Timestamps

My dad died while I held his hand with my mom and sister. Carrie, my partner and wife, was in the waiting room. After he passed, I joined Carrie and cried harder than I ever remember crying. It hurt. It hurts. I thought I’d get over it, but I haven’t. It hurts.

I don’t want to forget my dad—I don’t want him to die. He was generous. He was kind. He was thoughtful, aware, insightful, and loved by everyone that knew him (to the best of my knowledge).

Death is a common point of everyday conversation because of its connection to life. I hate death. I don’t want to talk about death, see death, or consider death. It’s too painful.

When my dad died, it confused my reality. I can’t fix it. I can’t control it. He’s gone. I can’t call him. I can’t see him. Some of his ashes are where I spent my youth jumping motorcycles he had helped me fix. His other ashes are at a veteran’s memorial in Grand Junction, CO. After his burial, I haven’t gone back (maybe once or twice even though I’ve driven by thousands of times). I don’t believe he’ll say hello if I show up.

I recently watched a video about grief that explained the process in a “brain-science” fashion. It helped me understand some reasons I’ve been struggling for over a decade. To those of you in the psychology world (and everyone), I apologize for my lack of brain-science accuracy, but this is my current understanding of how this works.

When we experience an event in our lives that matters, a part of our brain (called the hippocampus) TIME STAMPS that event. This gives the brain permission to slowly decrease the importance of this event over time (unless it is given reason to remain relevant). However, if the event is traumatic, the time stamp is ignored because survival in this situation “requires” a life-long awareness of potential threats similar to the traumatic event—at least from the brain’s perspective.

This explains how a scene in a film of a child holding the hand of a parent in a hospital bed triggers me. When I watch these moments in films, I can’t help but think of my dad’s hand’s inability to reciprocate a squeeze to communicate our mutual awareness of each other’s beings.

Although I cognitively understand my dad has been gone for years, my body and brain believe my dad died today. It’s not timestamped. I’m trying to figure out how to fully realize he is not here because my safety doesn’t depend on this memory existing without a timestamp.

This concept has given me hope to heal from traumas that happened years ago.