A Grief Called Cumulative

September 2024

A few months ago, my first romantic relationship since the loss of Kara came to a mutual, amicable albeit sorrowful end. Shortly after, I journaled, “It was a wondrous gift not to be mourned by its passing, but treasured for its most unlikely existence in the first place.” Nonetheless, I quickly found myself down in a deep hole of sadness.

A friend asked if I thought I had rushed into it. That perhaps I hadn’t been truly ready for love again. In hindsight, I really think I was. I wasn’t expecting it, but I felt prepared for it. One of the mistakes I did make, was inadvertently pressing the pause button on the grieving I had been engaged in before jumping into a new relationship with both feet. Once that was over, everything was taken off pause and I simultaneously and unexpectedly began to grieve the loss of Kara again, as well as the most recent relationship.

But there was more. I soon found myself on the business end of a three-pronged grief attack that was a sledgehammer to the heart, with the third of the assailing agents being the loss of my father. For whom the grieving process has been an odd procession of start and stop from the beginning. Not knowing any better at the time, I did my best to keep that sadness at arm’s length. Then, when I finally began to really deal with losing him, I suddenly and tragically lost Kara. That grieving was unavoidably thrust upon me, but what I failed to realize then was that it completely overtook what I had been working through with my father.

So, while weeping over photos of my freshly-minted ex, I entered into a brutally fruitful period of taking turns grief journaling about both her and Kara while also allotting time to dive headlong into baseball nostalgia and missing my father. Baseball was my father and my ultimate bonding agent. In fact, Kara and I had been planning on flying down to California to take him to a game when I learned that his condition had deteriorated to the point that getting him to the stadium would not be a possibility, and he passed shortly after that. I directed my paternal grieving attentions toward the team I had rooted for since attaining consciousness, thanks to him, the Dodgers.

I was regularly watching highlights on YouTube from games or moments that had sentimental significance. In one particular clip, Kirk Gibson hits a walk-off home run in game one of the 1988 World Series. It's a core memory for me. Jumping up and down in the living room with my dad, as Vin Scully, the play-by-play announcer for the Dodgers, legendarily recited, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!” In the next video, Vin quoted Dr. Seuss during the last broadcast of his 67-year career, saying, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

Which ironically caused me to erupt into tears. Still, it reminded me of the similar sentiment I had expressed about the relationship that just ended - which I viewed as a gift despite its terminus. As was my time with Kara. As was the time with my father. It’s interesting how life will occasionally expose similar themes through unexpected avenues. 

I desperately wanted to feel gratitude for all those gifts again. But I was so bogged down in the sadness of having lost them all in one way or another that I couldn’t apply appreciation for much of anything, given the head and heart space I was occupying at the time. However, I’m lucky to be at a juncture in my life where I have the time and resources to explore some of those aforementioned avenues if I’m feeling inclined to do so. And I was.

The journaling and nature time were doing what they had always done towards addressing and processing the Kara-related grief, as well as dealing with the sadness from the recent breakup. But I felt like I needed something different for Dad.

So I decided I wanted to start having catches with strangers. Then, out of the blue and with an open week on the calendar, I booked a trip to Cooperstown, New York, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. It wasn’t to keep a posthumous promise or anything along those lines. I don’t think Dad and I ever so much as discussed the Hall of Fame. But, it’s Cooperstown. It’s baseball.

You could say I was flailing, searching, grasping at straws, or throwing things at a wall to see what might stick, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue. But it all felt to be at least somewhat directed and purposeful, if not admittedly a little overkill. I thought it could all be part of a pattern that had worked for me before. It was making time to take the time to think about dad, while doing dad-like things, in a dad-like setting.

I was able to find Kara again after her passing by finding myself out in nature. But even though he passed first, I hadn’t been able to track down my dad. A realization that finally occurred thanks to Mr. Scully. So that’s how we arrived at things like a Cooperstown visit and asking people to play catch with me. I was trying to put together a set of circumstances and variables that might enable me to find or feel his spirit again. Thinking that just maybe if I were able to build it, he would come. So I did.

And he came. 

But it wasn’t baseball in and of itself that revealed him to me again.

Just like nature has been with Kara, baseball would be the catalyst for finding my father, in distinctly different but parallel ways. Time spent clearing my head while walking on a beach or a trail, versus quietly tossing a ball back and forth with an introverted young man who sent me a Facebook message.

By exploring an outdoor cathedral with only her on my mind, or walking by myself through the halls of an indoor one, while he alone occupied my thoughts. Seeing cycles of life in the wilderness and witnessing them in the faces and voices of strangers of all ages while semi-futilely attempting to throw and catch a baseball. 

I guess the upshot of all this for me, is that I need to remember that it’s okay to take a break or a breather when it comes to grief, but I need to be very mindful of a prolonged pause. Because “Pause” doesn’t actually stop anything so much as delay the inevitable. Also, the people I’m grieving are different entities and mean different things to me for various reasons.

Things like scene and setting are important. But more salient is the time and intention spent within the context of who and what we were, and currently are. That is the crux of how I’m able to find their spirits in the ether, feel their love in my heart, and appreciate the gifts they were and always will be to my soul. Additionally, baseball and nature are awesome.

Postscript: Two months after visiting Cooperstown and writing this essay, the Dodgers would win the World Series in a full season for the first time since 1988, spurred on mightily by the momentum of a walk-off grand slam to win game one. During the same timeframe, I would find love, yet again. Thanks to a casual hiking date that became magical consecutive days of walking in the woods together. Baseball and nature are in fact, awesome.