Loading...Today I seemed to have woken up grieving everything. There’s my dad, sure, I mean duh. But there’s all this shit it feels like we’ve lost this year. And I almost feel dumb and ignorant saying it, almost feel like the magnitude of what the Black community has been putting up with in this country makes everything else pale in comparison, but I can’t help it, and I’m sorry and I don’t know what to do. This morning I don’t feel like doing anything.
And that’s kind of a problem, because suddenly I have a bunch of clients who are like, let’s get back to normal! Hurray! Aside from the obvious, that come on really, things aren’t normal, there’s my own internal sense, something that seems to have been knocked off its center a bit in my brain. I felt it yesterday when I was a complete idiot on a call with some co-workers because I mixed up a Janet with a Janice—2 totally different clients with different issues. I felt it last night when I was awoken by some police activity literally right outside my bedroom window that was terrifying but ultimately ended peacefully. I was terrified they were going to shoot the man they were arresting. I could hear them cocking their guns. Neighbors were coming out of their houses, I’m sure donning their cell phones, demanding to know what was happening and I was just praying that no one was going to get shot. No one did.
I feel it now because my birthday is coming up and I don’t want it to. It’s not the usual reason, another tick on the slog to 50, it’s that I don’t want to have a birthday. I don’t want to have another milestone, to mark- another thing that has happened since he’s been gone. I was 46 when he died and soon I’ll be 47, then 48 and so on.
I found myself in the shower this morning running through the catalog of the people I have lost in my life. When did I start feeling better after they died? When did I stop grieving? Is there something I did? Is there an action I took that made me feel better? Did I cry more for Grandma than for Grandpa? Did going to, and in some cases, planning a funeral help? I was thinking about when my stepfather, Hank, died in 1997. When he passed away, I had recently moved to New York City after graduating from college and spending some time living in London. He and my mother were living in the Boston suburbs.
His illness and death as always been framed in my mind as a flaw in my character. Ok, maybe not fair, but a flaw of my age and my experience at the time that I honestly did not think he was going to die. The doctors did, and he did, he would joke about it, but I steadfastly refused to accept that. When I came to their apartment the Tuesday before thanksgiving, he was completely bed ridden and was too weak to speak. And still, I didn’t think he was going to die. I spent the next few days running errands including a completely surreal drive to a neighboring town to pick up a huge bottle of morphine at a pharmacy. They just gave it to me.
The night before Thanksgiving was quiet and we sat in dim light by his bed not really saying much. I was tired and decided to go back to the bed and breakfast where I was staying. Hank, though he couldn’t speak, seemed like he didn’t want me to go. The hospice nurse raised her eyebrows at me. I took his hand and said I’ll be back early tomorrow, I’ll see you then. Of course he died before I could see him again and his brother Dave, his son James, my mom and I stood by his bedside with his favorite priest crying. My mom looked at him and said “He has a smile on his face.” And then it started to snow.
Hank died on Thanksgiving and I always tried to focus on that, focus on being grateful for stuff. This was during that period of time when Oprah told us all to have our gratitude journals and man, I fucking tried, I honestly did. But all I could think about was that I never told him how grateful I was for stuff. I sat there by his bed thinking, he’s going to get up any minute. He’s going to be fine. He’s going to Dave’s house and eat turkey with us tomorrow. I was so mad at myself. I went to Atlantic City (because, at the time, it was the cheapest beach getaway I could afford) and yelled at the moon and the ocean for a while. But was it grief for Hank or grief that I was so fucking stupid? Of course he was going to die. Of course. This was my first hospice experience so I hadn’t yet learned the dirty little secret of hospice—you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave. And it felt like such a missed opportunity. I mean we weren’t super close, there were things I’m sure I can think of that we found annoying about each other. But when you’re sitting at someone’s death bed you don’t think about that, you say something meaningful, you thank them, and you don’t just expect them to spring out of bed and shout: “Just kidding!”
In the shower this morning when I was running through my grief inventory I was wondering: did that help? Did going to Atlantic City and yelling at the moon and the ocean help? Should I do that now? As long as there is no curfew, should I go yell at the moon or the ocean? Is that why I feel just so stupidly sad today? I haven’t been yelling or screaming, shaking my fist at things and such.
Not so much, I think. Instead I tried to be grateful that I told my dad I was grateful before he died. If it can help in how I felt when Hank died that I never make that mistake again, then it will help. March 4 was my Dad’s 75th birthday and I created a little book for him with a bunch of old photos and I thanked him for all the things he did for us—all the trips, all the lessons, and for just sticking around. I knew he wouldn’t hear me if I said it so I published it so he could sit with it for a while and know how grateful I was for all the things that he taught me. And that does make me feel better, that he knew that. Marge showed the book to every nurse and every aide that came to sit with him so that they would know also how grateful we were to him. And that does help, it really does. But I’m still sad.
