Grief in Thailand

what can't be shared with our dead, hurts too

This was an essay for my other newsletter, Love Notes To Grievers, but I wanted to share it on Slow Practice, too.

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I get pangs of grief about the things I cannot share with my dad, not because he's hard to approach or an absent father, but because he's dead. I say it like that because it's my way of landing it bluntly for the death-phobic amongst us who wince or try to soften the language around it. It's my dead dad, and I use words that suit that ache. Passed on feels too light, yet I will tread softly with those I barely know and their dead. But for me and mine, I want to land it solidly in your chest, not with a whisper, a bang—dead dead dead. Language is a landmine when it comes to grief. The words we choose can build a bridge with a solid foundation of trust and safety to one another or burn it to the ground.

I cannot call to let him know I arrived safely in a new land, nor is he part of our group family chat, where I send our travel pictures daily, although I thought about adding his old number to see what would happen. It would go something like this: I add his old number to the group chat. The number would now belong to a man around my mother’s age, 71.

He would text

“Hi, you all seem like such a nice family. I am enjoying all your pictures, but I think you added the wrong number to the group chat.”

I would say,

“Hi, I’m so sorry about that. This used to be my dad’s number. He passed away from cancer five years ago. I must’ve added it by mistake.”

As you know, that’s a lie, but I can’t fight the soothing effect of an even number: me, my partner, brother, his wife, mom and replacement dad. The text thread would reveal that he is a widower, with a one-syllable name like Jack, Rob, or maybe a fun nickname like Big Cat. His wife also died around the same time as my dad. He then becomes a family friend for a few years. My mom and Big Cat hit it off. He’s well off but not a flashy kind of guy, with no kids, so the blended family drama is out. He has two dogs, Walter and Daisy, who are six years old and long-haired dachshunds. He owns a villa in Tuscany, but that is the least interesting thing about him—an even six.

The grief that shows up when you're doing something joyous with your life needs to be navigated delicately and skillfully, and with grace that you didn't think was possible, each new experience, an absence lingers, like a low hum or ringing in your ears, sometimes it's loud, other times, it fades into the background, but there, forevermore. The year my dad died, it mostly consisted of broken sleep, crying in the car on my way to work, and feeling so exhausted I could barely function at times. I felt like an exposed nerve, but what I was was grief-stricken, and in that state, I like to plan trips I can't afford. So close to a year later, my partner and I booked a trip to Thailand, and you know what happened next.

“Holy fucking shit, this is like the movie Contagion, but real life” I said to my partner plunking down beside him on our tired grey love seat.

Glued to our TV, we watched video clips of doctors double-masked, wearing light blue and green gowns and caps in Wuhan, China, their hospitals overrun with sick and dying patients, trying to warn the rest of the world about what was coming. The death toll climbed in Northern Italy and Iran, and those poor cruisers (3,700 passengers and crew) quarantined on a Diamond Princess ship docked in Yokohama, Japan, for weeks. New York was the epicenter in the U.S., where bodies overflowed outside funeral homes in freezer trucks.

The global pandemic quashed our travel plans into oblivion, and many others, but it was the least of our worries.

Five years later, we were Thailand-bound with new aches and pains, bracing for the 17-hour flight. Our red-eye flight from Vancouver to Tokyo, not much sleep happened, leaning left to right, rotating my aching ass cheeks, regretting my choice of gluten-free for flight food. A short layover in Tokyo, I marvelled at the pristine public bathrooms with heated seats, music playing as you sat, birds singing, and down to the floor door stalls, a luxury I didn't know I needed, lingering longer than I ever have. Tokyo to Bangkok, I got the window this time. My partner reluctantly sat beside a tall, thick drink of water who no doubt thought about hurling himself out the emergency exit more than once. His muscular tree trunk legs, painted on dark-wash ribbed jeans, were pressed hard against the seat in front of him for the entire seven-hour flight. I'm 5'3 and my partner is 5'6. Economy class chose us.

We breezed through customs, grabbed a cab to the Rattanakosin area, old city, groggy, euphoric, and fighting to stay awake as long as possible to get on the time change, spending the first three days exploring the temples, adjusting MY stomach, and sweating through the streets around Samran Rat. Throngs of people, a sea of orange fabric piled in shops, monks garments, golden Buddha statues, all sizes, ceremonial offerings for temples and home altars lined the street shops we walked, steady streams of cars, motor bikes, and tuk-tuks created an organized chaos that swirled the polluted air, just as I remembered it when I was there in my early twenties, but with less climate anxiety, no smart phone addiction and perkier breasts.

On our last day before boarding a flight, north to Chang Mai, we adjusted to fast-paced city life, weaving through streets, frequently stopping at 7-Eleven’s for a blast of air con, band aids for my blistered feet from walking twenty-plus thousand steps a day, and water breaks. Exploring the nooks and crannies by the klongs, the city is filled with them, and by these waterways are rows of houses, which connect to the inner city streets. While walking down one, my partner spotted a few older Thai men sitting out front. The owner, a man around seventy, had a makeshift bar in the lower level of his house, with a few sturdy wooden tables set out,

“Dad would have loved this,” I said, slowing my pace to take in the painted blue wooden two-story house before we chose a table.

My partner glanced at me, sensing the waft of grief in the air, then looked around and nodded.

“Yeah, he would have.”

The sensation hits, call it what you will, a grief pang, a feeling of homesickness when you were younger or butterflies in your stomach, but filled with sadness that gets lodged in your stomach and travels up to your throat and into your tear ducts.

Dad would have loved,

This Thai beer,

This old Thai house/bar,

This jolly man who served us,

The two husky Russian men, sitting across from us, four empty large bottles of beer deep for each of them, and on to the next,

This murky canal lined with old houses.

I let it wash over me, look down the klong, and think about him, and no more.

No more beer,

No more texts from his daughter from a foreign land,

No more life left to live, and that thought twists in my gut.

This doesn’t break me, at least not anymore. I’ve gotten used to it being part of my life, the grief lingers, flares, lets itself be known, the art of practicing letting it come and go, ready for its return. Could I have so boldly said this year one, two and even three? Probably not, my body was fighting the loss of my dad with sleepless nights, utterly wrecked by caring for him until his dying breath, but now joking about a replacement dad.

We pay and get up from the table,

“What do you feel like eating for dinner?” My partner asks as we walk past the four older Thai men still sitting at their table.

The feelings fade and settle back to their usual hum. If grief pulls up a seat at your table beside a Klong, welcome it, and ask if it wants a beer, just not four. I don’t recall my answer or what we ate that night, but looking back on that moment, I probably would say

“Pad Thai, Pad Thai, Pad Thai.”

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If you're grieving the death of a loved one, you can read my book,

Love Notes to Grievers

Alright, that’s it. Those are my hopefully non-cringy pitches