grief

Sadness is the Monday Meme


My parents were the younger and youngest children in their families respectively. By the time they met and married, they had nieces and nephews in grade school. Due to circumstances beyond their control, they couldn’t have children and after seven years, they adopted me. So I was always one of the younger cousins. I was a child when many of my cousins married and started families of their own.

My oldest cousin, Dar, married at nineteen and her six children were more like first cousins to my sibilings and I then she ever was. Although I lost touch with my extended family when I went off to university, I did grow up, in a sense, with these second cousins.

Dar died a few years ago after a long battle with cancer. She was in her mid to late fifties. Young by today’s standards though my own widowhood has taught me that people are very unrealistic about what “young” really means. I think my late husband may have been in hospice at the time, so I didn’t get back for the funeral and never sent a note or card to her husband. At the family reunion this last June however I had a long talk with one his daughters and discovered that he has adjusted, as we all do, and was doing well.*

DNOS called me Sunday morning to let me know that Dad was not doing well. He’d had a rough night. His breathing was not good and he couldn’t get out of bed. But she had other news too.

Dar’s youngest son, who is thirty, came home after an outing with their two older children – aged 8 and 2 – to find his wife on the bed and not breathing. He discovered  her because their baby, born just this August, was crying. He and his father tried to revive her but she was already gone. She was just 27.

Twenty-seven is very young.

I called a cousin who is close to the family. She is DF’s godmother in fact. She filled me in on the details. Everyone focus’s on the details in the aftermath. The timeline of events takes on huge significance. The story is told and retold, passed from one person to another. It’s important, as validating as the life that is now over. And it will eventually make the loss real.

I reminded my cousin that DF will need support for a long time to come and to not let that be forgotten after the first few months, as it sometimes is.**

CousinA also talked with me a bit about Dad’s turn*** and how hard it is for us now too. But I didn’t agree. 27 is not 81. Young and healthy with a life ahead of you and small children is not old and ill with grown children. All deaths are not equal. Some are more tragic and more unfair.

I have no prompt today, but I invite you to share your tales of loss or memories of loved ones. It’s a good thing to tell the stories because they are reminders in these uncertain days of the other thing we have in common with each other – our mortality.

 

*How well a bereaved person is doing is never really known to anyone but the person. Family and friends always believe we are better than we are. It’s a very subjective call.

**She agreed and of course brought up that if anyone would know this it would be me. I don’t like being an expert on the subject.

***I am reminded was we speak that death often comes in threes. My uncle’s wife two weeks ago and now my cousin’s. And Dad has taken a turn.

Getting into the Spirit of Dying


I spent a bit of the morning Friday placating DNOS and our mother. It seems that the first official visit from the hospice nurse was not a rousing success. Mainly because Dad refuses to die peacefully and without being irritating.

Oh, did that sound cold? Here’s something colder yet then, as I listened to first my sister and then my mom describe the nurse’s visit and the ensuing argument it caused between my folks, so much so that when the nurse left DNOS lectured them on decorum, I realized for the first time really just how incredibly annoying and oblivious to the world I had been myself back in the care-giving and early widowhood days.

At one point as I reassured Mom for the tenth time in as many minutes that she was indeed relevant and important, I wondered if I had sounded that shrill and peevish and if people were rolling their eyes at me as I poured out my frustration over the phone to them.

Well okay, not eye rolling, but certainly more than one person had to have wondered if I would ever be a sane member of society again.

From this distance I can see all sides to the slow disintegration that is taking place. Mom is feeling overlooked as caregivers often do. She has needs as real as Dad’s and she thinks no one cares. Dad is feeling pushed to the grave, which is absolutely not what is happening, but I can see where his resistance is coming from. A couple of weeks ago he was dying someday and now he is dying sometime really soon. It is an adjustment and he feels the loss of autonomy more keenly than he has since he was banned from driving last spring. This is his passing and he is going to give the orders. He isn’t thinking about Mom too much right now and she is hurt by this. DNOS then is in the uncomfortable position of mediating their struggles.

My parents have never been stellar communicators. Fifty-two years has brought them great insight into each other but no great wisdom as to what to do with the information beyond tormenting each other. My sister would rather be peeled like a grape than involve herself in confrontation. Her modus operandi is too simply tell the parental units what they will be doing.

“And you are going to back me up,” she ordered as we spoke, “don’t you tell either one of them anything different.”

Four times I assured her that I was in total agreement. I don’t think she  heard me anymore than Mom did when I spoke with her later.

God, I must have been just the most awful person to run into back in the day old days. If I was even a tenth as deaf or petulant, I can imagine that my number was constantly being screened on phones everywhere.

And I know this is all just a phase. Eventually a person comes back.

Dad is probably the most even keeled of the three. He is driving DNOS crazy with his impromptu dictations of funeral arrangements. So far he has had her write out a list of personal items to be given to certain people, informed her that he would not have individuals eulogizing him at his service nor did he want any sort of digital picture display. DNOS has had to take down the pallbearer list, not the funeral home that Dad prefers above all others and be told that picking out the casket was her job.

Last evening she got to take the two of them to the wake of my Uncle Erv’s wife who passed away last weekend. I don’t like my uncle at all. He was a sharp tongued guy with no inner censor who looked me up and down when I was about fourteen and told me,

“I can’t believe how fat you are.”

Still, I felt badly for him when Mom mentioned how incredibly lost he was when she and my Dear Auntie visited him the day after his wife died. She had taken care of all the details in their life. He couldn’t even find their checkbook. They were married for sixty some years.

When I mentioned that I was surprised that she was driving them to the wake, I got,

“Well who else is going to do it?” rather peevishly.

I had actually suggested to Mom that they skip the wake and just go on Saturday with Dear Auntie, but wakes are huge social events. There was no way that either of my parents would miss an opportunity to mingle.

The only good news that came out of the phone at me today was that Dad was stable. The fluid is building but slowly, so there is no need for me to fly down right now. I can’t say that this disappoints me at all, but DNOS is clearly desperate for me to come, judging from her tone, though Mom knows perfectly well that my arrival is not going to let her off the hook as far as caregiving. I won’t do that again for her.*

Rage against the dying of the light, isn’t it? We have that done, I think.

*About six weeks after Will died, Dad had some surgery. He had a growth in his rectum and they thought it might be cancer – it wasn’t – but I was required to come as it was my spring break. Never-mind that I had a thesis due on the 1st of May and comps to write. There were complications and Dad ended up in ICU (ironically right next door to his brother’s dying wife – fun times) and I was the one doing hospital duty while Mom worked and DNOS went about her life. It was unfair of them to stick that on me. It will not happen again.

About Three Weeks


I don’t know if the hospice nurse was pressed for this time frame or she told just mom, but I got a semi-frantic call from DNOS.

“Did you talk to Mom?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know? And you are coming?”

“It was a couple of hours ago and she sounded awful. Dad didn’t sound too good either, but neither of them mentioned my coming now. Why?”

“The hospice nurse told them it will be about three weeks. Mom is wiring money to C.B. I think she should just buy him the ticket though.”

Let’s step back from this conversation for a moment to note that even though she is panicking in a mild way, she still remembers, and comments, on C.B.’s tendency to not use money sent to him for its intended purpose. And I won’t argue with her assumption. If anyone could eff up the opportunity to make amends with his dying father, it would be C.B.

I point out to her that it is much harder to buy an airline ticket for someone these days because mistakes are hard to fix. It will be better to just send money. I don’t remind her that C.B. will only bring more tension to a situation already fraught and if he doesn’t get home in time, it will make things easier for the rest of us.

“So are you telling me I need to come this weekend?”

“I don’t know. Mom said she was going to call you.”

And so the lines of communication begin their inevitable breakdown. Mom and DNOS are not on the same page.

“Well, Auntie and Cousin are visiting today. They are probably still in the middle of the visit. She’ll probably call me later. I’ll talk to her regardless of whether she calls me or I have to call her.”

I then went on to explain that any decision needs to wait until after Dad sees the doctor tomorrow. The doctor appointment on Wednesday revealed that fluid is indeed building up again and Dad mentioned to the nurse today he is feeling pressure on his chest. The likely scenario is that the doctor will suggest draining the build up or simply letting the cancer run its course. Whatever Dad decides. This will decide things for me too.

DNOS didn’t have much to say after that especially when I pointed out to her that I couldn’t come and hang out for weeks on end. I have a husband and child and even though they would survive without me, it is too long to be away given the stressful nature of everything. Rob, BabyD and I are still raw from our earlier losses. We worry too much about each other as it is. Throw distance in and the recipe is ripe for disaster.

This was not what DNOS expected to hear. She also did not expect me to ask her if she was really prepared for what is coming. It’s not easy to watch someone die. Dad’s death is not a hypothetical in the far future thing. It’s here.

Later I spoke with my mother, she had questioned the hospice intake nurse about the time frame. Wednesday Dad’s doctor took him off all his medications including the blood thinner which has essentially kept him from having any further strokes these last two and a half years. That has been running through her mind and today it occurred to her that this was done because Dad didn’t have much time left. Time that could be measured by weeks instead of months.

Mom was surprised though to hear about DNOS’s call to me. I was not surprised to learn that communication from now on was going to resemble a game of telephone.

The bottom line is that I don’t need to go right now.

But that time is coming much sooner than I had originally guessed and I guessed shorter than three months to begin with.