Grieving & Mourning

Yesterday was the most difficult day emotionally that I've had since Dad died. Yesterday was also my first day back at work. I suspect there is a correlation.

When I came in yesterday, there was a card signed by everyone in the department sitting on my keyboard. It was touching but not unexpected. I probably would have been surprised if there was nothing. But I would have only been a little surprised as I am only a contractor here. Full time employees don't make much effort to get to know contractors and vice versa.

Then people came by during the morning to offer their personal condolences. That was touching, and it also put me back in the mode I was in last week of listening to people's thoughts and thanking them. I suspect that a part of me thought I was done with that. If that's the case, I learned differently. For the next some time I can expect condolences from people who know and who haven't seen me in person yet to express their feelings.

Finally, the department bought me a planter, flowers and such. That was quite a surprise and way beyond what I would have expected. It was as if the whole day conspired to say, "No, you can't get back to normal just yet."

I was also a bit preoccupied with some information we got about our father that dates back to his childhood and the circumstances of the breakup of his parents' marriage. I did a bit of writing on that, but I'm not ready to share it yet. For one thing, there are still living people involved in the aftermath of what we learned, and my conclusions might shock them. My conclusions might actually be wrong (perish the thought). So, at the least, I need to do some fact checking, if that is possible.

Today has been much better, emotionally. More normal thoughts and activities. Fewer interruptions. I don't normally think a lot about my father. He was never my best friend, confidante, or counsellor. It just wasn't our relationship. For thirty or more years we have pretty much gone our own ways. So there is no presence to miss, really. I didn't call him a lot or write him a lot, and he almost never called or wrote.

Omega and Alpha

It's the end and the beginning. Dad is dead. The calling hours are over. The funeral is over. He is well and truly planted in the grave next to my mother and his wife. His life is over, and that part of our lives lived with him is over, too. Now comes the part after.

I came into work today to find that the department had signed a Sympathy card. It was very touching, especially given that I am a contractor here and not a regular employee. Several people with whom I've made connections have stopped by to offer their personal condolences as well. It's all very touching, and I am deeply moved (sometimes to private tears) that people reach out to me so much at this time.

And yet I want this period to be over. I want to be beyond the mourning. I'm tired of saying "thank you" to people who stop to offer their prayers and support. It's selfish of me, I know. I also know that I must deal with my feelings rather than burying them in work or reading or whatever else I use to deny and avoid the truth.

This past week, I learned things about my father that I never knew, and I realized that we are all tarnished diamonds. We have many facets, and we change as our lives go on. Certainly my Dad did, and I was fortunate to realize that before he died. His AA friends were particularly effusive in their praise. AA was obviously very good for him. It was also very good for his relationship with me in that, in doing his 12 steps, he was able to open the channel between us. I was glad of that, even as I am sad that I still had to wait until he died to learn more things about him. But perhaps that's the way it's supposed to be.

Anyway, the post-Dad world has begun. This will be a transition period as I deal with the stages of grief and come, I hope, to acceptance.

October 10, 2005

The date is my parents' anniversary. It is also the day my father died.

This afternoon I'm heading over to Indianapolis for the preparation, the Calling, the funeral, and the burial. I will be delivering one of two family eulogies. I don't know what my brother Ed will say, and I suspect we won't overlap.

Yesterday I wrote a set of remarks that I don't know if I will use. In writing a couple of pages, I realized that I still have a lot of anger in me directed toward my father. I have no intention of disrespecting his memory. I also have no intention to sugar-coat him.

Yet, what is the truth about him? What is the truth about anyone at the time of their death? We're each composites; we show different faces to the world, and to ourselves, at different times. Family sees us in ways that outsiders never can. Children see their parents in ways no one, not even the parents, can understand or expect. Children are very perceptive, very forgiving, very judgmental, and very cruel. And even though we grow up and take on careers and families of our own, at some primal level we remain children to our parents and children with our parents. We have expectations of them that they can never fulfill. We just never see our parents as people, just as parents often have trouble seeing their children as adults and peers.

Last night, as I was laying in bed before going to sleep, I got so angry with my father. Actually, the anger was welling up at old faults, slights, and hurts. It was anger at the man he was when we both were much younger rather than at the man he had become before disease robbed him of his personality. And I realized that this anger has been with me a long time. Even though I have done a lot of emotional work on my relationship with him and my anger, I see now that this work will never end.

Meanwhile, I'm off to Indy soon for an emotional few days.

Take Two

I started to write yesterday, but I changed my mind. I've started to do a lot of things lately, then changed my mind. Truth is, I don't want to do much of anything.

I blame it on others. My wife requires a lot of my attention when I'm around. She has been having trouble moving lately, so I'm needed to fetch and carry for her. I'm also needed to do things she can't do at the moment. Lastly, she needs me around and paying attention for companionship. She can't get out much and has few friends, so when I'm around she needs me to pay attention to her.

Those are my primary excuses for not doing any more in my life at the moment than I have to, and not even that if I can get away with it. I've often been a bit lazy. If I could describe a perfect day for me it would involve me not doing anything at all. Maybe I'd read or play golf (alone) or just sleep. Television is good for vegging out. All I need is something to grab my attention, and I can forget about anything and everything.

I think of myself as lazy.

My dad is now officially in hospice care. He's on a morphine drip and some oxygen, but other than that he's not doing anything but dying. I want to be there, but it would be irresponsible of me to go, my wife says. I can't do anything for him, which is true, and she needs me here, which is also true. But I want to be there.

Why is that? I mean I don't even much like my dad. It's a long and convoluted history, and I've worked through a lot of the emotional issues in the past twenty years to the point where I don't hate him anymore. The last few years, I've found him pretty pathetic actually. He was the bully of bullies in my life when I was young, and now I see him as what a bully always turns out to be: a pathetic little man.

I don't hate him anymore, but I don't know that I love him either. I think (perhaps in my conceit) that I know him better than anyone else in the family, yet I'm not sure that I 'get' him. Maybe that's it. Maybe my problem is that I've never fully gotten what he's been about; perhaps because he himself never fully got himself. (I think we mostly don't.) And now he's dying, and I'll never get him.

What do I mean about not getting him? I mean understanding what it takes to persuade him to consider things differently than he has. Understanding what makes him tick enough to help him. But he's never been much for being helped. He's always been part four year-old saying, "I can do it myself." But, of course, he never could. None of us can.

Sometimes I think that for me Dad has been less a good example of how to be in the world than he has been a good bad example of how not to be. A lot of times I look at my life and see where I came to a fork in the road similar to the one he came to, and I chose differently. And I'm happier with my choices than either of us have been with his choices. I think I can ask myself, "What would Dad do?" and when I've figured out the answer, simply do something else.

As my wife is fond of pointing out, though, I'm a lot like him. I know I've caught sight of myself in the mirror and realized that I'm standing like him or walking like him. And sometimes I talk like him. I know that I can argue like him because I infuriate others in the same ways that he infuriated me all my life. He has lacked self-confidence all his life, and so have I.

How can any two men be as smart and a stupid as he and I have been? We're both mentally smart and emotionally stupid. We neither one ever got over ourselves or rose to our potential in any area. I don't think he ever figured out the meaning of life, and I know I haven't.

Today would have been Mom and Dad's 57th wedding anniversary. From what I'm told, he won't die today, but nobody knows for sure.

Maybe that's the secret meaning of life: Nobody Knows For Sure. He used to say, "Do something even if it's wrong." But then, of course, he would whack me upside the head if I did it wrong anyway. Maybe that's what he learned. He would never talk much about his upbringing, but he was the child of an alcoholic, just as I am. And he was the older brother, just as I am the first born. Maybe he, too, had caution beat into him and initiative beaten out of him.

Whatever the truth is, I'll never know, and I'm sad and angry about that.

Blooming Where You're Planted

I was down at Lake Hope State Park in the southeast of Ohio this weekend and took a little nature walk by myself. After working my way down a very steep hill (either erosion has gotten worse or I'm getting older), I stopped at a wash where there was a nicely positioned fallen tree, and I sat down and admired the area.

There wasn't anything particularly special about this area of the woods. Sure there was a view of the lake off to my west through an opening in the trees created by the dry wash I was in. Looking back east, up the steep hill, it was plain to see that this was just one of many areas in these hills where the water chose to run together on its way down the hill to the lake. Around me were trees: tall and short, young and old. There were also bushes and saplings and the usual stuff one sees in the woods.

Flanking me on either side as I sat were two small bushes or trees. They were sitting right in the wash and surely must feel the force of water running down the hill to the lake. I am not a naturist, so I can't tell you what kind of bushes or trees they might be. As you can tell, I'm not even sure if they are saplings or bushes; they had, to my untrained eye, characteristics of each.

My first thought was that they were in a precarious place and probably would not survive a strong rain. And when compared to their strong, stout neighbors reaching as much as a hundred feet into the air (or so it seemed from my vantage point), they were unremarkable in this forest of tall trees with plumb line straight trunks.

After a bit, I came to realize that those trees and my little bushes had no say in where they were. Obviously, they cannot pick up and move to safer ground. They are, by their very nature, stuck where their seeds lodged and took root. They bloom where they bloom, where they were planted by fate or providence or the hand of man or animal.

I was sitting there making jokes to myself, telling my little bush/saplings that they had chosen poorly and would never be as tall or strong as their neighbors. There are lots of judgments in those sentiments.

Nothing in that forest around me chose to be where it was anymore than I chose to be born. They bloomed where they were planted. They will live as long as they can. And they will die either remarkably or casually.

I have always liked to believe that I have had choices in my life: where to live, what to do, who to do it with, when to do it, and even to do nothing. But I wonder how much choice I have really had in my life and how much of it was me blooming where I was planted and surviving as best I could.

I always thought of that aphorism "bloom where you are planted" as meaning that one should strive from where they are to better themselves. Now, I have room in that saying for accepting that not everyone is a mighty oak; some are small shrubs or scraggly sapplings. No matter how much a shrub may want to be an oak, it will always remain what it is: a shrub.

Analogy is slippery, and I can already pick the holes in mine. Still, we are life. We are what we are. Time and chance happen to us all.