My father’s death in 2008 was so sudden,… so unexpected. Sure, we all know that our parents will die some day, but Dad was only 82 and I’d had a wonderful, unusually long phone conversation with him about an hour before he fell down the stairs in our family home and sustained major head trauma. I was totally unprepared. I was totally devastated.
That first week, the days between his death and his funeral, I was numb. I wasn’t experiencing the five stages of grief described by the Swiss-American psychologist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. There was no denying that Dad was gone. I wasn’t angry. Depression had not yet set in. I saw no use in bargaining, as what was done was done. And I certainly had not reached the point of acceptance. I was in an indescribable zone.
In the weeks and months following Dad’s funeral service, I found myself deep in depression. I had never experienced such darkness. I struggled through the unfamiliar territory, mostly keeping everything pent-up inside me. There was an aloneness with which I didn’t know how to cope. I wasn’t suicidal, and despite my Irish heritage, I didn’t drink my sorrows away. Instead, I started reading — about grief. In each book I read, I picked up a few pearls of wisdom to take with me on my journey of grief. I also took every opportunity to drive over the hill to Santa Cruz and sit in my lawn chair overlooking Monterey Bay. Those strategies, plus the passage of time, enabled me to heal.
My mother’s death was not sudden. We all saw it coming. She was 92 years old. She’d be 93 on September 15th. I had the opportunity to spend an extraordinary amount of time with Mom in the final month of her life. We talked, until we couldn’t. I held her hand. I sang to her. And, for the most part, I was simply with her in those final days. I will be forever grateful that my three siblings were equally committed to being with Mom during that time. When Mom passed, I was prepared. There was no feeling of devastation. Rather, there was an overwhelming sense of gratitude.
Mom lived a good life, and, when the time came, she was ready to go. Her death was peaceful. I realized, as Mom was going through the process of dying, that she was teaching us all how to die, just as she had taught us all how to live. What a gift!
It’s not that I haven’t or won’t experience grief associated with the loss of my mother. I have, and I will. The difference between now and 2008 is that I am much more familiar with the process of grief. It’s not as simple as “time heals all wounds.” It’s much more complicated than that. I came across a quote that seems to hit the nail on the head when it comes to the unpredictability of grief. The quote, which was not attributed to anyone in particular, states:
“Grief is like glitter. You can throw a handful of glitter into the air, but when you try to clean it up, you’ll never get all of it. Even long after the event, you will still find glitter tucked into corners. It will always be there — somewhere.”
As cartoonist Charles Schulz’ popular character, Charlie Brown, seemed to understand so well, there is such a thing as “good grief.” We don’t have to allow grief to paralyze us. Most of us have played with a beach ball in a swimming pool, so we all know how challenging it can be to hold the beach ball underwater for a prolonged period of time. We get tired. We get distracted. And we can’t do much of anything else while trying to do so. Grief can do this to us, too. It is much healthier to allow it to come to the surface, recognize it for what it is, and move it off to the side so that we can be functional members of society again.
