Grief and Ice Chewing

I recently met a woman - someone I'll call Tina* - though a mutual friend.  In the course of conversation, it came to light that Tina's mother had been my boss for many years before her retirement.  I was particularly happy to meet Tina because her mom, about whom I will always think very highly, passed away tragically very soon after she retired, and I had never before had the opportunity to tell anyone in her family how much I appreciated the impact she had had on my life.

I told her how her mom had guided me professionally over the years, and then I told her what I admired about her mom the most, which was her mom's effort and ability to keep track of the details of things going on in the personal lives of her many employees and coworkers.  In a word, it was her kindness that touched me the most over the many years that I knew her - and it was that quality that I remembered and admired about her the most.

Tina told me about the day five years ago when her mom died, the specifics of which I hadn't heard before.  She talked about how hard it was to lose her mom and how she, as an only child, and her dad had grieved the loss differently.  She asked about my parents, and after I told her about my dad's death, we talked more about grief and loss.  As someone who is twice as far ahead as I am on the road of grief, she told me a few things she had come to know, like how the sadness and the pain never go away - but that things do get more tolerable in some ways over time.  

It was comforting to hear what she had to say about the grief process from her perspective and based on her time frame; it reminded me of once many years ago when I went to have my teeth cleaned at the dentist's office and saw a dentist in the practice whom I hadn't met before.  They had gotten a gadget to use during exams that was essentially a tiny camera that allowed them to film what was going on in a patient's mouth and then project the image onto a TV screen for the patient to view.  (Stick with me; I'm getting to the part where this ties in to the conversation detailed above.) The dentist used the camera to show me that I have some tiny cracks in some of my teeth; likely, she told me, the result of crunching ice.  Although she presented that information to me more in the form of a scolding than anything else, for some reason I felt the need to explain to her why I had started the obviously bad habit of ice crunching: to combat the severe heartburn I experienced during my second pregnancy.  "How old is that child now?" she asked me.  I thought she was just making conversation, and I told her my daughter was five.  "Well, that excuse got used up a long time ago," she snarkily informed me.

Needless to say, I did not bond with that particular dentist, and I chose not to be seen by her again.  I felt there were several important pieces of information involved in patient care that she was missing, ranging from general courtesy and compassion to motivation and perspective.  She didn't ask me if I still had issues with heartburn or if I thought the ice-chewing had just become a habit over the years; actually she didn't ask me anything except for the age of my child, which she obviously asked only as a lead-in to the judgment she was all too eager to issue out.  

And that leads me to what I think is my point, and, you'll be glad to know, to how this story ties in to the first one: grief, like ice chewing and lots of other things in life, has its own time frame in every situation, and that's ok.  Each person has his or her own story; each of us has traveled a different road to get to where we are today.  Without having traveled that same exact road, or, at the very least, without having worked to try to understand that person's perspective, another person cannot possibly have the insight or the knowledge - and possibly the right - to stand in judgment of another person.

That's one thing that I've certainly learned over the past couple of years; that, and the lasting impact of kindness.

*Her real name isn't Tina - and her identity probably really isn't a secret if you know me and my work history, but I prefer to use that instead of her actual name to protect her privacy - and since knowing her identity isn't the point of this story.

The Tears That Followed

When I was growing up, my parents used to tell me that even if you have to have a good reason to cry, at some point you need to stop crying and move on - or you risk running out of tears.  I'm not sure if I totally believed them or not, but regardless I have never been much of a crier, until my dad got sick.  Since the time of his diagnosis and even more so since he went on ahead, I have officially become a crier.  And today, I'm here to say that evidently what my parents told me decades ago about running out of tears isn't really true - the tears do not ever dry up.  

On the night my dad went on ahead, when they took his body away, there was a sense of utter bizarreness, almost of an unearthly quality.  It felt like everything was happening in the midst of a fog.  Afterwards, somehow - probably from sheer exhaustion, both physical and emotional - my mom, my sisters, and I all slept for a few hours that night before we had to get up and start planning for the funeral.  Once we had made it through that, we knew we had to make ourselves eat, even though none of us felt like eating, and so we stopped by a pizza place on the way home from the funeral home.  "This is so surreal," I kept thinking, and it really was.  My brother arrived from out of state not long after we got back to my parents' house after lunch, and, after awhile, we resolved to do something instead of sitting around the house crying or in a daze.  

Someone suggested we go to get our nails done at the nail place near where my parents lived, the same place where my mom usually went and where we had taken my dad just after he'd gotten out of rehab, on the day before we'd left to take him to Duke.  

"Was it only six weeks ago that we were here with Dad?" I thought, with tears in my eyes, as we walked into the nail place.  When the woman who worked there and who knew my parents looked up and saw us, she asked, "Where's your dad?"  I couldn't bring myself to say the words "he died," and so I just stood there until my sister Jennifer said, "He didn't make it."  The woman and the other staff members there were very nice; I was grateful that they just expressed their condolences and then moved on to other more casual topics instead of asking for details.

I don't remember much from over the course of the next few days, just bits and pieces and feeling lots of sadness and confusion.  I was grateful that my family was there together and that many of our extended family members and friends had come to the memorial service, but the shroud of despair was so pervasive that it was impossible not to retreat into bouts of stunned silence and driving tears, both at regular intervals.  

It was really tough to leave my parents' house that Sunday; I wasn't sure how I was going to get through walking back into my house, when the last time I was there things were so very different.  I was operating on auto-pilot, I'm sure.  I remember one of my friends from work texting me that Sunday night to express her condolences and to suggest that I take some time off work; no, I told her, it's better if I keep busy.  I couldn't stand the thought of sitting in a quiet house with nothing but my thoughts and my tears.  

Looking back now, I think it's odd that I didn't think I should take any time off from work.  The ten weeks preceeding my dad's death while he was sick and certainly his death itself were the most traumatic experience of my life, and I was exhausted, hurt, and in shock.  So much so that I thought going right back to work was a rational decision.  But, as it turned out, I ended up with two extra days off, and I didn't have to spend them alone, because it snowed enough to warrant two snow days off from school that Monday and Tuesday.  I felt like Dad had sent me a gift, so that I didn't have to go back to work right away and so that I was able to grieve in the comfort of my own home with my kids there with me.  

I have this photo saved on my
computer under "Snow From Dad."

After that, though, I tried to hit the ground running.  I guess I somehow thought it would be back to business as usual, even though nothing felt "normal" at all to me.  In reality, though, I was in a daze much of the time.  The emotional pain, and the physical pain that came along with it, were almost more than I could bear.  The physical effects - the body aches, the back pain, the crazy appetite, the insomnia - were a complete shock to me; I had never heard that those things are part of the grief process, and they all compounded the difficulty of trying to cope with the sadness and the other emotions. 

A far as I can remember, I functioned well enough at work, but it was at a much slower than usual capacity.  Some days it was all I could do to get dressed and drive to work, often while crying, to fake being ok for the duration of the work day, and then to make it back home.  It was as if I was just going through the motions from the time I got out of bed in the morning until the time when I could get back in it in the evening.  At home, for the first time in my life, I let others take care of things like dinner and laundry and paying bills.  I often couldn't sleep at night; I spent a lot of time wishing with all my might that my dad would at least come back to me in a dream, and I was unbelievably tired.  Tired from not sleeping, tired from the grief, tired from crying, and tired from trying to keep it together.  It was beyond my capability to make plans or even very many decisions; I felt like I couldn't think straight or keep track of things, and in some cases I just couldn't make myself care about a lot of things that were going on around me.

If I had to choose one word to describe myself during those first weeks or maybe even months after Dad went on ahead, it would be "depleted." As I had done while my dad was sick, I read about brain cancer; sometimes it made me feel better, but mostly it just made me angry and sad and so I started to read about grief instead.  Eventually, I found my way to a grief counselor, and my sessions with her helped a little in that she told me each time I saw her that what I was feeling was "normal" and in that attending those sessions eventually led me to writing.  Sometimes I still wasn't so sure, though, that I was doing anything right or that I was going to make it through any of the pain, but I just kept plugging away, getting through the days and the nights, one at a time, because that's all I knew to do.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer said that he found there was “a fellowship of those who bear the mark of pain,” and that “sensitivity to human suffering does not stand alone and rootless.” We have all stood over different graves and have had different beliefs as to the fate of our loved ones, but our tears remain a universal constant and need no translation.

Sorrow makes us all children again – destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.”

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sick Days

During the time that my dad was on chemo and therefore immunocompromised, I became acutely aware (read: completely paranoid) about being exposed to germs.  I’ve always been a little bit of a germaphobe, and, armed with the knowledge that it was entirely possible that something to which I was exposed could result in (1) my not being able to be around him once I realized I was getting sick, or – worse – (2) my accidentally contaminating him if I went to see him and didn’t realize I was getting sick, I was on perpetual high guard about germs and illness at that time.

All of that got me started thinking about sick day policies at work and at school.  Every school that I know of has an award for Perfect Attendance.  Many offer rewards for not missing school ranging from getting to choose one’s teachers for the next school year, getting to go to a party, getting vouchers for free stuff like ice cream and pizza (that seems at least a little counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?), and – the one I don’t understand at all because it’s something that would never have motivated me as a kid – getting to wear a hat to school.  At my kids’ school, students can earn the privilege of getting exempt from the final exam in any class if they end up with an yearly average of at least a 90 and have come to school sick amassed less than three absences ALL YEAR. 

Isn’t it a proven fact that a quicker recovery is much more probable if a person who is sick gets extra rest and takes in extra fluids, both of which are impossible if that person is on-the-job as a student or an employee?  If that sick person does come to work or school, it is a sure thing that he or she is not performing up to his or her full potential.  Oh, and, if that sick person has something that is contagious like a cold, isn’t it a certainty that he or she is spreading those germs all around, which could potentially result in a greater loss of productivity when others in the office or school catch the illness??

One of my kids did a science fair project once to determine which public place was the most germ-infested.  Samples from ten different locations around our town were put into petri dishes.  The one that grew the most grossness was the sample from the front door of City Hall.  I’ll leave that discussion for another time.  Second place went to the front door of the school building.  Yep, people are getting sick at school as often as they coming to school sick.

I don’t think that colleges care if kids have Perfect Attendance Awards listed on their high school resumes, and I doubt prospective employers do, either.  If I were in charge of hiring someone for a job, I would NOT hire someone who had a record of never missing work.  From my perspective, Perfect Attendance implies a person has almost undoubtably come to school or work sick and carelessly spread their germs around at some point.  I’m not advocating playing hooky or skipping school or being a slacker when there’s no legitimate reason; I just think it’s better to take a sick day when one is, well, sick!

Some of the funding for schools is based on the average number of students who are present at school each day, a figure that they call the Average Daily Attendance.  So school administrators are highly motivated to do their best to highly motivate their students to show up every day.  I think schools are, in general, also focused on the fact that kids who miss a lot of school aren’t likely to be learning as much as they could be.  That said, though, I think it’s a bad idea to have a Perfect Attendance Award that is so enticing that the consequences of coming to school sick outweigh the benefits of staying home to recover.  School employees typically get one sick-day off per month; why do kids, in cases like my children’s school, only get a few day off per year, or – worse – none if they want whatever Perfect Attendance carrot that is being dangled in front of them??

And don’t get me started on the value of mental health days.  What about an employee who takes a day off to go on a field trip with their child or to attend an awards program at their child’s school?  I think that’s commendable, much more so than it would be if that person missed the chance to be present for such an event. (Wouldn’t it be ironic if the employee missed work to go to see their child get a Perfect Attendance Award at school?)

Something I’ve learned since my dad got sick is that time is a finite resource and making time to be present in the lives of your loved ones should trump everything else – money, recognition, and awards for Perfect Attendance.  When I think about missing out on taking care of a loved one in their time of need (including oneself) just to avoid not missing work, Perfect Attendance seems anything BUT perfect.  I missed work whenever I felt I needed to be there with my dad while he was sick, and sometimes even when I wasn’t really needed but I just wanted to be with him.  From my perspective, there is so much more of a risk from not missing work or school in cases like that, and, I’m sure, Regret from something like that is a tough pill to swallow.

After my dad went on ahead on the Wednesday after the Christmas Break, my kids missed the next two days of school.  If ever there was a good reason for them to take a sick day, that was it.  We were all heartsick and heartbroken, but we were together, and that was the only thing that helped any of us at all.   After the memorial service, we packed up and headed back home on that Sunday, feeling obligated to get back to school and work on that Monday.  I wasn’t sure any of us would be able to wake up that next morning and go about our lives like things were normal.  And, thankfully, we didn’t have to.  I like to think that Dad had some pull Upstairs because we ended up getting the next two days out of school for snow, and so we had two extra days to grieve as a family unit, still not nearly enough but, as Dad would say, “Better than nothing!”

In China, health officials use a thermometer that looks like a gun to take people’s temperatures to limit the spread of germs for things like the Swine Flu.  I’m only half-kidding when I say maybe we need something like that to check people for fevers when they are coming into the school building or employees in a large company as they get to work.

I’m honestly not sure what the solution is for keeping kids or employees from not missing school or work when they aren’t sick or keeping the ones who are sick from coming, but I do know what is currently being done is not a good idea.  The fact that we obviously can’t rely solely on human decency and honesty and internal motivation makes me sick.