I needed to look through some old files, paper files, in a folder, in my file cabinet. I didn’t find what I was looking for. But I did find something that I definitely wasn’t looking for.

What I found wasn’t lost or missing. It was simply stored away, and finding it surprised me.

“It” was a powerful mix of emotions.

Opening one particular file reopened a whole pile of feelings and thoughts.

The file was full of paperwork, notes, certificates and everything about my Daddy’s death, on Christmas Day 1999. It was also, unexpectedly, full of dormant grief.

When my father died, I was the next of kin (since my parents were divorced and I was the oldest daughter). My hubby and I took care of all of the details following Daddy’s passing – cremation, memorial service, settling his (non-existent) estate, creditors, etc…, even hospital bills from the hospital he died in…

But the file reminded me of all of the details that had NOT been taken care of prior to my Daddy’s final hospitalization and inevitable death.

I was living 2200 miles away, in another country, with my own young family, on a graduate student’s income. We did what we could, and more, actually.

Things that could have been done with and for my Daddy, weren’t done, for many reasons.

No fingers are being pointed here. No blame is being placed. Forgiveness has been and continues to be extended to the other parties involved.

But the fact remains: Daddy fell through the cracks in so many ways, and lack of care led to his untimely passing.

He was only 44 years old.

His death certificate says that the official cause of death was “complications due to basal cell carcinoma” (skin cancer). There is much more to the story.

Social workers were involved. Hospital staff were shocked. No one should die from basal cell carcinoma – it’s so very treatable. A possible lawsuit was mentioned…so many things were wrong on so many levels.

That hurts my heart. It makes me mad. The emotion is as strong now as was the shock of it all the first time around.

And then there’s the fact that he died alone on Christmas Day, with so little company during the 2 days he was in the hospital before that…

I spoke with him several times every day on the phone. Even when his voice gave out and he could hardly whisper, I still called him so I could talk to him, so I could reassure him, and pray for him, with him, because he was mostly alone.

I called early on Christmas Day and got no answer. I tried again later in the day, but he didn’t answer. For hours he didn’t answer. And nobody called me either. It was after several hours of calling, finally having a nurse refer me to family members for information, and getting no response from family, that I was ultimately able to get someone to answer their phone, and discovered that my Daddy had passed away. All involved parties had assumed that ‘somebody else’ had already contacted me, when in fact none of them had.

We were scheduled to leave Dec 28th (waiting for cheaper flights) to head down from Canada to be with him and arrange for his long-term care.  Instead we flew down on Boxing Day (Dec 26) to make his final arrangements.

All of that flood of grief came back, and all of the injustice crashed over me again, as I searched through that file for…

…for what?

I was looking for an ADDRESS – ABC Street, City, State, and Zip Code.

I found sadness, madness – 101 Things That Went the Wrong Way, City of What Might Have Been, State of Grief, ZIPdone-the-end.

How can papers tucked away in a drawer somewhere evoke such powerful emotions?

Files hold pieces of our past. Those bundles of papers are like roadmaps back to the places we’ve been. And those places make up the stories of our lives, with all the feelings that go with them.

In all honestly, not a day goes by that I don’t think of my Daddy. I miss him. It hurts that he’s not here.

But, I’m not the kind of person to victimize myself over the loss of a loved one – not even the loss of my too-young-to-die father. I mark the anniversary of his birthday, Father’s Day, and now Christmas, with a quiet recognition of bittersweetness of the date, and also without a lot of ceremony. I acknowledge my tenderness at those junctions, because I do feel the loss most profoundly during those times, but I don’t dwell there. Death is a part of life, and it hurts, and hopefully it’s not THE END. I can’t live my life in the shadow of Daddy’s death. My life has to go on, my journey isn’t yet done.

And yet, this collection of papers, a file that I’ve looked at 20 times in the last 10 years with little effect, TODAY transported me back to the raw reality of his passing, to the full-on agony of the loss of my Daddy, and the seeming senselessness of his death.

Revisiting the grief ‘out of the blue’ today, triggered by a tiny file folder – that totally surprised me. I’m really sad, and mad, and REALLY angry, and grief-stricken, and hurt to the core, all over again. The unfairness of it all just makes my heart ache.  It sucks!

I never doubted that I would feel this grief again. From my training and life experience, I know that grief is a powerful mix of emotions, and the intensity of those feelings often does not diminish over time (we just feel them less often, and for shorter amounts of time). Anything and everything and nothing at all can trigger a return journey to that place.

And today, just like so many times in the first days and weeks and months following Daddy’s death, I again tripped into grief unaware.

Experiencing the grief isn’t the unexpected part… it’s the surprise of the moment when it actually happens. Why now? What brought this on?

It wasn’t a scheduled stop. Honestly, it wasn’t even on my radar. But today was a big side trip for me… Tonight, on a random night, over 14 years after Daddy’s death, I’m sad to the point of tears again. That’s what it looks like when a grief is revisited, I suppose.