I want to talk about a kind of grief I didn’t know existed until earlier this year. And I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate because I haven’t lost my Dad yet and I didn’t want to take away from people who have already lost the people they love. But this hurts. And I deny how much it hurts because I feel guilty for feeling it. For talking about my pain when I feel like it diminishes the pain the person I love is going through. But I can’t change what’s happening and I don’t know what to do with what I’m feeling. It’s like a cold current running through me every single day, a chill that has reached my bones on the hottest summer days and it won’t be over until he’s gone. That’s the cruellest part. It won’t be over until my Dad is gone.
I was listening to a radio program late one night and the host always begins the intro to a song with a bit of poetry, or a metaphor, or some kind of description of the music that goes beyond the music. I can’t remember what the song was, but I do remember the words she read aloud from a book a woman had written about her father’s long struggle with death. The way she described the tedious suffering of her dad and the affect the anticipation of his dying had on her struck a deep chord. In my bed feeling hollow and alone I remember thinking she’s right, I feel like I’m dying a little too right along side my Dad. She called it 'anticipatory grief'.
This is a different animal, this slow ‘not yet’ grief. It tugs at me every day, like deaths mediocre messenger, tapping me on the shoulder or tripping me up and then taking off, slinking away like some coward who hasn’t got the nerve or the authority to make it all final. I’m left trying to grapple with it. To try to be strong so my Dad doesn’t worry about me, putting some sunshine in my voice and then hanging up the phone, covering my mouth with my hand and muffling the sound of choking back tears as I stare at myself in the mirror wondering when it will be over. I feel so awful for thinking that.
I long to be released from this mean and macabre dance because it’s killing me slowly. And I don’t want to say this stuff to anyone because it’s the person I love who’s suffering, it’s the person I love who is staring at death as it creeps closer and smacks him with yet another stroke, or surprises him with complications like a kidney issue coupled with a heart attack then makes the pain that much more bitter and mean by declaring that treating one organ will compromise the other. And it’s the person I love, the person who taught me the meaning of being stoic, who taught me how to ride a bike and change the oil in my beat up Jeep, and showed me how to whisk the shit out of the eggs to make a proper omelette that is staring, sometimes alert, sometimes blankly, as yet another doctor rattles off yet another scenario and tells me and my family as we dumbly look at the wall just past the doctor’s head, or a monitor, or out the window desperately searching for a sign of life outside this fucking god awful hospital room, that ‘perhaps it’s time to get the DNR paperwork in order so that if the worst does happen’...
This isn’t about me. He’s the one who’s suffering. It’s my Dad who’s dying and yet I feel like I’m dying a little too. Watching all this shit roll in and hammer him, helpless, day after day, month after month... I did the rough math and realised my life has been alive with the spectre of death for two years and counting. And I’m weary. And my heart is weeping. And I just want it to be. Over.
I take long walks, sometimes for hours, thinking, crying, wiping away tears and snot in the pouring rain trying feel my way through this fucking minefield of strangled sorrow, not able to fully release because the funeral isn’t happening yet, and the diagnosis isn’t critical, yet, and the phone calls and flights and fears haven’t stopped...yet. I feel slowly suffocated some days by the wait. I want this heavy feeling, this dull grey slab to be lifted knowing only that the cold will be swiftly replaced with the searing heat of sorrow. There are days when I am at peace with the nature of things, that I talk myself into feeling connected and connecting with the cycle of life that is all around me and then there are the days when I don’t want to talk to anyone. The days where I want a strong drink and a never ending nap and the opportunity to punch death solidly in the face. It’s a brutal seesaw, an exhausting push and pull full of anger and tenderness and strength and collapse and comfort and cruelty and it just keeps going, it will keep going, until it stops, until that last phone call, or flight, or fear finally realised.
Friends will ask how he’s doing and I just don’t have words anymore. Where should I start? Which emergency do I want to open with? I don’t know. The avenues feel exhausted. So I don’t say much. Because I don’t want to talk. I want a long hug. Or a lot of laughing. Or I want to get really hammered or high so it becomes a blur for a little while and it ceases to become the narrative of my days and nights.
I had a conversation recently with an old boss and friend, a mentor of sorts. She’s a semi celebrity in a way and known for her incredible strength and straight talk. I’d heard that her mother had recently had another stroke. The first one had stripped her Mom of her short term memory making living on her own impossible. A nurse was required around the clock and everything changed. Overnight the family went from having a hearty, vibrant matriarch to having a lost, semi lucid woman who needed a constant companion. She had actually been doing fairly well until this second stroke hit hard and, from what I gathered, there wasn’t much remaining of the soulful woman that was. As I spoke with my friend we soberly compared notes, not needing to fill in the blanks because we could read between the lines. And then she said, ‘Yeah. It’s a shitty feeling when you’re wishing a parent would die.’ Fuck. The horrible tone of it. These are words that should never be spoken. I wince even writing them now. But it was the first conversation I’ve had where I felt understood.
I don’t really know how to end this other than to say I know I’m not alone. All the walks and the tears and the guilt and the confusion are all part of what makes up a life, my life at the moment. I don't know what to do with it, and neither does my Dad. We understand that we’re not meant to understand everything, or fix everything, or be stoic about everything. I guess that in and of itself is enough to set us both free from some of the suffering. At least for a little while. But we love. We’re suffering because we love. And there is a truly brutal beauty in that that I will continue to hang on to, until it’s time to let go.
