The Sweetness of Life

There are some things that so easily serve to bring us joy in life, to make us remember that we are lucky to be wherever we are, to show us perspective if only we are willing to see it:

A ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds after a storm

The sound of shells tinkling that can only be heard in the stillness underneath the ocean

The sweet surprise on a newborn baby's face when his eyes focus on something for the first time

The taste of too-strong kool aid

The sound of a grandparent singing a made-up song to a grandchild

The sound of siblings laughing at something only they recognize as funny

The drop of one's stomach on that first downhill of a roller coaster

The sight of a loved one's face in a photograph

The sound of crickets on a summer night with no curfew

The tears of pride that come from witnessing your child show kindness to another person

The pride felt as the National Anthem is played during an Olympic medal ceremony

Hearing a song on the radio that holds special meaning

Seeing the color of a flower as it's just begun to bloom

Seeing a baby smile in his sleep

Smelling honeysuckle, wisteria, or hyacinths at the start of a new season

Opening a new book, full of anticipation for the words ahead, and

Closing it later with the swell of satisfaction from the read.

Mustering up the courage to set a goal, to try something different and new, 

With a parachute of surrounding support from friends and family.

Measuring the Course

As far back as I can remember, one of my dad's routines after he got home from a long run was to immediately jump into the car to drive the route he had run to measure the exact distance of the course.  (This was WAY before GPS systems existed.) Most people would probably choose to sit down to rest as soon as they could after a strenuous workout, but Dad was the kind of person who couldn't stand to let grass grow under his feet.  He taught us to have honor and priorities, to set goals, to set our mind to doing things and then to follow through. WAY before Nike said it, he used to say “Just Do It” whenever he heard someone make an excuse for not doing something they should have been doing; I remember so many tough runs when he would tell me to tuck in behind him so that he could block the wind for me after he'd said “Put your head down and let's just do it.”

If Dad could have “driven the course” at the end of his life, if he could have had the opportunity to examine what he had done and the choices that he had made along the way – I wonder to what he would’ve made adjustments.  Not much, I would venture to guess, and I think that’s pretty damn remarkable.  I'm not sure there are many people in this world who would be able to say the same.

Here's a question with some Food for Thought: What would your biggest regret be if today was your last day of life, and how can you attempt to right that regret?

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last few weeks or months of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, and later she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.  Ware writes of the clarity of vision that people often acquire towards the end of their lives and of how others can learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again."

Here are the top five end-of-life regrets, according to Ware:

"I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."  Looking back over the course of their lives (measuring the course), people often recognize that certain dreams they've had that have not been fulfilled, making this the most common regret of the dying.  And, as we learned when my dad got sick, by the time a person realizes that he needs to hurry to try to realize those remaining dreams, his health (and sometimes other obstacles) often restricts those goals from being attainable.

"I wish I didn't work so hard." Ware says that this was a regret shared by every male patient she cared for (and some of the women too).  What they wished they had done instead of staying late at the office so many times was to have gone to their children's ball games or school programs or to have spent more time with their spouse or other loved ones.  

"I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings."  Ware says that many people reported that they had suppressed their emotions in order to keep peace with others.  They regretted not having told someone that they were angry with them - or that they loved them.  Sometimes this is a regret that can be addressed in the final stages of life, but many times the years that have passed since the issue began make it impossible to right on down the road.

"I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends."  In the midst of our hectic daily lives, it's easy to lose track of people who have meant so much to you and whose impact you may not realize until it's too late.  Again, sometimes when the person who is dying expresses this regret, loved ones from the past can be contacted, but many times it isn't possible.  

"I wish that I had let myself be happier."   The realization that death is near can give a person new perspective on things, and one of the things that is commonly realized is that happiness is a choice.  The clarity that often comes at this stage of life helps people to see the good in their lives much more clearly than they did before.  Other things like material goods no longer seem important.  People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible, but it is not money or status that hold true value for them as they near the finish line - it's love, both given and received.  

Two Years Out

Have you ever run into someone whom you haven't seen in awhile and noticed that something about that person that you can't put your finger on has changed?  Maybe it was something so indistinguishable, so subtle, that you have even wondered if it was just your imagination, but still you felt that something was different about that person than it was in the past.  That's what grief feels like for me at this point.  It has changed over the course of the two years since my dad died, but it's hard to say exactly how.  Or maybe I have changed in how I address the grief and in how I cope.  One thing is for sure, though: it's still looming; it's not any less of a threat except for the fact that I guess I have learned a little bit about how to manage it.  

Part of me is shocked and even a little bit impressed (surprised?) that we've made it to the two year point after my dad went on ahead.  We've done it; we've helped each other through it and we've survived it, so far.  Some days, though, it feels like running the third lap of a four-lap mile around the track, which for me was always the most painful because I knew that I had to give it my all in that part of the race but I was also aware that there was so much work left to be done even after that lap had been completed.  Part of me is so shocked and so saddened by that fact that we're already at the two-year mark that just the thought that it has been that long since I've seen him immediately brings tears to my eyes.  Two years.  How did that happen?

I had a dream about my dad a couple of nights ago, and in it he was sick and he kept asking me, "How did we get here?"  At first, I thought he meant that he wanted to know how we had arrived in the physical location where we were, which was, oddly, sitting on a bench in a park that was not familiar to me (and certainly it wasn't somewhere that I went with him while he was sick), but then it dawned on me that he was asking how we had gotten to that exact point in time.  And then in the dream I turned to him on the bench with tears in my eyes and I said, "We got here because of your strength, your courage, your toughness, your determination, and your love, and we will never forget that."  I knew he want to know how he had gotten cancer and how it had gotten so bad so quickly, but no one knew the answers to those questions.  What I did know in the dream - what I wanted to convey to him - and what I do know in real life is that my dad is the reason that my family and I have had the fortitude not to crumble in the midst of the biggest challenge of our lives; time and time again, we have held him up as an example of how to face the pain of our grief, how to cope with the sadness and the anger that threaten to overtake the joy and the promise of hope for a better tomorrow, and how to look for the good on even the roughest of days.  That's how we have gotten here; that's how we've made it through these two years since he had to go on ahead.

But of course knowing that doesn't make me miss him any less; if anything, the passage of time makes me miss him more!

It's not just that today marks the two year anniversary of my dad's death that brings him to mind; I miss him all the time.

I miss how he and I could laugh over the craziest things, sometimes things we knew were ridiculous or even dumb but we thought they were funny anyway. 

About ten years ago, Dad and I drove from my house to the small town in Alabama where my grandmother lived to pick her up and bring her back to my house so she wouldn't be alone on Christmas.  It was about a 7-hour long drive each way, and we had a great time talking and laughing along the way, just the two of us on the way there and then with Grandmom on the way back.  At one point en route to her house, we stopped at a gas station that happened to be in a rough neighborhood; we both got a big fountain drink inside the convenience store and then got back into the car.  As Dad pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto the street, we heard a loud ricocheting type of noise on the back window of the car.  Each of us instinctively ducked our head as Dad quickly pulled the car over onto the side of the road so we could see what had made the noise; we both thought we had been caught in a crossfire that had shattered the glass on the back window.  When we'd had a few seconds to process things, though, we realized that the sound had come from the ice from the drinks that had spilled as we'd turned the corner after both of us had set our cups on the roof and had forgotten them there as we got back in the car.  A good laugh ensued, and we headed out onto the road again.

I miss the inside jokes and the memories we shared from running together.  One thing we used to talk about in that vein was our strategy of "rounding up" our run time ("If you say you'll be out running for 40-45 minutes, you can go for almost an hour before anybody notices," Dad had advised me many times throughout the years when I complained about not having as much time as I liked to have to run.  Prior to the time when he began training for the Ironman triathlon, his fitness goal from age 55-65 was to work out for an hour a day, at least 5 days per week.)  

I miss the exuberant way he marked his place in books, by folding half of the page down.  I was reminded of this just a couple of weeks ago when I was going through some books to see which ones could be donated to charity and I came across a book that he had handed down to me a few years ago, complete with folded down pages marking the places where he had taken a break from reading along the way.

I miss the way he took joy in everyday tasks and, in doing so, he made them fun for those around him.  This included lots of things he did to entertain me on long runs - things like singing as he ran and alternately bounced and caught a tennis ball to the beat of a song, like taking me on different running routes that he had scouted out in advance to make each one an adventure, and like coming up with unusual training techniques for the two of us like running up and down the steps on the outside of a grain storage bin for a certain amount of time (which he then challenged me to try to improve on when we did it again the next week).  

We ran up and down steps like these
as one of our training routines.

There were lots of non-running tasks that Dad made fun, too, though.  One thing I was thinking about recently was what he called "Laundry Parties."  When I was a teenager, Dad, as the person in our house who did most of the laundry, had trouble discerning whose clothes were whose between my mom's, my sisters', and mine, and so he often brought laundry baskets full of clean clothes into the den, dumped them on the couch, and announced to my sisters and me that we had to help fold them.  "It'll be fun!" he'd say. "It's a Laundry Party!" and, although we usually groaned and complained about having to help, he always joked around and made a usually boring task fun.  

I miss the way he hugged, which was often more back patting than anything else.  Somehow his technique always seemed to instill confidence in me, as if the back-patting was literally him patting me on the back to let me know he thought I'd done something right.

I miss the funny random emails and phone calls from him, sometimes about something so out of the blue that just his question or comment made me laugh out loud.  Once he called to ask me how to spell "coulotte" (pronounced "coo-lot" - this is a style of women's pants also known as a split skirt, in case you didn't know).  I spelled it for him, he thanked me, and then, obviously in the middle of a thought, he hung up.  I had to ask him later why he needed to know: he had been writing a memo to employees in his office about what was and what wasn't acceptable attire for Casual Fridays.

I miss the funny rules he made up for some things, like "I never drink beer that I can see through," a rule he imposed several years back when he discovered that he had a penchant for dark beer, despite the fact that he had been drinking lite beer for decades before that.

I miss the smell of Brut on him, so much that I sometimes break out a bottle of it that I have stashed in my bathroom just to take a whiff of it.  It's comforting in that context; it's disturbing and sad when I smell it on someone else in passing, as if that intrudes on the comfort of it in my memories from when he wore it.  

I miss the way he bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked.  I miss his competitiveness, which he carried on with himself as much as anyone else, and I miss his pride.  I miss the way he could (and usually did) talk to anyone who crossed his path.

I miss the way he lost certain things, like his wallet, so often that he tended not to worry about it whenever he did; like he did with a lot of other things, he didn't worry because he thought worrying was a waste of time and he just believed that everything would be ok.

I miss having him ask me about my job and how things were with my husband and the kids; I really miss how he used to listen to what I said in response and then how he would sometimes sigh as if he felt exhausted on my behalf and then say, "I don't know how you do it all!" with so much pride and admiration in his voice that it soothed me and made me proud, even when I'd felt like I had been struggling before then.

I miss his no-nonsense attitude and advice, the same kind he gave me when I called to tell him that I'd been offered my first job as an occupational therapist after I'd graduated from college.  I told him what the salary would be and that I thought it would be a great place to gain experience, and then I said that I had told the human resources department that I would get back to them about my decision.  Without missing a beat, he said, "Haven't you been wanting to work at a children's hospital like that for many years?"  I told him that I had, and he said,  "Well, then, what are you waiting for?" was the advice I got in return, in response to which I hung up with him and made the call to accept the job. 

I don't think Dad always recognized the value that other people found in the advice that he gave out, though.  Late one night when he was in rehab and he, as usual, couldn't sleep, we were talking about the schedule for the next day and I reminded him that I was leaving to drive back home as soon as my mom got back to stay with him the next morning.  "Be really careful driving back," he told me, and then he said, "Be sure not to stop for gas in the valley on the way back; it could be dangerous there and cell phone coverage isn't good."  He paused and added, "But I'm sure you can take care of yourself."

Before I could say anything in response, he commented, "Sometimes I worry that any advice I've given you hasn't been about the important things."

"What do you mean, Dad?" I asked him. "You've given us good advice!" to which he responded, "All I can remember telling you is stuff like always keep a towel in the trunk of your car and put some toilet paper in the waistband of your shorts when you go for a run in the woods."  It was true; he had told me both of those things many times throughout my life, and, truth be told, I always did both of them (and still do).  But, of course, that wasn't the bulk of the advice he had given to me over the years, and I wanted to be sure he realized that.  "You've taught me a lot more than that," I told him, but the only answer I got was the sound of his rhythmic snoring.  After tossing and turning and chatting for the majority of the night, he had, at last, fallen asleep.

I miss the lists of "suggestions" he emailed to us before his birthday, Father's Day, and Christmas.  To me, he was always the easiest person to buy a gift for, not just because of the list but because he had such distinct hobbies and because he would often just "make do" with whatever he already had instead of buying the latest and greatest accessories and gadgets for himself, leaving it open for us to give those things to him later if we wanted.

Once when we were running together during the time that I was preparing for a marathon, I told him that I had gotten some new gear to help me with the training and that I had estimated that I had several hundred dollars of equipment on me every time I went out the door to run.  He actually stopped in the road and said, "Are you serious?"  Yes, I told him, but that included my high-tech clothes, my shoes, my GPS-enabled watch, my heart-rate monitor, my sunglasses, and my iPod.  "That's crazy!" he said, incredulous.  He started running again but insisted that we go back by the house so that I could "ditch the extras." "That way we can really run just to run," he said.  And that's what we did.  How I miss being able to do that with him, and to talk about anything or nothing along the way.  Damn.

Trying to Fix Grief

I'm a "fixer;" I like to fix things.  Maybe that's one reason I'm finding the grief process to be so tough - because there's no righting this situation.

Not that I haven't tried.  I went through with three different counselors in search of a remedy not long after Dad went on ahead, each of whom didn't specifically deal with grief; I liked all of them at first precisely because they seemed to have a linear approach to how they laid out their sessions - my impression was that they were "fixers" too, and that seemed like a good thing to me at the time. 

About halfway through my second session with the first counselor, she asked me how I defined myself after the loss of my father.  What the hell does she want me to say? I thought, and I felt as if I had been sucker punched.  I felt like I was afloat in a sea of sadness on my best days during that time, and on many of the other days I felt like I was drowning.  How do I define myself???  I had absolutely no idea, and I knew it would be a long time before I could withstand even the thought of redefining myself without my dad here with me in this world. And so, without answering, I thanked her for her time and walked out the door.

Two sessions in with the second counselor, she leaned back in her chair, put each of her fingers together with each of the matching fingers on the opposite hand so that it looked like she was about to start doing the hand-gesture that goes along with "Itsy Bitsy Spider," and said, "I think what you need to do is to realize that you were lucky to have been given the time to say goodbye to your father."  Then she just sat there looking at me expectantly, as if she thought that some giant epiphany was going to come to me in that moment.  Anyone who has ever been through the death of a loved one after that person has had to suffer through a terminal illness would not find comfort in that statement, particularly at that point in the grief process.  Without a word, I stood up and walked out.

I waited a couple of weeks and then, mainly because I was concerned that I still wasn't sleeping much at all, I tried again.  About 45 minutes into the first session with Number 3, I got "It's already been six weeks since your loss.  You should ask your primary care physician to write you a prescription for an anti-depressant."  The message I took from that was that I should have already moved on, that six weeks was plenty of time to have moved through the grief, and that I should get over it, and that's really the last thing I wanted to hear.  Strike three.

Luckily, through a friend of a friend, I found my way to a grief counselor about six weeks after that, and that was a different ball game all together.  That made me realize the lack of training and knowledge in the area of grief that the other three had.  The grief counselor let me talk about my experience and my feelings; she had posters on the walls of her office that said things like, "To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die" and, my favorite: "Every grief needs a thousand tellings."  

More than one physician, when I've gone in for a check-up or for a minor physical complaint and then when I've brought up the subject of my struggle to try to figure out how to cope with the loss of my father, has offered to prescribe medication as a solution for grief.   As society does so often these days, these doctors have seen grief as a sickness, as an imperfection, as something that needs to be "gotten over."  I didn't want to be on medicine.  I know it's something that's helpful or even necessary for some people, and I told myself that I wouldn't completely rule it out as an option for myself on down the road -  but I instinctively realized that to numb the feelings associated with the loss of such an important person in my life at that point would not only put the feelings associated with grief on hold temporarily but also would likely numb me to the goodness in my life, and I knew that the latter was all that was keeping me going.  As I had learned from my dad, I mustered all the courage I could and forged ahead, for the most part with the belief that someday, somehow I would find a way to make it through.  Because one thing that I've learned about grief is that not only is there not a "quick fix" for all the things that come along with it, but there isn't really a "fix" at all.      

Courage

"Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities ... because it is the quality which guarantees all others." ~Sir Winston Churchill

When I was a freshman in college, I took a class during which we learned how to rappel.  The culmination of the instruction of that part of the class was that each student had an opportunity to descend by rope from the top of a tower that stood three stories high. 

At the beginning of the semester, in my 18 year-old mind, that endeavor didn't seem to me like it was going to be too tough.  I wasn't scared of heights, and I was in pretty good physical condition.  I listened carefully to the instructor talk about the technique and the safety information, and I watched videos of others rappelling.  When the day of the descent finally arrived, I confidently climbed up to the top of the tower, hooked in to the roping gear, and backed up to the edge.  And then I looked down - and that's when the fear hit me.

I tried in vain to talk myself into stepping off the ledge for several minutes.  The instructor, who had positioned another instructor at the top, shouted words of encouragement to me from down below.  My legs just wouldn't move.  Finally, the guy at the top said, "The longer you stand there, the harder it's going to get to take that first step.  On my count of three, you're going to step off.  One, two, ..."  I took a deep breath, and I did it.  The warmth of the sun on my face, the feeling of gliding so freely, and the big burst of adrenaline all hit me at once, and I loved it.  It was, in the true sense of the word, awesome.  

But the best part of the descent was at the bottom, and it came from the words spoken by the instructor, words that I have thought about many times since that day:  "And that," he said as he turned from watching me to address the rest of the class,  "is a perfect example of the difference between courage and bravery.  Bravery is something a person can be born with, but courage is something we have to dig deep to find.  It's natural and often even smart to be afraid, but, as long as you are prepared, you can't let that stop you from forging ahead - and that's courage."

Before that day, I had never considered that there was a difference at all between courage and bravery; I actually thought they were synonyms.  Upon further consideration, though, I began to see that there is a distinction between those two words.  Bravery is the ability to confront pain or danger when one is not afraid.  Courage, on the other hand, is the ability to take on a difficult situation or pain in spite of the presence of fear.  Courage requires using a thought process in order to overcome a natural emotion; it is the willful choice to forge ahead regardless of the possible consequences.  A courageous person understands the risks of the task but is driven to participate anyway for a greater purpose.  

From my perspective, there are a couple of different types of courage:  Physical Courage, which often involves overcoming fear of the risk of pain or death to do things - like rappelling, getting up to try again after falling off a bike, running into a burning building to rescue someone, climbing a mountain, or undergoing a medical procedure.  Here's a video that gives a great example of physical courage (it's 17 minutes long but well worth taking the time to view it!):

And then there is Mental Courage, which may involve doing something that poses a risk of something negative socially happening, like embarrassment or rejection.  This includes things like standing up to a bully, giving a speech to a crowd, disregarding peer pressure, and being a leader.  It also encompasses ethics and doing the right thing, even when that puts one at risk for consequences such as disapproval of others.  It's pushing past a fear of rejection to put oneself "out there" by being true to one's own beliefs and essentially to oneself.  And that is how courage is linked to the most bonding of human traits: vulnerability.  A person who has the courage to accept that he isn't perfect but the depth to love himself and to see himself as worthy anyway not only ends up being a happier person but also gains a different kind of strength than cannot be gained in any other way.  And, in accepting himself as an imperfect being, he shows others that variances - and vulnerability - are the essence of the beauty of life.  

What I have taken away from that is the understanding that courage has to do with perspective and with the way we adapt to the challenges and to the circumstances of our lives.  

Without a doubt, what my dad had a great amount of physical courage, and I think that was likely something about him that a lot of people noticed and admired.  What I have found to be even more impressive about him, though, and what I hope to go out having had is the courage to be imperfect, the compassion to be kind to oneself and to others, the conviction to stand up for myself and for people and things that are important to me, and, last but not least, the courage and the confidence to show vulnerability, which, really, is the thing that connects us as human beings. Vulnerability, like the imperfections seen in granite, is what makes people unique, memorable, and beautiful. 

Funerals

I went to the funeral service of a dear friend today, probably the fourth one I've been to since my dad went on ahead, a tough thing to do for several reasons, one of which is that it turns my focus back to when we buried my dad.

Before my dad went on ahead, I remember feeling completely at a loss of what to say or do when I went to a funeral.  "What can I possibly say that will make a difference at all?" I'd think, and, truth be told, there were a few occasions when a family member (whom I didn't know) of a friend of mine passed away and I didn't make an effort to go to the funeral.  I told myself that my friend wouldn't miss my presence there, that I would be just one more person in a sea of people paying their condolences that day, and that it wasn't a big deal if I just waited to check in with my friend later.  

But since then my perspective has changed, and I've started thinking differently.  I now know that it is important to make an effort to be there to support the people I care about who are grieving, even if it's hard and even if I am struggling still with my own grief.  For all of my rambling over the past year and a half about what I didn't appreciate people saying to me in my own grief, the truth is that I STILL don't know what to say to another person who is bereaved.  Here's my gut feeling, though: I think those whose loved one has gone on ahead need to hear that the person who died will live on in the memories of and in the hearts of others who knew him or her.  I think it can be helpful for them to hear about what that person meant to others or even just to hear a story that that person has to share about their loved one.  For me, one of the things that I have feared the most since my dad died is that time and the business of everyday life will swallow up the impact of my dad's presence for other people in the world, like he wasn't here or like his life didn't matter to anyone other than to those in my family.  Maybe that is a common thing to fear in a situation of loss, and, if so, maybe reassurance in some form from those who also knew that person will in some way help those who are suffering from a loss.

From my own experience, I also learned that the significance of following-up with a friend who has lost a family member, checking in with them after a little bit of time has gone by, is so often overlooked, or at least it was in my family's case; I think it's something that most people just don't think about doing, or maybe they think about it but just get too busy with their own lives.  I learned how touching little things are as we go through the process of the funeral are, everything from having someone bring extra Kleenexes to someone taking photos of some of the flowers to the strangers along the way to the cemetery who pull their cars over on the side of the road to let the procession go by.  I learned that different families, different situations, and different religious practices result in different types of funerals, and that that's ok; certainly there's no right or wrong way to hold a memorial service or to grieve.  

The funeral today was at my friend's church; the service was very touching and was reflective of my friend's beliefs and her preference in music and verses.  My dad's, though, was a different style altogether.  Before he got sick, Dad had said many times that he didn't want a big service to be held in his memory after he died; he said it embarrassed him to even think about having lots of people gather in mourning for him.  For as long as I can remember, he'd said that he wanted to be cremated, and several times after going to someone's funeral he commented that he would much prefer it if a celebratory type of gathering could be held in his honor in place of a traditional funeral, when the time came.

And so, on the night he died, my mom, my sisters, my aunt, and I sat in my parents' den and talked about what Dad wanted, and the plans were set in motion.  A memorial celebration it was, to be held three days after he went on ahead, to allow for travel time for the many who came from out of town.  Some of the time around the gathering is a blur to me; I see from this vantage point so clearly the shock that blanketed us then and I know that created a haze over some of what was going on.  I remember who came, though, and I will never forget their efforts to comfort us with their presence and their kind words and gestures during the most difficult time in our lives.  The memorial celebration was memorable, in probably precisely the way it needed to be, and it served as Part One of our bereavement process.

Part Two happened six weeks later, when the cremation had been completed and when those of us who lived out of town had a chance to regroup and return for the burial.  One benefit to delaying that part of the process of laying my dad to rest was that my mom, my siblings, and I had a chance to put some thought into how we wanted to have things go.  We'd decided early on to honor Dad's wishes and to have the burial only opened to close family members, and we agreed that we wanted the ceremony to be held at the graveside only and to pay our respects on that day in whatever way each of us decided.  One by one, each of us chose what part we wanted to play as individuals, to honor and to pay our respects.  My mom, my sister Jennifer, and I planned to read something that each of us had prepared in advance; my brother Lee wanted to read from the Bible, and my sister Nancy did not plan to address the group during the ceremony.  As it turned out, though, Jennifer had trouble getting through the end of her reading, and Nancy came to her rescue to finish the passage.  When my turn came, as I read what I had written, I felt my voice shaking, and I couldn't hardly see through the sea of tears that clouded my vision as I struggled to keep my emotions in check enough to get through the words I wanted to say. I thought I would feel some closure, some relief, or some comfort.  All that really happened, though, is that I did more of exactly what I'd been doing since the moment of Dad's passing:  I breathed, I mustered up all the courage I could, and then I pushed forward to do what I knew Dad would want me to do, despite the pain and the confusion in my heart.

Part 48 - I’ll Love You Forever

Continued from Part 47

I’ve heard it said that in some cases when someone is dying he can exercise some control over the time that the going on ahead occurs; the person might have been waiting for something like a chance to finish something, he may need reassurance that those he is having to leave behind will be ok, or he may be holding on until a certain date passes or until certain people are present.  

I think all of these things were true for my dad and that, for as out-of-control as things were during the course of his illness, he was somehow about to commandeer every last bit of strength he had so that, although he couldn't stop what was happening, he could control the timing of things.  I think he needed to check some things off his list, not for himself but for us, and I have never admired anyone as much as I do him for the sacrifice, persistence, gallantry, and dedication that it took in order for him to achieve this.

On the first Monday of 2011, the hustle and bustle of my parents’ house had dimmed, with only my parents and my sister Nancy and her husband David there as the sun came up that day.  There had been almost constant activity, things to do, and caregiving responsibilities since the second Dad had gotten sick.  It still seems odd to me on some level that when his conditioned worsened, when he had gotten to the place that was obviously near the end of that illness, there was actually less for us to do for him.  We were still reeling from the shock of the decline, and thus there was a sense of confusion and conflict within all of us.  Each of us, whether we were physically in the house with Dad or not, strangely had some leftover energy but were at the same time almost completely drained.  Pacing the floor didn’t help, and neither did surfing the Internet for new ideas of things that might help Dad as we had been.  Talking didn’t help and really, among each other, it wasn’t even that necessary; without using words, we knew the pain that each of the others of us was feeling.  As different as we are in personality and in the exactness of each of our relationships with the man we so loved and so still wanted to save, we felt the same blows, the same sense of aching in our hearts, the same feeling of torment as we were realizing that we could not.

Mom, Nancy, and David had split the night shift with Dad, and after she showered and dressed for the day and came back into the bedroom to sit with Dad, Mom leaned over and kissed him and said, “Happy anniversary! I love you so much!”  Dad, who had been lying so still and so quietly in the bed for many hours, opened eyes and looked at her adoringly and then said, “I’ll love you forever.”  Tears followed, as they still do for me even now when I picture this scene in my mind; we were so sad and yet so grateful that he had made through to their 43^rd anniversary, and we were so touched by Dad’s efforts to convey his final message to Mom.

David and Mom stayed with Dad while Nancy went to work that day.  I have no doubt that Nancy was operating on auto-pilot, as was I at my job.  It was only due to the shield of the disbelief that any of us were functioning at all at this point, I think.   

Dad's case had been primarily assigned to a hospice nurse named Dave, who came to my parents' house mid-morning that day and spent a long time going over the details of Dad’s care with Mom and then gently examining Dad, changing Dad’s clothes and the sheets, all while talking to Dad very compassionately.  Dave again emphasized “staying ahead of the pain” with the medication schedule and then said that he would check with Mom again later in the day.  

Those of us who were not at the house were anxious and worried; Jennifer and I both spoke briefly to Mom after the visit from hospice that morning, and, although she reassured us that everything was being taken care of there, it was harrowing to feel so out of control and out of the loop.  Early in the afternoon, I called Dave from Hospice, who essentially repeated what Mom had told me a little earlier: we were in a holding pattern of sorts.  Like the hospice nurse from over the weekend, Dave was making no time predictions, but he did not mince words about Dad’s condition, which, for as hard as it was to hear, I was grateful for the directness of.  I told him that I was so worried about the stress of what was going on at my parents’ house, that we were standing by to come back to help and to be with Dad but that, because of the uncertainty of time and what would be needed for Dad on down the road, we just weren’t sure what to do.  After we had talked for several more minutes, Dave said that the hospice company could send in LPN’s on 12-hour shifts to stay at my parents’ house around the clock.  “We often do that when a family feels they are in crisis,” he said.  

I didn’t want to be a family in crisis, but I felt we needed the help or, more specifically, the guidance, the expertise, and the reassurance of someone with knowledge about what to do in a situation like ours.  “That would be great,” I told him, and I knew Mom and my siblings would agree.  We weren’t usually the type to ask for help, but there was no denying that we were struggling, and, as we had been during the entire course of Dad’s illness, we were willing to do whatever it took to care for Dad.  Dave said he would make arrangements for the first shift-nurse to come to the house at 7 p.m. that evening, and I felt a weight being lifted from my shoulders.  It wasn’t what we wanted – none of this was – but it was part of our perspective about what needed to be done, part of sticking together as a family, and part of loving and caring for Dad.

To be continued ... Part 49 - Being Called Home

Part 32 – Falling

Continued from Part 31

Falls separate people in a very literal way: the careless from the careful, the clumsy from the coordinated, the weak from the strong, the unlucky from the lucky, and - as in our case - the unhealthy from the healthy.  After a fall, one's first instinct is to reassure everyone, including himself, that it was "no big deal," that he is "just fine."  It is natural for the one who has fallen to want to “shake it off” and forge ahead as if it didn’t happen at all.

This is an exceptionally hard part of my family’s story to recount because it involves two falls for my dad that marked a turning point for him and for us, watershed moments when Dad stopped being embarrassed about needing help.  After the past couple of months of having given it his all to pretend that he didn't need assistance, he was completely drained, and it was the beginning of a struggle from which we just couldn’t disengage. It was heart wrenching and very sobering to see Dad’s acceptance of help after these falls and to see that he was starting to understand just how sick he was.

No one involved in what happened with Dad over the next couple of weeks could give any reassurance that things were ok or any explanation as to why he had gotten so much worse or why he couldn’t recover.  We were on our way to the front lines of the battlefield, and we were soon to learn that we had only thought we knew what difficulty and devastation were.

On the Monday before Dad was scheduled for an MRI on Tuesday and Round 3 of chemo and Avastin on Wednesday, my sister stayed at our parents’ house with Dad, and Mom went out for a break with her two sisters.  In a few hours’ time, Dad got up and sat for awhile in his recliner in the den and ate a few bites of food at my sister’s insistence, and then he said that he needed to get up to go back to the bathroom.  As we had been doing over the past several weeks to help Dad with his balance whenever he walked, my sister held onto the waistband of his pants from behind him to try to steady him.  As she recounted later, he seemed more unstable and weaker physically than ever before.

A few steps into the hallway, Dad lost his footing and fell to the ground just behind the couch.  My sister cushioned his fall with her body, turning the fall more into more of a controlled collapse, but once Dad was down, he couldn’t get up.  He tried, she tried, and they tried together to figure something out, but nothing worked.  In the midst of their efforts, the doorbell rang, and my sister could see through the windows by the front door that it was Dad’s swim coach Ashley.  She motioned her to come in, and together the two of them were eventually able to get Dad up using the back of the couch for leverage.  After they helped him back into his recliner, he strangely acted like nothing had happened, even though he and my sister both had been in tears and had spent at least half an hour feeling utterly helpless on the floor before Ashley had arrived.  Dad had great admiration for his swim coach, and my sister said later that she thinks the fact that Ashley was there was the only reason Dad was able to muster enough strength, courage, and perseverance to get up and act like he was ok.  

After Ashley left, the Occupational Therapist came for a therapy session that had been scheduled the day before.  My sister told the OT what had happened, but he really didn't seem to understand and/or care.  He had Dad do some hand exercises from the recliner in an extremely short therapy session in which Dad was very obviously totally disinterested and disengaged.  My sister asked the OT to help her get Dad to the bathroom before the guy left; he acted annoyed, but he agreed.  The two of them assisted Dad in getting up and behind the walker but quickly realized there was no way he could walk at all; he was just too weak.  They ended up pulling a dining room chair over to Dad and lower him onto it, and then they pushed him in the chair along the hardwood floor into the bathroom and then into the bedroom.  Once they got him back into the bed, Dad immediately fell into a very deep sleep.  It was so undisturbed and so very uncharacteristic for Dad at the time that while he slept over the next few hours my sister sat in the bedroom on the floor and watched his chest rise and fall the whole time.  At one point, she took a video of Dad’s breathing pattern on her cell phone and then called me to tell me that something just seemed really, really wrong.  (By the way, the therapist hauled ass out of there right after Dad was back in bed, leaving my sister alone at the house with Dad with no way to get him out of the bed if he needed the bathroom again or anything else for that matter.)

I had planned to arrive at my parents’ house the next morning, and, since Dad wasn’t hurt physically, we decided to just let him rest until then so that the three of us could get him to the appointments as scheduled over the next couple of days.  In full Bargaining/Denial mode, I told my sister and myself that Dad had just worn himself out with all of the activity over the past couple of days and that he just needed some extra rest.

That night, as was the routine during that time, Mom took the first shift with Dad, talking to him about the plan for the next day which included the MRI, the visit with the neuropsychologist, and the candlelight church service.  Dad was still very anxious about the MRI but seemed to accept that we would be right there with him when the results were read the following day and that we just needed to get through it and then go from there.  

Around 3:00 a.m., Dad informed Mom that he needed to get up to go to the bathroom.  She turned on the light and then helped him get up with the walker and into the bathroom adjoining their bedroom.  Dad had been soloing in the little “toilet stall” room and did the same that night, but after going to the bathroom he lost his balance.  He fell against the wall and slid to the ground.  Mom yelled for my sister, who rushed in to help.  It was a repeat of the afternoon fall, except that this time even two people wasn’t enough to support Dad.  They tried different maneuvers and various strategies but nothing worked.  Finally, in desperation, they called 9-1-1.

Thinking that Dad would resist having other people come in to help, neither my sister nor Mom wanted to tell Dad that they had made the call.  The ambulance arrived in a matter of minutes, and, when Dad saw the paramedics, a look of sheer relief washed over his face.  Two strong men carefully picked Dad up and put him back onto his bed.  They checked him over and declared that he somehow didn’t have any breaks or bruises, but after some discussion it was decided that they should transport him to the hospital due to concerns about the decline in his physical status that seemed to indicate a worsening in his medical condition. 

Mom rode with Dad in the ambulance; Dad’s anxiety actually seemed to be mitigated by the decision to go to the Emergency Room.  My sister called me and told me to meet them at the hospital instead of at my parents’ house as planned, I called our other sister, and we each began to make our way back to the hospital.

Up next ... Part 33 - Hospitalization 2.0

The Way We Were

Here we are one year from the day that Dad couldn’t finish his run*, when he was taken by ambulance to the hospital and the mass was discovered in his head, when he stopped breathing for several minutes and had to be resuscitated in the middle of an MRI scan.  When his life – and the lives of everyone who knew him – changed forever. 

I really don’t want to mark this date on my calendar.  Hell, I don’t want it even to have happened, and sometimes I still don’t believe that it did. 

Here’s one thing I’ve been thinking about lately as I go back in my head through the story of what happened a year ago:  Dad regularly used to half-jokingly say that he hoped he would “go out running.”  What better way to go, he pointed out, than when you're doing something you love?  Certainly he didn’t want to officially Grow Old; he would not have done well sitting in a rocking chair on the porch all day.  And who among us wants to stick around so long that we lose our independence and suffer physically and emotionally?  No one I know, most especially Dad.  He hated inefficiency and down-time. 

 In many ways, for Dad it would have been so much easier to go to the light when he stopped breathing in that tube a year ago.
I believe he had the chance to go on ahead then and that he made a conscious decision to come back to us, not for his sake but for ours.  I think a person who wasn’t as strong or as determined or who didn’t have as much love and devotion for their family as Dad did would have made a different choice in that situation, and I am more grateful to him than I can ever express for the choice that he made on that terrible day last October.


Dad gave up his chance to go on ahead when he could have that first time; he devoted the end of his life to being with us a little longer.  I don't think everyone has that chance - or the courage to take it when they do - but he did.  He put all of his effort and strength into it, for us.  And, as much as I long for the way we were, I am so incredibly thankful that he held on for as long as he possibly could.

*To clarify: October 23, 2010, was the day that Dad was taken to the hospital and had the mass detected.  I keep picturing myself on the airplane on the way back from a conference at the time he was in the ambulance, late in the afternoon on that Saturday, and that's what inspired the timing of this post on October 22, 2011.