I had a client nearing discharge who dropped a bit of a bombshell.
“There’s something I should probably figure out before I’m done here,” she said. “I need to figure out what to do with Dead Dad. He’s been in my closet for a couple of years.”
Wait.
WHAT???
Her father had parentified and abused her for years after her mother died. When he passed, she and her sister argued over who would take his ashes. Neither of them wanted him, so she put him in the trunk of her car to be dealt with later.
A couple of years went by.
She and her family were moving, and she needed to clear out her trunk. Still not knowing what to do with Dead Dad, she put him in her closet, still to be dealt with later.
Years went by.
Therapy happened.
She’d healed so much.
But the one thing she’d been afraid to bring up? Dead Dad.
Figuring out what to do with Dead Dad was the final loose end she needed to tend to before she “graduated” from therapy.
She asked me what she should do.
“That’s not a question I can answer,” I said. “What does your gut say?”
She listed off a bunch of ideas…
Releasing his ashes somewhere.
Burying them in the ground.
Leaving him on her sister’s doorstep.
Toss him in the trash.
She wanted me to tell her what to do with Dead Dad.
I offered her the idea that knowing and knowing are different.
One kind of knowing lives in your head.
The other lives somewhere deeper.
It lives in a quiet place of healing.
Knowing what to make with dinner is one thing. That’s a “knowing” thing.
Knowing what to do with Dead Dad?
That needed something different.
That needed clarity.
Looking back, the symbolism of her journey with Dead Dad is hard to miss.
When she was handed her father’s ashes, she didn’t know what to do with him. So she tossed him in her trunk and tried to forget about him. But he was there. Everywhere she went.
Then her life shifted and she needed to clear out her trunk. She needed to put him somewhere. So she tossed him onto the floor of her closet and piled a bunch of stuff on top of him. He stayed hidden there until she was ready to deal with him.
Time went by.
She started therapy.
She dealt with the years of abuse.
She healed. A lot.
But Dead Dad… was still hidden in her closet. She wasn’t done with therapy yet. She needed to figure out what to do with Dead Dad who had been dragged around in her trunk for years, then hidden in her closet for even longer.
Clients often ask “How will I know…” I usually say something along the lines of “When you know… you’ll know. It will feel right. It will sit comfortably in your gut.”
That’s clarity.
So I told her to stop trying to figure it out. Just trust herself and wait for clarity.
A month or so went by. We tied up a few loose ends and checked in on Dead Dad here and there.
And then one day she came in and said “Well, I figured it out.”
She was standing in the kitchen making breakfast when she heard the trash truck coming up the road.
She knew.
Not in her mind.
In her gut.
He had abused her for years.
She spent even more years trying to heal.
But now she was done with him.
Carrying him no longer served her.
She calmly walked to her closet, retrieved Dead Dad, and tossed him in the trash. She took the bag out to the curb and stood there watching the truck lift it, empty it, and drive away.
Dead Dad wasn’t about his ashes at all.
It was about trauma.
Dead Dad’s ashes had become a physical representation of the trauma she had carried for years — first in her trunk, then in her closet — until she dealt with him.
Until she became the version of herself that was ready to let go.
Throwing those ashes away wasn’t disrespect.
It was release.
And with release came peace.
And with peace… came clarity.
We spend a lot of time thinking and waiting for a “lightbulb” moment when we suddenly know exactly what to do.
We make pros-and-cons lists.
Ask friends.
Read articles.
Poll strangers on Facebook.
And sometimes that helps.
But some decisions can’t come from collecting more information.
They come from healing.
When we’re still carrying fear, guilt, obligation, grief, or trauma, every option feels wrong because we’re trying to decide from inside the wound.
As we heal, something shifts.
The noise quiets.
The internal debate gets smaller.
And then there it is.
It’s not an answer.
It’s clarity.
We don’t “figure it out.”
There is no lightbulb.
We don’t suddenly become more certain about everything.
We simply become the version of ourselves that can sit in the quiet long enough to finally hear our gut.
That’s clarity.
It isn’t louder than doubt.
It’s quieter.
