I haven’t been crying much recently but for the last week my eyes keep feeling tight around the corners, like I’d just finished.

I feel like I’m a nuclear core, with control rods to help stop a cascade of grief. The control rods can be work, a book, sleep, or for all last week the labor of going through dad’s house, and making arrangements.

Being around family, I felt like the control rods were even more important because if any of us let go it would cascade to the others. We each grieve in our own way, and I’ve been worrying about letting mine out, because I don’t want to make anyone else feel worse. I wish I could tell them that grieving is a good thing, and that my own expression of it shouldn’t make anyone else feel worse. It’s easier to hold it in like a balloon with a slow leak. I think about him in a thousand small ways, every minute, each time crying a little inside. It shames me that I even worry what other people think, that I’m worried about showing my pain too much, while at the same time worrying that I’m showing it too little.

I feel it, inside, and that’s what tells me that I’m not a bad person.

Yet I still feel the compulsion to write this post. The irony’s not lost…