grief

Last Days


There is this idea that floats around about adversity and tragedy bringing people together. That would be other people. People to whom I am not related.

It’s tempting to write specifically now about the melodrama surrounding Dad’s last days but another time. Suffice to say that my brother, CB has at last burned one bridge too many. He is stranded in a place that Mom and DNOS, especially, are fully content to let him be. He even managed to alienate BabySis, and since she has blindly worshipped him since childhood, I wouldn’t have thought it possible had I not witnessed it.

Did he step over any of my lines? Yes he did. He knows it. He has been extra careful with me all week because I am his only lifeline. I choose to withhold my charity from him for the time being. Instead, I carefully painted him into a corner and he was on the earliest plane back to Nevada this morning. I am still the oldest and I still, mostly, rule. However, I gave him money for the trip. I consulted with Rob first, because we had agreed not to be ATM’s for our dysfunctional siblings, but even he agreed that there was no good reason to be so cruel to CB.

“It’s funny but as a non-Christian, I am the most Christian person in the house right now where your brother is concerned.”

I was very angry with CB. His behavior while Dad was dying was appalling. What he said to me while our father’s still warm body was lying in the other room is not something I will forget any time soon. I am not one of those people who believe that grief is blanket permission to behave as one pleases. I heard many times during the latter part of my first year of widowhood that grief can cause a person to act out and that it was part of the “process” and therefore should be overlooked or at least tolerated. It was not okay, I was told, to call people on what amounted to shitty behavior for which a non-grieving person would be handed his/her soundly kicked arse.

That is bullshit.

Being in pain isn’t an acceptable reason to inflict it intentionally or to not apologize when it is done in a moment of thoughtlessness.

And there is no hierarchy of grief. Widowhood does not trump the loss of a parent, no matter the age of the child though, in the latter case, age dictates the level of personal responsibility expectations.

I really can’t say that I felt worse after my first husband died than I do now. The relationships I had with Will and with my father don’t compare. They occupy different spaces. I feel each loss in a different way with equal intensity. The point of view may change but the sorrow is the same.

I was not with Dad when he died. I knew it was coming but I chose to go with Rob and the two kids to McDonald’s for lunch. There is a play area there and, though all I can eat is the side salad sans dressing, I didn’t want the little ones around and I thought Dad might be more inclined to go if they, and me too, were out of the house.

It was a moment in time that hurt very much to give up, but I knew it was the right thing to do.

I went in to be with him when we got back. I had forgotten the waxen look a body takes on after death. The complete absence of animation in the face. Mouth gaping and eyes hooded and the stillness, the chest no longer rising and falling.

There were a lot of tears. It was easier this time because Rob was there to envelop me. It felt safe to cry and I have never in my life felt able to safely show my sorrow in such a manner. He was not a panacea but he was, and continues to be, amazing.

I helped the hospice nurse, A, undress and then redress Dad. Mom couldn’t. Neither could DNOS. I wanted to and was glad I was able. Truthfully, helping care for my father in his last few days was wonderful. Dad was not someone who said, “I love you.” Consequently neither was I for much of my life. His way was to take care of a person. Provide and do. That is why actions are so important to me. Words are good but without accompanying actions, they are meaningless.

“Dad didn’t say ‘I love you’ to me until just a week ago.” BabySis complained to me the day after he died.

Lucky you, I thought, because he didn’t say the words to me at all. He did love me. I know that because of the things he has done for me. For BabyD. For my late husband. I guess it would have been nice to hear the words, but he showed me in a hundred different ways and what more is there?

Taking care of him was a way to show him back.

It was hard. The death rattle was agony to listen to. I have written before that I heard the sound many times during Will’s hospice stay. He was in a six bed hospice for three months. One room had the same occupant the whole time but the other four changed over at least three times each during those months. I heard death rattling a lot. I saw death’s shadow more than I ever cared to. The sound, the look and the smell are all things I never wanted to encounter again. But I loved my dad more than I worried about the effect of his dying on me. I wanted to show him I loved him even though I could have simply said the words, which I did as well, and let someone else do the rest.

I don’t think I want to watch someone die of lung cancer again but judging from my siblings’ coughs, and their strange habits of taking a smoke break after watching our dad gasp, wheeze and hack up a steady stream of brown phlegm, I could easily be witness again.*

I would like to thank all of those who read and took the time to comment. I appreciate your concern and your friendship. I have more to write about but I am unbelievably tired and quite swamped with things that need to be done before we head for home. The exhaustion, I have to say, is every bit as awful as when one is widowed.

*I might be much more militantly anti-smoking from now on.

My Dad has Died


Several Weeks ago I offered to write my dad’s obituary. He agreed but only if I sent it to him for pre-approval. I did write a first draft but never did get it emailed to him which is just as well because Mom can’t open her email account anyway due to the fact that she only just knows how to turn the computer on.

Saturday night as Mom, DNOS and I sat up with Dad, I plugged in my trusty macbook and typed another draft, stopping periodically to read it to them for approval or clarification.

It didn’t occur to me until yesterday morning that I hadn’t run the obit by Dad, so as I sat with him I confessed that I had the obit written now but he was just going to have to trust me – and besides he wouldn’t have let me be so creative anyway. He would not chuckle as some have, and more will, when they read it in the paper on Wednesday. Not that he wouldn’t be amused, but he would never have given me the satisfaction and the most I would have gotten was a raised eyebrow and wiggling ears.

 

Donald passed away at 2 PM on October 27th after a short battle with lung cancer. He was 81 years old.

Donald was born in Washington Mills in 1927 and grew up in the Zwingle area. He was the fourth of six children born to James and Mary and is survived by two of his elder siblings, Elizabeth and Leo.

He attended Loras Academy and graduated in 1945. Just seventeen he immediately enlisted in the Navy and served in the medical core until his discharge in 1948.

Upon returning to Iowa, Donald took a job at the Packing House. He stayed with the plant until his retirement 44 years later.

As a young man, Donald played baseball with the New Melleray team, pitching to his younger brother Jimmy, the team’s catcher while his cousin Joe played center field. He loved to play ball and taught his older daughters to throw like boys and step up to the plate.

Card games of all kinds were a family tradition, and Donald enjoyed nothing better than sitting down to the kitchen table with family, or friends, and a deck of cards. He was the most graceful dancer and unlike most men he didn’t stop dancing once he was married. He found the New York Times crosswords entertaining and will be taking the dictionary he used while solving them to his grave with him, just in case he needs it. He never bought a car that was made in the same decade in which he was living, and he made very specific Christmas lists and assigned each of his family members the gift they were to give him so he always got what he wanted, a trait he passed on to his grandson, Z. Donald was a Pinewood Derby champion first with his son and again with his grandson, Z. He had Rice Krispies for breakfast every morning and a bowl of ice cream before bed every night, and he missed having boiled dinners though no one else in his family does.

Donald met his future wife, Ruth, at a dance in March of 1954, and they became engaged in June of 1956. They were married on a beautiful October weekend that same year. And not just because she had a brand new car as he liked to joke.

Donald and Ruth were married for 52 years, which is not something that everyone can boast of, and have four children: Ann (Robert), Katie (Joseph), Christopher, and Amie. They have five grandchildren and two step-granddaughters.

During his retirement, Donald volunteered as a math tutor at Central High School. He also spent many years as a driver delivering meals for the Meals on Wheels program, and he was a member of the St. Anthony’s prayer line.

Donald was a member of the St. Mary’s Credit Union board for many years. He enjoyed the work he did there and made many life long friends through his association with it.

Donald is survived by his wife Ruth, four children, five grandchildren, two step- granddaughters, sisters-in law Eileen and Donna Mae and brothers-in-law Irvin and Donald and many nieces, nephews and their children. He was proceeded in death by his parents, his sisters Margaret Mary and Joan, his younger brother Jimmy, brothers-in-law, Red, Francis, Arnie and three sisters-in-law, Bernadette and Elaine and Dorothy  as well as his niece Darlene and great-nephew, Keith and his son-in-law, William.

Donald asked that any memorials be made to Saint Monfort Parish in Haiti and Hospice of Dubuque.

His family gives special thanks to Dr. K. and Dr. S. for their excellent care of Donald and to Hospice of Dubuque, especially Ann, Nicole and Jane. Donald would have echoed their sentiments.

Donald C. was one of a kind. He was greatly loved and will be missed terribly.

Deathbeds and Live Blogging


Four in the morning and it’s probably the most peaceful the house has been in days. I haven’t had much sleep in the last few days. Since Thursday it’s felt like time is standing still at a hurtling pace and though that makes no sense at all, it is what the last days and hours are like. Periods of total normal puncuated by long moments that seem as though one has lived them already. Deja vu stalks me because  of me – because of Will – and yet not. There are cystalline moments that belong just to this experience and just to Dad. 

I am the only one awake right now which is not surprising since I was the first one to go to bed last night. Driven by the noise of all things. Between the constant hiss and rattle of the oyzgen machine and the need to flee my younger brother’s anger, my sister’s grief and my mother’s helpless resignation.

There was not so much noise when Will died. I outlasted it until it was simply he and I.

Yesterday tried my patience with my youngest siblings. BabySis is too simple-minded to process what she sees and her mental defects are jarring in the harsh light Dad’s dying has thrown on them. She has been so annoying over the last twenty-five years that I was able to skip over the fact that she is borderline mentally disabled. Functional but vulnerable. And I want to be able to feel some for her but I just want to put distance between us. I am tired of her neediness and for once happy that LawnMower Man came back into her life because he seems genuinely concerned and protective of her. 

I haven’t seen LawnMower Man in over twenty years. Not since right before he knocked her up and then split for the West Coast. He is a tiny man. Skin so tight that he looks plastic. HIs clothes seemed painted on. He had Ken doll hair. Molded to his head and lips that seem stretched too tight.

“He looks like an old lesbian,” I told Rob who didn’t disagree and probably shouldn’t have laughed but his own siblings look like trailer park inhabitants too, so he knows exactly what I mean.

And then there is CB. He was drunk most of Friday to varying degrees. There is irony. He more than any of us suffered most from Dad’s drinking and hated its effects on the family unit, yet there he was at 3:30 in the morning, hammered, sitting watch. 

“He is very vulnerable,” Mom kept telling us.

And he is but I don’t care right now. Perhaps I will again at some point this week, but last night I gave in to my body’s need to sleep to get away from the rage that radiates off him.

Whatever lie I have to tell him to get him back on a plane for Tahoe will be told. He isn’t staying here with my mom. 

DNOS is alternates between in charge and distraught. She wishes us gone as much as she wished us here. She doesn’t like having to share her dad with the rest of us in his final hours. 

At one point last evening, when Dad was caught in a cycle of coughing, trying to swim free of the mucous that is swamping his lungs, she ordered us all out of the room. 

“It’s been just the three of us all along and it should end with just the three of us,” she said through the tears.

I forced CB, BabySis and Nephew out of the room. I silenced their indignation with the force of my will – which is considerable – and allowed DNOS, Mom and Dad to be alone. I remember clearly my own mute frustration at the end of Will’s last weekend when all the family and friends, who’d basically forgotten about him and us, came scurrying to the hospice. Despite the fact that it had been just he, BabyD and I for nearly three years, they laid claims based on longevity that had nothing to do with love as I know it. So I cleared the room for my sister and kept it cleared the rest of the night.

He’s still alive. Gurgling and surprisingly warm. I laid my hand on his chest and felt the heart pumping too hard. Death rattling in his chest and throat. How many times did I listen to someone in their last hours as I walked the hallway to Will’s hospice room? Even BabyD could recognize the sound by the end of his long stay.

“That person is going to die tonight, right Mom?” she would say as we walked past and heard the wet breath.

I wish Dad would just die. I wished the same thing about Will at that time nearly three years ago now. There comes a time when it is past time.