In The Grieving: Confessions of a Mourning Son
"Grief is not a problem to be solved; it is an experience to be carried." – Megan Devine, It's OK That You're Not OK It all starts, oddly enough, with a PDF. On the morning of September 3, 2021, I opened my laptop and revisited a digital document that was minimized to the bottom corner of my screen. I left it there the night before, a reminder of the new reality I was about to experience, a world in which my father would no longer be with us. I was asked to sign this PDF so that my father could be removed from his hospital room and begin hospice care after suffering a massive stroke one month earlier, which was one month after he lived through through a heart attack. It was a simple piece of paper that held so much power over me. Four days later, at 5:30 AM on September 7, my mother and I received the dreaded call, one of those Worst Phone Calls Ever you always hear about. My father had passed minutes earlier. Those previous four days were heavy with an emotional