Anna Konkle Instagram – Thinking about loss a lot. Tragic posts feel weird because hearting, clicking tragedy as a “like” is counter intuitive but I just wanna talk about it I guess. This is five months ago, a day before my dad passed of lung cancer. Words in the news like oxygen, coma, death, are familiar. But I got to sleep in the folds of his hospital chair. At the time I felt alone and yet it was a privilege. And given everything going on today, I tell myself stuff that occurred to me on his final day. His eyes closed into a coma, the eyebrows in the shape of pain and I panicked for his comfort while he struggled to breathe. But other stuff happened in my brain like a gift. Thinking actually, maybe, his soul or whatever it is that makes us conscious had already begun to break or depart in the kindest of ways and he was meeting freedom from pain despite his body’s signals. And his odd, funny, compelling, meaningful impact on earth he knew as much as anything, bigger and happier than his human constrictions allowed. He wasn’t in the cold hospital, nothing was literal anymore. He knew how much I loved him, love him, despite his inability to respond. Those who were far away were with him somehow. And he wasn’t isolated but surrounded because he was larger than his own life in the hardest moment of it. And I don’t know if this is more a me thing because of rocky times with my Dad, but I didn’t know that once he was gone it would feel like someone pulled this thread or rope, vital to keeping me together, out. This woven-in thing was removed. I felt that happen. I didn’t give permission and then it was gone. I had prepared myself for bone grinding devastation but I didn’t know how vital in everything he would be until after he wasn’t there anymore. Every element took his battery so nothing had power. Like the sun and the moon were misplaced. But my grass grows, the current’s current, I can love without him even though I don’t want to so I try to be better, loving like him, funny like him, strange like him, courageous like him, without him. But listening to the news I keep thinking of us and over and over in my head I just want to say how sorry I am these threads are being taken.