot to me.
I am still as proud as ever that my daughter is out on her own, happy, independent, and doing well.
It is now a week after the wedding, and the dueling grief and joy have largely given way to something different: Warmth and gratitude for the experience. I believe that identifying it, giving it a name, and recognizing it in these words and in so many more in my journal have helped me both experience and process this.
The truth is, my daughter is a shining star. She has made my life so much brighter. At times like the wedding, I saw how she brightens the lives of everyone around her. It would be a crime for that light not to be shared with the world. This is how it should be, even if it is hard sometimes for this new version of me. This version no longer holds everything down deep inside under a heavy weight.