Der erste Schritt ist der Schwerste. “The First step is the hardest”. After arriving home after a psychologically trying visit with my mother, I discovered a birthday package sitting on the darkened steps that lead up to the apartment I will soon be vacating. Inside were 2 one-a-day calendars: one for books lovers and another for those who want to learn German phrases. Mittwoch, Wednesday 6th, 2010: Der erste Schritt ist der Schwerste. This is the sentence I have been practicing over in my head inside my cubicle attempting yet again to discover a language between my mind, and heart which has been feeling more like my guts as of late. Leaving nothing to be lost in translation, this language would be able to tell me in explicit and easy to follow instructions how to make right inside the fact that my mother is dying. The first step is not the hardest, it is realizing what the first step is.
On April 1, 2007, I lost my dad to a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. After almost 3 years, each day I must mentally find a way to be “okay with it”. Because the call for grief was as sudden as the death itself, I reacted immediately out of blind impulse in concentric circles that carried me out in ripples away from him. Now, I am with my mother but I feel the ebbing pushing me away. The knowledge that I must mentally prepare myself for the looming heartbreak sets before me a challenge to
A) meet the grief head on
B) prepare for the aftermath
C) make my past suffering useful to the present
D) utilize what my father has taught me by making my mother’s life as comfortable and filled with joy as possible, thus not making his death in vain.
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