Clichés, angel numbers, blue butterflies

It’s been 77 days since my father left Earthside. I could say “died,” but I’d rather not. Souls, after all, are believed to be immortal, and it’s only the physical body that leaves this plane.

- IRIS GONZALES

Still, the thought of that isn’t enough to console me, and I’m not being overly dramatic when I say that perhaps nothing ever will. The death of a parent, I’ve come to realize, is profoundly excruciating and unsettling. You feel like a headless chicken — defeated yet frantic and staggering with nowhere to go, running on nerves and muscle memory.

One does not learn to move on, only to move along with grief.

Grief is universal, they say, though each person’s experience is uniquely their own.

As for me, I have turned to clichés, angel numbers, coins and a kind of Joan Didion-like magical thinking to make sense of my new reality.

This started when I buried myself in books, researching one of life’s oldest and most enduring questions: what really happens when we die?

After my father died, I read every night, hoping to understand the kind of loss I was facing. I devoured published works on death, accounts from those with near-death experiences, listened to podcast interviews with mediums and even befriended an embalmer because he dealt with the dead every day.

I was deep into it, reading far into the night, past the witching hour, trying to understand death.

And here’s what I gathered: