Over the years, I’ve watched a few other bloggers go through the death of a parent. Inevitably, there was silence for a while, and I always wondered, What is going on over there? Does the experience cross some unspeakable line, too personal or painful to reveal?
I must also confess that I would always be varying degrees of disappointed. After all, what’s more voyeuristic than watching someone grapple with a major life event that I would one day also face? I mean, sure, I’m here for your day-to-day drama, but the real goods are always in those moments of crisis and change. That’s when I want to see who you are. Plus, I might get lucky and pick up a tip or two.
So imagine my dismay that in vivo, grief is quite boring and disjointed, mostly bereft of deep thoughts. There’s nothing left to think about, I guess. He’s not going to get any deader.
Here are pockets of things that seem briefly meaningful, but have yet to coalesce into any kind of theme. In case you, like me, are curious about post-death day-to-day operations.
The dogs got here the day my dad died, and left this past Friday. I thought I would love them. After all, what is the cure for death if not new life? I also felt protected because there was no ‘dad’ dog, and felt reasonably sure I wouldn’t end up conflicted and sobbing about ultimately rejecting some father figure in dog format when we sent them all back to the shelter.
But, great as watching/snuggling/playing with puppies and mom dog was, I couldn’t access any deep attachment, although I was hoping to. I could almost hear my heart say, Look, I am worn out right now. Like when you make all the motions expecting a seat belt to snap into place, but every once in a while, you put the metal clip into the buckle, and nothing clicks, even though it looks right from the outside.
Also, I got conflicted anyway. Those puppies were on a deadline to lose all their siblings and the only parent they knew. And maybe they were ready to go out in the world on their own, but it was hard for me.
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When my brain is full of mindless static, part of ‘the healing process’ seems to be erasing my dad’s memory a little bit, making him less important in the rear view mirror. This feels gruesome when I look directly at it, but on the daily, I think I’m OK with the process. I don’t want to grieve forever, and maybe this is the way my head knows how to heal. Once, like an internal memo, I suddenly thought, I can no longer 100% trust the memory of my father’s advice, because he only lives in the past now, and will never have access to new information that might change things. And my next thought, directed at those memory scrubbers going to town: Don’t scrub his intent, I can still use that.
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I got in a huge fight with my husband. Most of my life, I’ve been afraid of losing my temper, and usually don’t pick a fight until I can say what I mean in a logical way. Honestly, I thought this argument would go down like that. We’ve been married 19 years, we know how to fight. So when I opened my mouth and screaming, prolific curse words, and wild sobbing came out, I was probably as shocked as he was. I ran away and slammed the door behind me. We worked it out, but everything has that earthquake-aftershock feeling, and I feel both embarrassed and justified about being so dramatic, and unsure of who I am now, or might become.
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Aside from those instances, I mostly feel thoughtless and low level bad most of the time. Also, am grown woman, with what is starting to feel like an uncomfortable fixation on my parents, who wishes she could blog about nearly anything else. Unfortunately, it also seems like something I have to wait out. Which, honestly, I’m doing with a lot of fantasy vacation planning and drinking more than I usually do to escape feeling so goddamn miserable all the time. I mean, you can’t fix someone dying. But I would settle for being able to fast forward through this bullshit.
Here, some photos of the puppies, so you can determine the exact frostbitten coldness of my heart.
Sending you love. My husband lost his dad and then his only brother in a six month time frame a few years ago, and there’s just no right or gentle way to navigate loss of a family member. There are moments of extraordinary levity, deep sadness and anger and regret and we’re moving through it, but it’s just a messy process.
The brain has a way of shoving you forward. It ties itself up in the present until something jolts it into the past. You’re not so much forgetting as you are just living. Your brain can’t remain static. It demands the next thought and so it will nudge you until you have no choice but to keep going.
This sucks if your heart is also demanding a rest because it puts them at war with each other but eventually it will get to the point where your brain will be in go mode most of the time until your heart says, “Hey, do you remember…?” That’s when you’ll pause for a bit.
At least that’s been my experience of grief. But my head can be more stubborn than my heart.
There’s no guarantee who you will become on the other side of this. I fear fights like the one you mentioned as I am a buttoned up kind of gal but part of me wishes we could let loose once in awhile without walking on eggshells after. Here’s hoping your earthquake settles with few aftershocks. As for the rest of grief? A crapshoot at best. At least now your house can stop smelling like dog. And you have done a good thing by giving them a warm, safe place for awhile. That’s the best we can all hope to get.
Grief has changed my life… I can’t say all in bad ways, but it is really hard to find the good ways (and, truthfully, when I do, I get bitterly angry about those changes, too).
When the experts say, everyone grieves in their own way, it’s irritating, but true.
The first year, for me, was interrupted when I had another major loss (brother first and then seven months later, sister). In the first seven months, I went from being unable to sleep or eat and wanting to claw through the floor, to feeling like I might be ok.
And then the second loss. I completely lost it, but in a very strange way … not unlike what you describe, but also different. I crawled in a “I’m ok” hole and stayed there, refusing to feel, heal, or deal.
And then everyone else in my family fell apart in very open, real ways. My reaction to that was: I’M OK, I can handle it all! I will fix everyone. I can stick to all my plans and all my deadlines, EVERYTHING IS FINE!
When I scheduled my qualifying exams, no one even thought to say, Are you sure you can do this?
In fact, no one checked in on me.
Friends I have known for year, for whom I have been a major emotional support for every little thing in their lives, did not even call me to see how I was.
I was busy. I was holding everyone else up.
When I mentioned to a virtual stranger how hard the weekly calls with my mom and sister-in-law and brother-in-law were straining me because I couldn’t take any more pain, she shamed me.
Apparently, it was my job to be OK! FINE! Nothing to look at here…
I was so beyond dealing with the grief that I saw my sister everywhere. I would see her drive by in a car. I would glimpse across a crowded mall, and lose her before I could catch up.
And I would think, good, she got away. She doesn’t have to deal with this. I was developing an intricate story about how she was living a new, better, unfettered life..
And this month will be SIX YEARS since I lost my sister, and I just barely started crying about it a year ago… and it still comes out as yelling and screaming and angry and conflicted and and and … it seeps out whichever way it wants to, when it wants to, unbidden, unwelcome…
All this to say, it really is different for everyone.
And whatever gets you through the day. [And all those other things people say which are all too true.]
But also there is no way around grief. You have to go through it. When you feel you have the strength to face the loss, the scrubbed memories may just come rushing back and rushing out. And even when you are not “ready” …
I checked in on you the other day because I want you to know that your grief matters… whatever stage or feeling or denying, it all matters, to me, and to a lot of others… but you don’t need to post anything. You don’t need to entertain me.
I will keep checking on you. <3
Mm, I guess it’s good in a way that you’ve done a lot of thinking and self-analysis since he started going downhill, absolutely :/ I think if you had grief AND shock to deal with then it’d be a lot harder to process now, whereas I think it is very reasonable to spend time now going “is this it” and “don’t I have anything deeper to realise about this”.
Being greyed out, maybe even a little dissociated, is very understandable re the dogs. I’m glad they were there as a distraction, and they look SO ADORABLE, but you knew they were going.
Y e a h, moving your dad from short term to long term memory inside your head sure is a process, huh? Gosh I feel for you. He’s still important, and he was still very important to the you of that time, but it’s okay that day to day you shouldn’t be rending your clothes and so forth. It’s like any change, as you know. When you leave school, when you move house, when you leave a job. It’s very immediate at first, and then over time it’s still important, and you will still have occasional moments of reliving a memory like it *just happened*, but in general it’s not a big deal to your daily life. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t / didn’t matter, but moment to moment that set of memories is not very present.
I’m so glad you figured out the fight with your husband okay. That must’ve been very upsetting.
I think you are allowed to think about your parents as much as you want to, so theeeere. This is your blog and blogs are inclined towards the introspective. You sure don’t owe us updates about anything, but if you *want* to think and feel and write intelligent things about your parents, that is up to you and I will gladly read it just like I read everything else from you.
Thoughts. I haz ’em, but I don’t know how useful they are to anyone (including myself).
My own father died about a year and a half ago. We weren’t close. I’d tried, over the years, for SOME sort of relationship with him — he never saw his grandsons (or any of the grandchildren except for one child, in 1999) — and my eldest is a lot like him in many ways (although I hope never, ever in the ‘abandon-your-children’ way). I grieved/didn’t grieve his death. What was there to grieve except the permanent loss of ever getting another chance? It was 100% completely his choice, so… I don’t know. I have cried, a little. I have created a Ghost Dad that I can mentally talk to and criticize. He’s dead; what can he do? He doesn’t get any say in how I reinvent him.
His death came in the middle of Major Personal Crisis That Wasn’t a Death But Sure Felt Like One In a Lot of Ways. The MPC is ongoing and is about 3 and a half years old now. It fell on all of our heads while I was pregnant and I was surrounded by people who told me not to cry, not to grieve, not to feel anything too strongly because “it’s not good for the baby.” FWIW, I think they were all a bunch of liars who just didn’t want to deal with me falling apart on them, because how can it be healthy to be in charge of a newborn with enough repressed emotion to power the entire New England coastline for the next 20 years? I understand your reaction to the puppies because I feel the same way. My heart’s still broken & I can’t take any more heartbreak right now, thankyouverymuch, no thanks, gonna pass on new emotional connections. I, too, feel terribly cold-hearted, and the old me is gone. I don’t know the new me yet. So how do I deal? I mean, I’m not. I’m attending university full-time and that is an incredible allocation of time, energy, and emotional resources, to the point that I don’t have much left when it comes to the MPC.
I don’t have any words of hard-earned wisdom. All I can offer you is sympathy and solidarity. We’ll get through this. We’ll get through this together, somehow.