The Things They Don't Tell You

     The things they don't tell you, the good the bad the ugly. I promised transparency when I started this and well I started it to help myself get things of my chest and not be so hard headed..... that second part isn't working so well. Everybody tells you that it's going to be tough. Losing somebody always is. What has been strange and somewhat tough for me has been finding out all the little things that I miss having dad around for. I mean I knew I'd miss seeing him play with my daughter, I knew Is miss talking to him on the phone or calling him and talking about wrestling or the weather or whatever he'd want to talk about as he sat out in his garage in his favorite chair waiting for Mom to get home from work. But the thing nobody told me is how much you miss things you never knew you would miss. 
     You just take so much for granted that you never knew you loved until it's gone. I knew it would be tough on the birthday's and the holiday's and the big events that we marked on our calendars every year. I knew i'd miss the weekends or afternoons spent just sitting around talking about nothing and everything. I knew I would miss stuff like that but I never thought that I would miss calling Dad and telling him about the girl I'm seeing. Telling him about how much I know he'd like her. I  never thought I would miss calling him when it turned out that he was right about something just so he could laugh and refuse to say "I told you so" even though it was plastered all over his body language. 
     Theres no handbook to how you grieve. It is way more challenging than I ever thought it would be. It's going the whole night with no sleep because you're playing an argument you had with each other over and over again. Wishing you could go back and sit yourself down and say you're going to regret this, you're going to wish you could just have another simple conversation with him. They didn't tell me that I would find myself on a treadmill at 1 AM trying to exhaust myself to calm my mind and sleep. They didn't tell me that it would just randomly hit me like wrecking ball colliding into a rundown building. 
     The things they don't tell you are some of the toughest things to get through. Mainly because the things I've found, aren't the same as yours and the list never stops growing. It is something new every single day, and every single day you figure it out step by step again. Some people grieve and they remember nothing but bad and they only think of how much it sucks right now in this moment. Don't get me wrong I have done my fair share of that. But now I try and focus on being grateful for the time I had with him, and it took realizing that he can still hear me, I just might not be able to hear him. I send my conversations up to him daily and I'm sure he laughs and says I'm a nut when I do something stupid. But thats kinda the beauty in it, I know he's still watching. 
     We learn daily what our new life is. We build and we build and we keep punching away. As the great Rocky Balboa said "It ain't about how hard you can hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." So that's what I'm going to continue to do, keep my head down and keeping punching, keep pushing forward. Whatever life has to throw at me, I'll get through. I was prepared by the best. But there will be days, there will be days that its crippling, and nights that its haunting. Thats the things they don't tell you, life is gonna knock you down. Brush the dirt off throw a smile on and say bring it.