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.

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.