There’s no such thing as a bad year

It must be said – since about April last year a ton of things have gone horribly wrong for us. We’ve been worried about money, whether we can continue to run a home business. My father was diagnosed with cancer and died.

Phew, that should have been the worst thing to happen, right? Wrong. After the funeral, my mother and youngest sister went to mush and remain that way. Instead of being comforted by the show of support from my father’s sisters and brothers, they spent more time criticising and bitching about them, which was distressing to hear.

To make matters worse, the other sister was caught stealing from my mother, and when confronted by me, tried to claim that I’d assaulted her in doing so. We can put this down to her myriad of mental health ‘issues’, or we can say that she’s just a truly toxic individual. Needless to say, she wasn’t remotely assaulted – she was caught out stealing during an extremely difficult time for the family and chose to lash out in the most vile way possible.

Then, in the late autumn we discovered that Lisa’s mother had got cancer. Not only was there the very real possibility that she would die from the disease, there was the prospect of yet another family cracking under the strain of this disease. I’m not ashamed to say it – my own family’s poor behaviour after my father’s death has left me scared and distrustful of people under stressful situations – some people crack up entirely, other people make it about themselves, and other people become solid and stoic and dependable.

And that’s where this last twleve months has been a good thing. I think Lisa and I can be self-critical to the point of self-loathing. But this year proved to us that we’re a great team, and above all else loyal, strong and resilient.

Lisa doesn’t get enough thanks for just being a tower of strength to everyone around her. She gets on with things, doesn’t ask for thanks or praise, she just does the right thing every time. And even when she’s struggling, she gives of herself fairly readily, although we’re both realising that giving too much often leads to being taken for granted. So we’re learning to strike the right balance between helping others and not damaging our own lives.

More than that, I think we both know that we’ve grown in some very profound ways. Dealing with so many huge events all at once has made us much more tolerant of little foibles and gripes that used to seem major. I think we now see the long game – the consequences of our actions in the future – and don’t react so quickly to events surrounding us.

We know who our friends are. There have been people who supported us in subtle ways throughout the events of the last year. And there have been people who leaned on us heavily, used us without a single thought for what we were going through. As a result of that, there’s been a subtle recalculating of our priorities for the future.

But most importantly of all, as buffetted and battered as this year has left us, we profoundly love our little family more than ever. Because when everything else has been tough, and challenging and painful – and it has been a painful year – our family has been growing closer than ever. We can take comfort in how Rachel (our eldest) is growing up – a wisecracking little madam, but also a wise little soul. She’s starting to see our personalities and identify the things we like and she loves nothing more than a late-night conversation, which is the best time to get her to share her day!

Jake is affactionate and shy and loveable as always. He’s the artist in the family, and goes through a rainforest’s worth of paper making drawings, cartoons and crafting bizarre items at the kitchen table. Daniel – the baby of the bunch – is starting to come into his own. We’re fighting a constant battle to keep him away from video games. He’s addicted. But he’s starting to go out and play a bit more with friends in the street.

And though they sometimes have their meltdowns, our little fivesome remains a close-knit, loving family. So when everything is at its absolute worst, we can look around ourselves and feel good that we’ve got such a great bunch. And that’s why it’s been a good year – because the bad stuff is in the past and we still have our family.

Not Coping With Grief and Loss

As the regular readers among you will know, my father died in June from lung cancer. I guess the survivors have dealt with the grief in their own individual ways.

For my own part, I was devastated and temporarily paralysed by the grief I felt afterward. A cornerstone of my life…gone. But strangely enough, real life intruded, and I was forced to snap out of it. The possibility of returning to work, as well as dealing with my father’s financial affairs certainly kept me grounded. As well as that, my own family needed me.

Although that wasn’t quite it. I did grieve. I did feel pain. But somewhere along the line I had to shed that grief.

And I did. It’s difficult to describe how it happened. First of all, I wrote it down. The process of writing it all down really helped. All of the emotions and memories I was feeling were captured, and that helped. I was able to let the sensations die down, knowing I’d recorded events and feelings to revisit any time I wanted to. Suddenly, I didn’t have to repeat my experiences inside my head. That lifted a burden for me.

I also visualise that ‘goodbye’ to my father. When I explain it to Lisa, she doesn’t understand, but here it is: I imagine a sort of viking funeral. What they did was to pack the body in a longboat and set it on fire before letting it sail down the river. And as strange as it sounds, that reminds me that he’s gone. That he can’t come back and the events of the summer are all past tense.

What that doesn’t mean is that I’ve forgotten my father. No, I still have glimpses of him in memory and recounting conversations with him. And from time to time, I’ll feel a pang of loss, I’ll miss his presence. But it won’t destroy me or cripple me. I know that now. I won’t let it. Life goes on.

Which brings me to my mother and sister. They’re floundering. Completely and utterly. Even now, 5 months after the fact, they recount his final hours in great detail, sigh and burst into tears. I can see that they still feel the loss acutely, but I feel less than qualified to help them.

For one thing, I feel like they’re wallowing, drowning, submerged in grief. It’s like in the movies when everything fades to grey. And I’m not unsympathetic to their plight. I just know that people don’t understand how my thought processes work – if they thought I was over the grieving, they’d think I was stone-hearted and question how much I felt for my father. Quite the opposite, as I know, but hard to explain away to anyone else.

But far be it for me to wade into someone else’s emotional drama. Especially my mother and sister. I usually come off worst in these matters because communicating my point of view is like talking a foreign language to them. The only option I can see is to wait until they work it out for themselves, deal with it in their own way. They need to learn to look to the future again.

My Inheritance

Before he died, my father insisted that he wanted me to have two old fog watches that his father had passed to him. My reaction was visibly lukewarm, but I accepted them and promised that I would make sure to pass them down the generations. As long as Lisa doesn’t eBay them first. I’m joking See? I used a smiley-face!

But wait, judgemental reader, this wasn’t because I was holding out for a high value item such as a house or a car. No, it was because no physical item would ever replace him.

I wasn’t visiting the hospital so regularly hoping to nudge myself into a more favourable spot in his will. No siree, and I think he knew that Lisa and I are fairly non-materialistic folks. Funnily enough, the one thing I would have loved to receive would have been some kind of letter from beyond the grave. Yes, you can almost taste the diet of Hollywood schmaltz – did Bette Midler get a letter at the end of Beaches?

This probably says a lot about me, my deep-in-the-closet need for parental approval. It undoubtedly became a part of the vast tapestry of grief that followed, but I’d have liked to know that he thought I’d done a good job growing up. Somewhere along the line. Even if not a letter, perhaps a croaked, emotional deathbed scene where between hacking coughs he’d say “You did alright, kid.” Thankfully he didn’t, not least of all because that dialogue would have been really shitty.

No, I quickly realised after the funeral that a new era of adulthood was dawning. “The Age Of The Mother”, they’ll call it when it’s recorded for the history books. Because behind him, the dear old fella left a dependent wife. He also left a crazy-ass daughter (in the Psycho sense of crazy-ass), whose pastimes include stealing from her family, eating crisps by the box and keeping a long-held pact (with herself) to lie each and every time she opens her mouth. I am ashamed to come from the same uterus as her.

Also part of this package deal are my other sister and her husband and their ever-growing brood. I sometimes think Chib let himself die because there was literally no room left for him in the house. There are houses of refugees that are less crowded than my parents’ house. Which makes it kind of hard to visit.

But I don’t hold that against them – at least they’re company for my mother. It just makes it hard to visit – there’s literally nowhere to sit down anymore. I had to sit on the stairs during my last visit because the house was packed.

Anyway, “The Mother”. Let’s be honest, I was always closer to my father. We did things together, I helped him do odd jobs in people’s houses to earn extra money, and we could talk crap and argue with each other for hours. In my early life, I recall my mother as being constantly critical, extremely harsh. Any time I criticise myself in my head, I hear my mother’s voice. In her later years, she became very dependent on my father, partly due to illness but also partly because she wanted to abdicate responsibility for much of the household stuff. He came out of work to support her and care for her, and she slipped into the hybrid of dotty old grandma / venomous bitch we know and love today. For the most part, dottiness reigns, but sometimes – if someone’s crossed her – the Granny Hyde side of her personality comes out. And that one’s hard work, let me tell you.

Since Chib died, she’s become a regular phoner (it was always Chib who called, once a week on a Sunday night). Sometimes I get a call in the morning and one at night.

Oh, I don’t mind I suppose. The thing is, when I look at them I see expectation. Some kind of role I’m supposed to fill now that I’m the eldest male in the tribe. And yet all I want to do is withdraw. Somewhere I’m still licking my wounds and being around them is a reminder of the loss. You know? The one thing that keeps drawing me back is in a duty to him. I guess he’d want me to make sure The Mother was alright. But that’s going to be hard to do, as I’ll explain later.

Oh, it would have been easier if he’d left me that melodramatic note, gushing with praise and encouragement from beyond. I’d have felt much clearer about what I’m supposed to do now.

One last letter…

I don’t think I’ve called you ‘father’ in years. I adopted the monkier of ‘Chib’ for you after years of cleaning chimneys together. It got shortened and distorted from ‘chimney sweep’, didn’t it? But it stuck. My nicknames always stick.

The point is, you’re gone now, and everything you are or were has been added up: father, friend, protector, provider, verbal sparring partner, simultaneously my biggest supporter and critic, grandfather to my children and so much more. And all that you were is suddenly taken away. For such an unassuming guy, the void you left behind is incredible.

I thought the worst of it was watching you in pain. Suffering, declining. Your legs and arms getting thinner until the skin wrinkled around your joints. Your hacking cough that would overtake speech and leave us unable to talk. And those dreadful, painful sores that covered your tongue because of the oxygen. One of your sisters put it brilliantly in the obituary column: “a short tragic death, suffered with dignity” or words to that effect.

And for a brief while after you died, we were consumed with arrangements: wakes, funerals and paperwork. Still are. I felt strangely disconnected from your body in the coffin. You looked overdressed in that suit. I could see discolouration starting to creep in. I often wonder that people find comfort in visiting graves when the person they loved is decaying beneath their feet. What strange customs we have. All of it reminded me that you were gone.

As we settle back into our daily routines for the first time since Lourdes, there’s a claustrophobic shroud of sadness wrapped around me. Is this grief? Well, it pulsates from a numbness, a staring into the distance to a silent scream that seems to rise from deep within me. At its worst, it feels like every part of me, man and boy is ridden with anguish at the loss of a father. Memories replay themselves in my head – childhood memories, recollections of the hospital, times we laughed together, times when we frustrated each other. Life. Yours and mine.

And it’s not just the memories that bring sadness. It’s the cruelty of being denied any type of future with you. You’ll never phone again on a Sunday night for a chat. When we call at Ballycastle, there won’t be any sparring over whose turn it is to buy some beers. The children won’t remember much about the grandfather who used to chase them around the house. I’ll never received another of those awkward emails that ends with “That is all for now.” And so your legacy diminishes. Like your mother before you, who will remember you when my generation vanishes?

You were such a funny man to know. Your life was never complicated or ambitious, yet I always felt you regretted coming out of work to care for my mother. Ironically, the more you did for her, the more hopeless she became. It surprised us all when she raised her game to be at your bedside throughout your illness. I know how much you enjoyed your work, you helped so many people. While most of the world these days is seeking fame and fortune, you were making a difference to people close to you.

We got a short time in the hospital. Two months to say our goodbyes, although we expected more. Perhaps a few more months. I hope that I managed to show you how much you matter to me. As a family, we were never great about sharing our feelings, but cancer is a game changer. Back when you were well, I’d bear-hug you, just to make you uncomfortable.

But all of that’s over now. All of us, we have to get used to you being part of our past. It’s like we were all travelling along nicely together and you stopped abruptly.  We’ve continued on, and the only way we can see you is in looking back. I’ll miss our conversations, and I’ll miss making fun of you and all of that history we had together. I’ll miss showing you how to do things on computer and fixing the printer that you managed to break at least once a week.

Most of all though…I’ll miss you.

Lourdes and home again: The death of my father

My father died at roughly 5:30am on Thursday 25 June 2009. Later that day, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett would follow him, a fact I’m sure he would not care about.

As you know, he died from lung cancer and the weakening side-effects of chemotherapy which left him vulnerable to pneumonia. This is the story of his final journey, the discovery of his cancer and those short, final two months which led to his end.

Lourdes

It all started back in Lourdes. He woke up on the second morning of a short holiday unable to breathe properly. He was quickly hospitalized and given a scan which revealed the tumors. I flew out the next day to be with him and my mother and provide some support.

We flew back on the Saturday going directly to the airport from Lourdes General hospital. There we met the tour group the pair had travelled out with and spent the next few hours in their stark but modern departure lounge. Well wishers from their tour group came up to say hello, but we downplayed the reason for his being hospitalized.

Back home

When we arrived back in Northern Ireland, we arranged an ambulance directly to the nearest hospital. My father spent the next few days in Antrim Area Hospital, where he was due to undergo tests. However, he was released until the next week because pressures at the hospital meant they couldn’t actually do the tests, and he was more at risk from MRSA staying in hospital. Basically, being sent home was better for his health.

A week later on a Friday, he returned for an endoscopy. I went along to the hospital with them, and the tissue sample was gathered in a short space of time, so my parents came back to my place for lunch.

The very next day, he ran into complications, and his difficulty breathing returned. Later on, he collapsed in the bathroom and wasn’t able to get back up. Cue a quick one-way ambulance ride to hospital in Coleraine.

He never actually returned home after that point. As soon as a bed became available at the Cancer Centre in Belfast City Hospital, he was transferred there from Coleraine.

Belfast

And so the remainder of his illness and treatment was carried out in Belfast: my mother and sister staying with us for the first couple of weeks and then moving in with an aunt a bit closer to the hospital.

The doctors were clear from the beginning: there was no cure. Only a hope of a little extra time through chemotherapy. Sadly, the successive chemotherapy treatments left him feeling weaker and weaker and susceptible to pneumonia. We noticed a thinning in his arms and legs. The presence of this, and the loose skin it left behind was a daily reminder that he was fading.

At the same time, we had some great times in the hospital. I’d visit during the day when the kids were in school and sometimes take Daniel down with me too.

He spent his birthday in the hospital, and we went down as a family. The room was packed out with relatives though, and we couldn’t get a word in edgeways. He made eye contact with me, and without saying a word, I could feel his sadness. Although we went home, I slipped back later that night when everyone else had gone away and chatted with him. And though I’d tried not to do it in from of him, I cried. We sat in silence holding each others’ hands.

Once or twice we walked to the massive panoramic window on his floor and bathed in the evening sun and chatted to each other. And on one of his final nights I stayed in his hospital room, just glad to be close to him and be able to do something during the night to help him.

Last weekend, he started to decline in earnest. A scare on the Sunday night (21 June 2009) meant that we started to arrange vigils. For some reason that I can’t ascertain, people believe it’s important to be at the bedside at the moment of death. Sometimes we don’t get that chance. I stayed in the hospital three nights in a row, and he died on the fourth night. Typical bad timing!

From Sunday onward, the decline was marked by brief moments where it looked like he might regain his strength. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. At 1:00 on Thursday morning (25 June), his hands apparently started to swell and he received some pain medication. By 5:30am, his pain was gone and so was he.

Ballycastle

Suddenly, funeral arrangements had to be made. My dad’s belongings, my mother and sister hastily packed up and I drove them to the family home in Ballycastle.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the next few days sped by in a blur of distant relatives, neighbors and friends popping in to pay their respects. Saturday morning, we were marching down the street with a coffin on our shoulders, and a short while later lowering it into a narrow grave.

So finally, early Sunday evening, I took my mother down to the graveside. The journey that began in Lourdes and included stays in four different hospitals was finally over. And today, nested in a picturesque corner of a graveyard in Ballycastle, my father rests. We’re glad that he’s no longer suffering from the tumor, but now we have to suffer for a little while from the emptiness that he leaves behind.

We miss him.

Deathbed scenes and false alarms

To say that the last few weeks have been stressful would be pushing the art of the euphemism to its absolute limits.

My father’s condition has deteriorated (he has cancer) since his second round of chemotherapy. Suddenly, I’ve been dealing with some overwhelming emotions – intense grief and a sadness that I’ve never felt before. As the prospect of him dying becomes ever more real, feelings and memories have been jumping out at me, helping to crystallize my father’s role in my life.

My nickname for my father for years has been Chib. In the last week, he’s come close to dying a couple of times. He’s even managed to fool the hospital staff, but would inevitably recover overnight as we all sat close by.

It suddenly became important to me to tell Chib how I felt about him before he died. After the first scare, I thought I’d missed my opportunity, so on the second scare, I wanted to make sure that I had a heart to heart with him. I got a text message during Rachel’s dance show, and rushed to the hospital before I even had a chance to see her perform.

After a frantic dash from Lisburn to Belfast, I arrived at the hospital and ran to the ward, whizzing past uncles and aunts who were clearly assembling as well. The room was packed with relatives, and I glanced at Chib lying on the bed looking failed with his breathing shallow. Before I could stop myself, tears were streaming down my eyes and I thought I’d missed my chance. I might have spoken there in front of everyone, but one of the aunts in the room realized that I wanted some time alone and kindly took everyone else out (except my mother).

The words came tumbling out of my mouth in what was probably a frantic stream: reminiscences of things we’d done together, gratitude for always being there for me, and that above all else, I loved him and would sorely miss him. When you suddenly start to sum up the life of a loved one, you realize how important they’ve been to you. And although we rarely (read: never) shared our feelings openly, it became important to me to share this with him before the end, before he became incapable of understanding the words…

In the end, it turned out to be a false alarm. He lasted out the night, and seemed to be recovering from the low ebb.

Though my father continued for another couple of days, I felt oddly at peace after my deathbed chat. Whether he heard me or not (the nurses say that hearing is the last thing to go), I felt that it was important to thank him before the end. Even if my regular presence at his bedside wasn’t a clue to my feelings, I hope that the words helped.

(Apologies for the change from present tense to past tense – I wrote this before my father died and finished it today).

Lassie: an unexpected death

The family dog, Lassie, died yesterday. Lassie was a border collie that my father and I had brought back from a house he was doing some work in. She’d been in the family for years, like since I was back in secondary school.

Before my father got taken into hospital, he’d remarked on how the dog’s health was deteriorating. She had no energy anymore, and had started a disturbing habit of collapsing when walking through fields.

I guess the upheaval around the homestead had become too much for the dog, because yesterday an aunt phoned to say the dog was dead in the back garden, and my sister’s dog was barking at it. Of course, my mother and sister have been more or less living in Belfast for the last few weeks. My other sister was looking after the dogs, but had gone to Belfast herself yesterday morning. A neighbour noticed the dog hadn’t moved all day and phoned an aunt to get a message through.

After drawing a blank with the rest of the family, she called me. I managed to track down my brother in law Michael and asked him to race home and check if it was true. After 45 minutes, he called to say yes, the dog was dead. I felt so sorry for the poor old mutt, dying alone on the back doorstep.

The next question was what to do with the body? Michael talked about burying her in the back garden, but I asked him to check with a vet about the best way to dispose of a family pet. They recommended a cremation at around £70.00, so he brought the dog out to them.

As of right now, we haven’t broken the news to my father. He’s holding up reasonably well in hospital, but I’m worried that the upset of his dog dying might affect his condition. I want to check this out with the medical staff at the hospital, but I’m worried that my mother or one of my sisters will blurt it out anyway. I know that he’d want to know if the dog died, but it’s such a critical time in his treatment that I wouldn’t want to hurt his chances with such a blow.

It’s funny though. The day we brought Lassie home, he grumbled all the way back in the car about not wanting a dog. And for the first few years, he was ambivalent about her. Over time though, he grew fond of the dog, and after I left for university, the two became constant companions.

As for me, I’ll remember her as a pup, bounding through the long grass in the fields near my childhood home. She was a fantastic dog: obedient and well trained (I’ll take some of the credit for that, thanks) and loved to play fetch. In fact, she was obsessive about fetch. She’d find you a stick to throw for her. More than once she’d drag a massive branch down the road in the hopes that we’d throw it for her.

By my estimation, Lassie was easily between 15 and 17 years old, so she had a relatively long life. It’s just sad that she was alone when she died. I know my father wouldn’t have wanted that.

An impending death in the family?

This could be quite a difficult post to write, because as I type this, my father is seriously ill in hospital. The outlook is not good for him.

All of this started almost three weeks ago. We had returned from a short trip to London and the very next morning got a phone call from a family member in my hometown. The shocking news: my father had been taken to hospital…in Lourdes. I raced across to France to help organise my parents’ return home, and heard the French doctors’ diagnosis that he appeared to have two have two tumors and two aneurysms.

We returned home on the 18 April and my father was taken straight to the local hospital, where he stayed for a few days. However, he was released because they couldn’t do the required tests straight away. He went back to hospital to have a tissue sample of the suspected tumor in his lung last Friday.

But by Saturday night, another phone call – he’d been rushed to hospital after collapsing in the house. He was having breathing difficulties and dizziness. I went straight to the hospital, and met my worried-faced family. While we were there, he started taking serious chest pains and was hoarsely crying out in agony. Word came from the doctors that he had some kind of chest infection which was affecting his breathing. But, boy did he look bad at the height of those pains.

Dealing with family stuff

Right now, I’m burned out on family stuff. As hard as it is to watch my father deteriorating, I’m trying to keep my mother focused on practical things (she’s not a clear thinker at the best of times), and not to become to maudlin, at least not right now.

The eldest of my two sisters is being insufferable though. I won’t go into the details of my dislike of her, but that dislike is deep-rooted and long-lived. She acts like a petulant, moody teenager (she’s 31) and sulks when all attention is not on her. Now, any normal person would respect the seriousness of the situation and put their own issues on the back burner. Not my sister. She’s storming out over trivial nonsense on a daily basis, just for the attention.

Coupled to that, there’s clearly a very negative mood in the family right now. Given our gene pool’s predisposition to cancer, and the vague diagnoses that we’ve had to date, it looks like my father may be heavily riddled with cancer. We don’t have confirmation of that, of course, but our collective Spidey-senses are tingling.

Anyway, there’s much noise right now: relatives enquiring after him, my mother and sisters talking about wills and possible funeral arrangements, a bit of antagonism about certain aunts trying to take control of the situation. Blah blah blah. I’m able to cope with the practical stuff extremely well, but family politics are quickly wearing me down and tiring me out.

My brood

There’s been a ton of disruption to my own family. I’m having to disappear back to my home town for a few days at a time. Lisa’s coping admirably, but she was shocked when she finally made a visit to the hospital. We took the kids along and they were pretty shocked. In fact, I’ve never seen them so well behaved and silent in a public place.

And my reaction?

I’m doing remarkably well when I’ve got something to keep my mind engaged – like making arrangements and making sure my mother remembers to eat. I was extremely businesslike in France, and likewise when we got him into hospital back home.

Right now though, I’m tired. And more emotionally drained than I can remember being at any other time in my life. For the most part, I’m coping well, although I find myself becoming teary whenever I think about after he dies. Who’s going to manage the wake? Who’s going to say a few words at the funeral? Will it be me? What will I say? I don’t know. I did have a brief break in my composure this evening. I couldn’t stop myself, it all just became so overwhelming.

On an intellectual level, this is testing all my beliefs about death and illness to the limit. My core belief on this is that death is the end. Once you die, it’s like turning off a television set for the last time. No picture, no sound. And I’ve read enough Buddhist literature to accept that death is inevitable and we must come to terms with that. And if I’m honest, my sadness is for the man who raised me going through such pain and rapid deterioration right now.

I think I can handle his death, when it happens. It’s just really upsetting to watch his physical pain and my mother’s mental distress – she’s floundering without him and I think what’s hitting her hard is how much she relies on him. Part of what I’m trying to do is to get her thinking about how she’ll manage her routine if something happens.