Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Death didn't come easy.
I mean, when did it ever? My family and I — we never truly got past dad's death. We kind of just. . .lived with it. This constant aching sensation that poked and prodded at our insides—a reminder that we wouldn't wake up to dad making his famous ice cream extravaganza morning breakfast or how dad would always take the time to individually listen to all of our problems (I mean, granted he was a guidance counselor and that was his job) but he never outright treated us like just another one of his clinical portfolios.
To dad, we were his everyday reason to get out of bed and make the day mean something — even when it amounted to being a pretty shitty day, dad managed to always make the day just a little bit less shitty.
Whether it was his lame dad jokes, him and mom poking fun together revisiting old memories, or having game night every week, dad always made the time for us to be a family, and even took personal time separately with us so that we felt heard and understood and loved in each our own ways without identifying as just a whole of his children. He was the king of parenting, I always thought. And he did it better than mom to be perfectly honest. . .
When dad died, everything changed. Mom depended on every excuse known to man, and each one, was a greater incentive to drown her sorrows until all she could function, was just staring at a wall mute and unresponsive. It took a whole year before she got out of that head space—and it took a whole year for her to get back on the sober train.
Kinsey's perky and familiarly sociable self faded out, and she spent more time in her room then she did with her friends. It didn't take long for those relationships to die out. Kinsey always pretended she was fine, acted indifferent even just to past the time, and could be considered distant at a point I hardly recognized her. But Kinsey never completely pushed me away or Bode or Tyler. . .If anything, her and mom's relationship became more strained. I knew why; Kinsey was always closer to dad. And it didn't help, for a while, mom recoiled into a shell of a person.
Unrecognizable and unemotional.
Tyler focused all his steadily growing anger issues into hockey. It worked, for a little while. And Tyler learned to not project his bitterness onto us because we were all going through the same grief. We all lost dad, in one way or the other. Tyler, over time, managed to regain a little bit of his life back, and even ventured his time into scholarships and girls. He just always kept himself distracted and busy—it was something I both envied and hated. Because it seemed like, Tyler didn't want to be in the house at all.
Bode never really changed. In my eyes, he's always been the bright little beacon on a lighthouse scope that never completely died out. It might've had something to do with his age, and his memory of dad being not as prolonged as ours, but Bode always kept acting like a kid. He'd spent hours playing games in his room with his friends, or role playing Star Wars in the hallway just by himself, even one time went into my room without permission demanding I free Leia. Apparently, I was Janna. Yeah, that never really sat well with me you can imagine. . .
