Remembering Him

by Lindsay Bribiescas

Zinnia Moreno / Daily Bruin

My dad died three days after classes started in my first year of college. When I heard the news, I was sure that I wouldn’t be able to do ... well, anything. I shut down and just went along with what people told me to do.

A lot of people say that their parents are their inspiration – or their best friends – and for me, my dad was exactly that and so much more. He was practically my whole world. Since I was little, we had spent every possible moment together. He started reading the Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated to me until I was old enough to complain that those magazines were too boring. We graduated to “Harry Potter,” until I didn’t allow him to finish the series because I was old enough to read it by myself. More than 10 years after I stole the book out of his hands, he kept whining about the heartbreak he endured every time someone referenced the series.

All throughout my elementary school years, my dad worked in San Francisco, starting his commute from Santa Rosa anywhere between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. in order to work at the large bank headquarters there. Whenever I stayed with him as part of the custody agreement after my parents’ divorce, he would wake up even earlier to drive me over to his sister’s house – that way she could take me to school, where she taught – just so we could spend a few more hours together the evening before.

Lindsay Bribiescas / Daily Bruin

During those years, I often had trouble going to sleep, terrified that my dad would get into a car accident driving into the city. The thought of him dying regularly kept me awake, crying, and even sent me crawling into bed with him a few times. I was scared of being without him – left alone.

But those days passed. When I entered middle school, he quit his job in the city and started working a few miles from our house, where I could walk to his office after school. Most days – all through middle school and high school – I would visit him and remind him to eat something, or just complain about how heavy my backpack was. That proximity to my school also made it possible for him to attend every tennis match of my high school career – and a good number of the practices, too. He proudly told his friends that he got to be the team’s “ball boy.”

I could go through every year, every moment, of my life and point out where I was emulating my dad, where he had taught me something, where he had pushed and pulled me into trying something terrifying but good for me. He knew almost all of my secrets and had the best reactions to everything I told him. Our celebrations, whether they were for birthdays or college acceptance letters, were quiet and often brief, but that was what we were comfortable with – a dinner at our favorite restaurant or rewatching our favorite movie. Usually, either he was gone in the morning to get to work or I was staying with my mom – but more often than not, I woke up to a text that proclaimed just how proud of me he was.

Moving to UCLA was the first time I really had to face something without him being there the whole time, but I clung to his promise that he was only a phone call away. We talked through all of my hopes for college – that I would study abroad, that I would join the newspaper and a few other clubs, that I would try out all of the things I was too scared to do in high school. During those first few days, I texted him almost hourly with updates – ranging from my panic over how scary all my classes were to the new people I was meeting. Every response he sent kept me moving through my homesickness.

Lindsay Bribiescas / Daily Bruin

So when he was gone, I felt hopeless, terrified, distraught, furious and – strangely – apathetic. Some days, even now, it’s hard to get motivated to do anything, even eat. Some days I want to scream at someone, some days all I want is a hug. A lot of the comfort that people try to give falls flat, simply because I can’t imagine that they understand, and there’s nothing that can make the situation better – only having my dad here could do that. But that impossibility also leads into my near-constant roller coaster of emotions: switching daily from irrational anger to sadness to confusion, and hitting every emotion in between. But with time comes practice. Now, eight months later, it’s become easier to manage the influx of emotions and actually feel “normal.”

When I first moved into my dorm, I promised myself that I would stop worrying so much. I told myself that everyone goes to college, and no one’s parents ever die, no matter how much they worry. So when my dad failed to text me first thing in the morning for the first time since I got a cell phone, I did my best not to panic. I went to a coffee shop and started studying, beginning to settle into the idea that I was in college, while simultaneously checking my phone every five minutes for his text. By the time mid-morning passed, I became frantic. I started calling my dad, only to be sent to voicemail. I called his girlfriend, then his best friend – whom I had just been talking to – but neither picked up. I started receiving texts from my mom, asking where I was and telling me to stay there. That was when I really started to panic – she was supposed to be back in Santa Rosa, and she refused to explain why she was in Los Angeles. Ten minutes later, she walked into the coffee shop and pulled me outside. Less than a minute after that, I was convinced that I was having the worst nightmare possible. I couldn’t control what I was doing, I couldn’t feel my own body and I needed to talk to my dad. The day itself is blurry – all I remember is overwhelming confusion. I couldn’t understand how this had happened, or what I had done wrong. I even briefly convinced myself that I had killed him by leaving for UCLA and subsequently breaking his heart.

During my week in Santa Rosa – after flying back home to my family on the night I found out the news – I realized that I needed to go back to school. Picking out the urn for his ashes, listening to the condolences of my closest friends, visiting all the places that we had frequented – it was too much.

Returning to UCLA was difficult. I didn’t really know anyone, it was a new town and I had missed the first full week of classes. But I wanted the challenge of school, hoping that it would distract me from my grief and confusion. And that plan worked, for the most part. That first quarter, I had to block off a few hours a day just in case my grief got to be too much, which made making friends hard – harder than just missing that first week of classes. But I managed to make a few friends who made the bad days better, and who could make me laugh and not look at me with pity.

Therapy helped, too, even without the deep, movie-esque plunge through every aspect of every emotion I have. Knowing that someone is there for you, that their actual job is to listen to you rant or cry or just talk is inordinately comforting. Being able to spew out that I feel guilty and angry and I kind of want a hug – and not be stared at like I’ve lost my mind – is a relief. Even better, the therapist was able to at least assure me that I am normal. My therapist would walk me through what I was feeling and remind me (when I was at my most irrational) that my dad’s death was not my fault. He died of a heart attack, not of a broken heart, and anyway, I didn’t break his heart by going to college – I made him proud.

Lindsay Bribiescas / Daily Bruin

Besides just letting me talk, my therapist also gave me strategies to deal with the issues that surfaced following my dad’s death. Sometimes I would disassociate from what was happening – I would struggle to focus or register what was happening as reality – so she recommended that I use mindfulness exercises to help ground myself. When I would suffer panic attacks, she would tell me to talk to someone about anything – to have them reassure me that I was going to be OK, or even just tell me about their day to get my mind off of my panic. She helped me develop plans to deal with or get out of uncomfortable situations or conversations.

Having that support is reassuring – especially a few months after the event, and in a place as big as UCLA. It’s easier to keep up a facade that everything is always fine, even when that’s not true. That facade seems to make it easier for people to forget that I’m still grieving. But grieving doesn’t stop after a couple months. It keeps hurting, but more often than not, it’s just a hum in the back of your mind. Sometimes the pain is all you can think about, but those times are not necessarily a daily, or even weekly, occurrence – which is manageable.

Now, it’s easier for me to go out and do what my dad and I had planned – I want to make him proud, and it’s a way for me to keep him in mind as much as possible without feeling like I can’t breathe. But even as I’m doing all that, there are still times when I worry that I’ll forget him. I worry that I forget how he used to put hot sauce on everything and then whine about the spiciness. Or how excited he got over freshly made doughnuts or a box set of an old TV show. I sometimes worry that I’ll grow into a person that he wouldn’t know anymore – or even worse, that he wouldn’t like.

But if there is anything that my dad taught me, it is that we have to come from a place of love, not fear. I love my dad more than anything, and he taught me to keep moving forward when things are difficult. So out of love for him, that’s what I’ll do.