Grieving Someone You Knew When You Were Someone Else

8 years.

8 years ago I sat next to your bed quietly working on a project while you slept when a nurse came in to check on you. She paused next to the bed.

“Oh sweetie, I think he’s gone.”

I looked up, and she was right. You were at peace. My Dad was gone.

It wasn’t technically that day that changed the trajectory of my life. It was 5 days earlier, when in consultation with his doctors, my brother and I made the choice to end my father’s treatments and let him pass comfortably and humanely.

My father’s memory paused that day. He breathed his final breath and we got to have our final moment where we shared time together on earth. Where we learned and grew together. At the same time that his memory froze in time, he stopped ever getting to know who I would become.

Ned Donovan at 26 is the last version of me that William Michael Donovan knew.

I think about that a lot. Very few people are anyone at 26. Looking back, I don’t always love the person I was in my 20s. But I have to accept that Ned Donovan at 26 is the last version of me he got to love. Some days that helps me love myself more. Other days the opposite.

My life now exists in such a wildly different state than he knew.

He didn’t get to meet my incredible wife or see the life we’ve built together.

He never got to experience a single project I produced. Now I have a tv show that I co-created from the ground up and am a series regular on.

He never got to experience my life in *real* jobs. My career in tech that allowed me to fund my artistic endeavors.

He didn’t get to see the moment my entire world shattered when 14 months later my mom passed away. He didn’t even know she was sick.

“It gets easier with time.”

This is a common refrain people said to me again and again in the coming days, weeks, months, both when he passed and again when Mom passed the next year. 8 years later I can confirm, they’re right…kinda.

As more and more distance grows between the last moment I knew him and the person I am now, the less emotional weight he has on my day to day memories and choices. I do less things that remind me of him. I don’t absentmindedly call his phone number like I used to.

Grieving my father, who I stopped getting to know at 26, means putting myself back into the mind of someone I no longer am. An extra step has been added to accessing that hole in my heart. The hole’s still there, but I get to choose when to explore it now. It rarely appears out of nowhere anymore, waiting to derail my day.

Where grief used to be a series of potholes to dodge, now it’s a cavern system I get to explore. There’s beauty in selective grief. I now get to sit down and remember. I get to explore a part of him I momentarily forgot about, or recall a memory at will, rather than it appearing unbidden.

But I find there’s a depth to the cavern that I didn’t know about 8 years ago. Only just now am I finding the nooks and crannies of pain that etched itself on my person way deep under the surface.

It was really only today while spelunking in my grief that I realized I’ve spent the last 8 years fighting to get back to where I was at 26. Somewhere I thought that if I can achieve what I wanted then, then maybe I’ll be honoring the version of myself that he last knew.

But today I took a long walk in a park and told myself that Ned at 26 doesn’t exist anymore. I’m Ned at 34. Everything I’ve achieved is built on the back of who I was then, and everyone I got to be since. Ned at 26 wasn’t the best version of me. Ned at 34 isn’t either. I can grieve my father and grieve that he’ll never know me now, he’ll never know me in the future, and with each passing year my grief will lessen as I leave Ned at 26 further and further behind.

But Dad didn’t love me for who I was at 26. He spent the 26 years of our shared lives preparing me for Ned at 40, 50, 80, and so on. Honoring his memory is embracing the future without him rather than apologizing for it.

Today I experienced one of the deepest days of grief I’ve felt since he passed away, because I realized that the best way to grieve my father is to let go of who I was when I lost him and try figuring out who I am today. Embracing versions of me he won’t know means I get to be less and less the person he expected. That hurts. That’s new. I hadn’t found that cavern before.

That’s something Ned at 26 never could have figured out.

I wonder what Ned at 35 will learn.