My father-in-law died this month.

I honestly don’t know what to type after that sentence. There’s nothing I can say that doesn’t sound cliché or overtly sentimental, and he deserves so much more. He was a county council member, the former president of both the Kiwanis club and Community Corrections Advisory Board. The day after he died, our local newspaper wrote a tribute to him under the headline “Councilman remembered as a true servant” and put it above the fold as the lead story on the front page of the paper. He called my kids on their birthdays. He never said no when we asked him for rides to the airport. Everyday, at the end of his five-mile walk, he stopped at the nursing home to visit his mother. Multiple people at his funeral told me how often he talked about his own kids and grandchildren, how obviously proud he was of all of us.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the first weekend of May and immediately admitted to the hospital. He never came home after that, transitioning back and forth between hospitals and a rehabilitation facility throughout the 10 week period that stretched from his diagnoses to his death.

During these last few months, I’ve relearned that time is not only relative, it is often slippery and impossible to make sense of. Ten weeks can feel like forever when all you want to do is get your loved one to a place where they can return to enjoying something as simple as a dinner spent at home. It can feel like a blink of an eye when the hospital case worker is asking what hospice provider you want to use. When it comes to grief, there are no rules attached to time, no preset allotment of hours, days, weeks, months or years you’re allowed to cry or stare into the freezer of your grocery’s frozen food section, trying to pinpoint what’s causing a sudden avalanche of emotion.

My father in law spent most of his career as an auto mechanic. From 2003 to 2009, he was the auto technician at Prosser, our school district’s vocational center. He raised his family on the wages he earned getting cars and trucks back on the road. His first born, my husband, followed a different career path. But the day after his dad’s funeral, my husband spent the entire morning and early afternoon in our garage installing a headlight on his truck — not just the bulb, but the entire headlight kit.

“I think I’ll be able to do the other side faster now that I got this one in,” he said. He told me he had spent more than an hour calling different repair shops to ask about getting a new muffler. After finishing the sandwich he made out of the leftover deli slices from food delivered to the funeral home, he returned to our garage to continue working on his truck. This was what grief looked like for him — the immediate grief that comes after the funeral services. He spent the day using his hands the same way his dad did, trying to fix something that was broken.

Days after the funeral, I spent six hours binge watching Mare of Easttown, a show that, on the surface, is a crime drama centered on dead and kidnapped girls and a detective hell bent on doing her job. I realized a few episodes in, when the detective at the center of the show is forced into grief counseling by her boss, that it’s a show about complete and utter grief. The grief of lost love and lost loved ones. The grief of suicide and mental illness. The grief of broken marriages and infidelity. The grief of chronic illness and addiction and alcoholism (no one on the show enters a kitchen without being offered a beer). It’s about how unprocessed grief bleeds into everything and impacts all that comes within striking distance of it. How it can ripple through a community, get into the water and poison everything. This is what my immediate grief looked like to me, spending the day engulfed in a story about all forms of grief.

This deep dive into grief is familiar territory for me. Instead of turning away from sadness, I tend to turn toward it, inviting it in for coffee and hour-long sobbing sessions. And yet, I continue to find myself in grief-avoidance scenarios. Or maybe it’s not avoidance. Maybe I am just laying the brick so that I can walk up to my grief, confront it face to face. During my father-in-law’s illness, I walked five miles every single day of June and into July. It wasn’t on accident — at the end of May, I made a goal and wrote it above the month of June on the year-at-a-glance calendar I keep on my office door: “Goal: Walk at least 5 miles every day this month.” The 30 squares that make up the month of June now have a 5 written in each square, marking every walk. The first day I missed my walk was the day my father in law died, a day our entire family spent in his hospital room, by his bedside, as the nurse continued to administer morphine.

My own father drowned two months before I turned four. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life thinking about grief. How it has shaped me. Shaped my family and my place within my family. How it manifests in my body. How it is laced through my years as an active alcoholic and the last fourteen years of my sobriety. I think about how my grief shows up in the piles of clothes covering my closet floor and unmanageable stacks of books spreading across my office. I wonder how many of my decisions include the slight whiff of grief — my tendency to choose darker stories, read memoirs based on tragic childhoods, listen to the songs that make me cry over and over again. I don’t see myself as a morose Debbie-downer sort, but I do find constant unbridled optimism down right agonizing and a sure-fire sign that there is some serious trouble lurking just below the surface.

I think about grief enough that I’ve begun to wonder in what ways I should be grateful for it. Since quitting my job last year to take complete ownership of my career, I have been full of gratitude for all that led me to that decision. Using this logic, I must be grateful for my grief and its impact on my professional life. There is no question, when I look at the arc of my career, that my unprocessed grief led me to my early professional roles — jobs that put me in situations where I was forced to look at behavioral patterns, not just my own behavioral patterns but how I managed other people’s behaviors. Patterns that were formed by my grief and all they ways I had survived grief. I have longed believed that if we fail to deal with our shit, life will continue to put us in events and environments that require us to examine it. I believe wholeheartedly that the subtext of my entire career has centered on this idea: Me dealing with all the shit I keep avoiding.

My father in law loved what he did — his role on the county council, the time he spent working (and working out) at the YMCA, being an expert auto mechanic. I always admired just how much joy he found in life. I will miss him every single day. This too is what my grief looks like, me missing him and the way he embraced his life. I am sure I will continue to grieve his death in the days and weeks and months to come. My own father has been dead more than 44 years and I still fall into wells of grief over him at the most unexpected times. Grief is part of life. What I’m trying to learn is how to walk through my grief, to sit in it and be enlightened by it, without allowing it to define who I am or the work I do.