At Least A Thousand Times More

Today is the fifth of the month, and, like the fifth of all the other months that have marked the time since I last spent time with my dad on this earth, it's not an easy day for me.

Every month I wonder if there will ever come the fifth of a month on which I won't feel this way.  I don't think so, at least not for at least a thousand times more or so.

I thought I could make it through the day this time around without writing about my dad or my grief, a new kind of milestone that I feel a weird kind of obligation to reach towards, even though it seems unnatural - and, truth be told, so sad and disrespectful I can't really allow myself to think about it much.  

It's been 30 months.  My god that's hard to believe.  But not as hard as it is not to be able to talk to him except in the format of a one-sided conversation.  

Today I've been thinking about the last time I saw him before we knew he was sick, which was on an extended family vacation in upstate New York.  My husband, my daughters, and I hugged my dad and my mom goodbye as we headed off towards our respective gates at the airport at the end of the trip; I don't specifically remember hugging my dad then, but I'm sure I did.  And I'm sure I thought I would see him at least a thousand times more, with both of us happy and healthy.

I can't help myself from thinking back to things that happened when he was sick, and sometimes the memories and the visions of those things haunt me - like how I used scissors to cut the hospital bracelet from his wrist both times when he came home from the hospital - and how the way I felt when doing so was so completely different on each of those occasions.  The first time, he was still recovering from brain surgery and we were still reeling from the news of the devastating diagnosis and preparing for him to go to Duke for the treatment that we thought would save him.  The second time, we had brought him home on hospice, to save him from the spiraling misery that was going on in the hospital, with hope of a different brand.  The second time, I saved the bracelet after I'd cut it from his wrist; I put it in my purse as if that made sense or a difference in anything that was going on. 

I think back to the packed-up box of stuff from his office, the contents of which would seem meaningless, perhaps junky even, to a stranger but were of exactly the opposite to us in value. I don't know where most of that stuff is now; I guess it doesn't matter, except for when it feels like it does.

I can clearly remember the moments during which the news of the diagnosis was delivered to us, and I remember so well the feeling of hope that the statistics wouldn't, and didn't, apply to him, or to us.  It was as if that Hope was our magic carpet, our oxygen, our blood; to live, we needed to believe that he would live.  I sometimes wish that I didn't remember some of those moments or the rapid decline and the series of let-downs and failures and disappointments from the second and final time that we spent with him in the hospital; that was like being caught in a fishing net, and it forced us to reconsider what we thought about almost everything.  I try to think back to the full weight of the feelings of helplessness, of guilt, of terror, and of powerlessness that crept in during that time, before they were overtaken by resignation and different shades of the previous emotions. But I'm not sure; I think they just gradually took hold of me over the course of the last three weeks of his life, and I have to say I haven't quite shaken most of them yet.

At the end of that trip to upstate New York, my immediate family ended up being stuck at the airport in Albany because of a delayed flight due to thunderstorms across the country; my parents made it out on their flight on time.  After they's gotten home, Dad texted me to check on us and commiserated with me about the inconvenience of the lateness of our adjusted schedule.  "I hope you make it home ok," he texted when I told him that our plane had finally been cleared for take off, the second-to-last time he would text me, ever.  And only five months later, I said goodbye to my dad for the very last time, and, in the early hours of the morning later that night, I laid my head down on the pillow to try to sleep and found myself crying so hard that tears threatened to fill my ears.  I tried to stop but couldn't, and then I squeezed my eyes shut and felt that same message flash from me to my dad:  "I hope you make it home ok," I thought between sobs, and then I added,  "I miss you, I can't believe this whole thing happened, and I don't think I can make it without you" - thoughts that would run through my head at least a thousand times more between then and now.

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.      

One More Conversation

I recently read about how sometimes people who are going through the grief process think about what it would be like to have one more conversation with their loved one.

Thinking about that is complex for me, because, as far as I knew, my dad didn't think that he wasn’t going to survive his cancer diagnosis, and so the things that I'm guessing typically come up in those one-more-conversation type of exchanges weren't on the table for us to talk about when he was sick.  We didn't talk about end-of-life kinds of things during the ten weeks we had after his diagnosis; honestly, I don't know that any of us could have withstood that type of emotional wrenching, including my dad.  He knew that we loved him, and we knew that he loved us, and I think we thought there was still time to talk about everything else.

Part of me wonders now if we should have been straight up with him about what was going on medically; after all, he was an adult and maybe it was underestimating him or overprotecting him to keep that information from him.  He knew his diagnosis, but he didn't know the prognosis.  The bottom line, though, is that my family and I did what we truly believed was in Dad's best interests at the time, given what we knew and the resources we had.  We didn't LIE to him, but we did skirt around the truth about his prognosis and the severity of his illness on the few occasions he asked us about it, when he said things like "What if the chemo doesn't work?" and then we said things like, "It will, Dad! We just have to get through it."  He asked one of his doctors a few times about the usual prognosis of someone with his same diagnosis, and they told him the truth, but all of us, Dad included, discounted what they said because Dad wasn't "usual" - he was extraordinary.  Towards the end, he asked me a few questions like, "What's it like to die?" and "Do you think it’s cold in heaven?" (he hated to be cold), and I am so very glad that I answered him truthfully then.  Most of the things I said to him though, when I realized how very limited our time together was going to be were part of a one-sided conversation - when he couldn't talk back, and when I'm wasn't sure he heard me.  Looking back, I think it would have been so hard for us to say goodbye to him and then to have him say it back; the pain and sorrow that I see on his face when I picture this scene in my mind are heartbreaking, sending a stream of tears down my face, and that's when the vision is only in my imagination.  I think Dad might have viewed his own farewell message as quitting, and I am glad he was spared that, at least.  

So when I think about what our conversation would be like had he gotten an extra few minutes tacked on at the end of his life, it’s hard for me to picture anything other that what we did talk about when he was so sick.  Given that, I want to respond to the question of what would I say to him now - not as if he is still alive but as though he and I are able to communicate now, with him being wherever he is in the afterlife and with me being here on earth:

Dad,

There are a few things that I want to be sure you know, and if I can be assured that you realize and understand these things it will help me to better deal with my grief:

I miss you so much, every day.  You had such a big impact on my life and on making me into the person I am today, and the things you taught me and the lessons I learned as a result of having you for a dad are carrying forwards, still affecting me every day.  So much bigger than that, though, was your impact on the hundreds of other people you knew and even on the thousands of other people you came into contact with over the course of your life.  What you left all of us with – and all of the people with whom WE will come into contact with in the time to come – is your perspective, your view on kindness, and your joy and gratitude in all kinds of situations.  Because of you, I know that I am lucky, no matter what is happening around me.  Because of you, I know that I can decide to be happy, if I choose.  And because of you, I know that family comes first but that every person is important and that being kind and giving to others is a privilege, not a duty.   I wish you could realize how many people admired and loved you; I think while you were sick that you might have gotten confused on just how many friends you had because we discouraged people from visiting you then because we were so worried about you catching their germs.  I’m sorry that we didn’t find a way for you to see how cherished you were by so many.  Finally, I want you to know that we will be forever grateful to you for the way you fought so hard to hang in there through so much over those last ten weeks, I want you to understand how we are so appreciative of every bit of light you brought to us over the years, and I want you to know that I will think about you and try to make you proud every single day, for the rest of my life.  

What I Didn't See Coming

Since my dad went on ahead 18 months ago today, I have come to realize that when someone you love dies, you don’t just have to say goodbye to them at the time they pass away but also at every crossroad, every milestone, every big event.  I've discovered that there are endless firsts and countless tough moments to get through, not just obvious ones like holidays and big events, but many others that are equally if not more challenging and shocking, which in many cases makes them even more difficult to struggle through under the heavy blanket of grief.

As children, we look forward to firsts – the first day of school, the first time to ride a bike without training wheels, the first time to ride the school bus, the first time to go on a date, the first time to drive a car.  Firsts seem happy and are something we treasure.  But somewhere along the line, we suffer a loss, things change, and we have to adjust.  And then the firsts that come can bring about a sadness that is hard to shake, a feeling of extreme loneliness because you know the picture isn’t really complete and things aren’t as they should be.

And so as we traverse through the forest of firsts and other challenging moments in the midst of our shock, our sadness, and our grief, we are forced to let go, one finger at a time.  For me, the milestones have been hard, sometimes really hard, but some of the most difficult things to get past so far for me have been the ones I didn't see coming:

Topping the list are The Flashback Moments:  The first time I went to visit someone in the hospital after leaving the one with my dad and knowing he wouldn't be coming back.  In the elevator when I was visiting that day, on the way up to see my friend, I almost had a panic attack when the flashback hit me. It was a different hospital and a different reason for my being there this time, but when my mind careened back to a few months before, to the many elevator rides we took in the hospital when we were taking care of Dad, the unexpected flood of emotions that swept through me was shockingly debilitating.  

When I hear about someone giving birth to the first child in their family and especially when I hear about how excited someone is to become a grandparent for the first time, I flash back to when my first child was born.  As Dad happily took a turn rocking my daughter in the rocking chair in her room when she was just a few days old, I could hear him over the baby monitor singing to her and having a one-sided conversation with her, telling her that he was so proud of her and how he was so glad to be a grandfather at the age of 50 and that he thought it would be a good plan for him to become a great-grandfather when he turned 75.

There’ve been lots of other Flashback Moments too:  there was the first time I went to a funeral after I'd buried my own father, and there was the first time I found myself in the pick-up lane at the airport and I realized that I was in the exact place I was when I found out Dad had a mass in his head.  Every time I hear someone say “Howdy!” just the way Dad used to greet people in passing.  Just recently, on our family vacation, I was standing on the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard and suddenly I was hit by the awareness that the last time I was in that exact spot, less than a week before my dad’s diagnosis, my life as far as I knew was as it should be.  Hearing a song that Dad used to sing and recognizing that the only way I will ever hear his beautiful voice again is in my dreams is heartbreaking, every time it happens. The toughest of these Flashback Moments so far, though, was walking into my parents’ house the first time I’d been there after he wasn’t.  During all of these times, my mind is pulled back to another time as I remember; sometimes it is to a happy, healthy time, but more often it’s to darker days that let me know I am still heavily in the midst of grieving.  Even when the flood of memories from before his illness come to me in situations, I am almost knocked to the ground by the sadness and anger that come along for the ride too because I know in my heart that that’s how things should still be, with my family together, Dad singing and laughing, enjoying life as he always did.

And then there are The Stinging Moments, those that rub salt into my wounds, the ones that make me feel like I am walking on a very wobbly tightrope, like when I am watching TV and the story line is one in which one of the characters is dying and/or has cancer (or even brain cancer!).  Like when I close my eyes to go to sleep at night and all I can picture is the image of my dad’s frailty at the end.  Like the times when I’m searching for a contact on my phone or in my email and his name automatically pops up, such a cruel reminder of how I can't talk to him anymore.  Like just now, when I typed the number 18 in the first sentence of this post.  Like the time I checked my calendar just a couple of weeks after Dad's passing and I saw my notes about the trip to the Brain Tumor Clinic at Duke that we were supposed to be taking that week, and I was hit by another wave of realization about what had happened and what couldn’t happen.  Like the ones when I feel like I shouldn't STILL be crying so much or the ones when I lie and say I'm fine when someone asks how I am.  Those are the times that I keep forgetting to expect, the ones that leave me with a just-slapped feeling that I’m not sure will ever lessen or go away.

Probably the most frequently occurring difficult times for me since Dad went on ahead have been The Empty Chair Moments, the ones in which I am startled again and again by his absence.  I think about him many times each day, I fall asleep with tears on my pillow almost every night, and I talk to him in the car pretty often – so that part of missing him has become part of my routine these days.  But family vacations and holiday gatherings, they are so tough without him, even worse than I thought they would be.  I so often think about how he would've loved the things that we are all able to do, the ones that he isn’t still here to do ... going the beach, riding a roller coaster, drinking a beer, swimming and lying in the sun on a hot day, playing with the kids, listening to the conversations and the laughter.  All of those moments together that feel so great except for the fact that he is missing.  The ones that make me tear up and grind my teeth and CUSS because I am just so damn angry, over and over again. 

The first time I went on a run after my dad went on ahead, I got about a mile from my house and the tears started; being out there on the road by myself, away from any distractions and so aware of the empty space beside me, was tough, and I didn't see that coming.  It wasn’t that I never ran without him before; it was that this time I was running and I was so acutely aware of the fact that he couldn’t be.  And he LOVED it.  That day, I ended up cutting my run short and trying it again the next day; the second time I wore some of Dad’s running socks and things went a little better, but it still stung.

When my daughter graduated from high school a couple of months ago, I knew that getting through the ceremony without become a total emotional wreck would be tough for me for so many reasons, including the fact that her Gramps wasn’t there with us to see her and to tell her how fiercely proud of her he was.  As I watched her walk across the stage and accept her diploma, I felt the love, the excitement, the joy, and the pride more than anything else, and I got through it without a tear, but what happened after the graduation that night was even harder than I’d thought the ceremony would be: my husband had made a dinner reservation for nine people at the restaurant where we went afterwards; however, when we got there, the table was actually set for ten.  I don’t think anyone else except me noticed, but the chair that stood empty after we’d all taken our seats seemed like a blatant reminder to me, such a glaring physical sign of the very important person who wasn’t able to be there. 

The first time we gathered for a family photo with one less, and every time since, we can all feel Dad’s absence so strongly – it feels like the reverse of a Where’s Waldo photo. Each time I start to call him and realize that I can't. The first time I did something that I knew he would be proud of and I had to feel his pride in my heart because I couldn't hear it in his voice or see it in his eyes. The first time he became a person whose name was being written "in memory of" instead of him writing that to honor someone else.  The times when I need to ask him a question and he isn't here to give the answer that only he knew. Ouch.  

Another kind of moment that I didn’t see coming has been The Shadow Moments, the times I've seen someone doing something in everyday life that he would (should) be doing now ... scenes that, if I squint my eyes and get the angle of the view just right, give me a second to glimpse what I can pretend is actually my dad, in the moment, here as he was meant to be: a man about his age running or biking, someone swimming in the ocean, a person sitting in the sun reading the paper and drinking a Diet Coke in a Sonic cup.  All of it, underscoring the unfairness, again.

Also making the list are the surreal Not-Supposed-To Times, the times when I have to do something that I shouldn’t have to be doing – like when I visit his grave, like when we had to clean out his car to sell it, and every time I hear my voice telling someone who doesn’t know our story that my father passed away.  Or the first time I had to mark the box next to Family History of Cancer and then write brain in the box beside Type/Other.  Closely related are The Stand-in Moments when I am having to do things my dad should've been here to do - to worry about my mom, to tell his grandchildren that he is so proud of the good grades they are making, to give my mom and my sisters the advice that I think he would be giving were he still here. 

And finally, there are The Obscure Moments, those unique to him and probably unappreciated by or perhaps even imperceptible in the awareness of other people who didn't know him in the exact way I did: the first summer Olympics, the really hot runs of the summer (“Anybody can run in good weather,” he said at the start of every summer, “but it takes a real runner to brave very hot conditions.”), going to the movies and ordering popcorn and then saying "No way, but thanks anyway!" (as Dad always did) when the worker asks do I want butter on the popcorn, the times when I think of something that I know he would think is funny or interesting and I realize that I can’t share it with him. These things leave me with an aching in my heart because he enjoyed them so thoroughly and now he can't.

The first Mother’s Day after he died was one of the worst days I’ve had in regards to handling the grief.  I expected that first Father’s Day to be hard, but when I woke up on Mother’s Day that year, all I could think about was how my dad wasn’t there to honor my mom (or his own mom, who’d passed away just a few weeks before that first Mother’s Day), and my heart was unexpectedly full of sadness even more than usual that day.  When we took my daughter to visit the college she will attend this fall: Dad was so good at meeting people and making everyone feel comfortable, and I kept thinking that he would have loved to be there with us to help her meet people and acclimate to the new surroundings and he would have been so proud of her and so impressed with her college choice.  On the night of my daughter's prom, just a few months after my dad died, the kids and their parents all gathered at a park before the big event for a photo shoot, and grief descended upon me like dew falling at night; it was the first big event involving my kids that we had to get through without him being around to know about it, to see the pictures, to hear about how much fun she had.  And even the minor, the everyday times, that come in intermittent blasts, like when I see an Advil tablet dropped on the floor like he used to do or when I eat an apple and catch myself thinking I should just go ahead and eat the core too ("It saves time!" he reasoned whenever someone asked him about why he did it.) just like he always did.  Those are the ones that pop into my head and shoot me with a spear of grief and all the emotions that come with it, but at the same time somehow those memories sometimes bring a smile to my face as I remember how unique of a person my dad was and how his viewpoint, his perspective, and his “don’t sweat the small stuff” attitude are something I will carry with me forever.

And with all of these unexpected moments, I am left to wonder:  Does it get easier when these firsts happen again as seconds, and then thirds, and then so on? Do the shock and the pain lessen as the time when he was here gets further and further out, like a balloon floating in the sky?