After he was gone I backed away from his bed and walked out onto the patio. It was just after seven o’clock in the evening and the sun’s light still shimmered over the rooftops. It was a warm night—the neighbor kids were still playing in the pool—and the palm fronds whispered in the breeze.
My father was dead.
I remember this feeling—this vast empty feeling at my back—as if, were I to turn around there would be nothing there to see, just space, infinity, blindness. I felt utterly still inside. The thing was done. My parents were dead.
A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
It's one of the first things I tell people when I begin a new bereavement group: After I explain how I've been working in hospice for a year and a half, after I state the credentials of my master's degree in clinical psychology, after I tell them that I've been conducting group work for several years, I then tell them that both of my parents died of cancer.
I don't always tell them all the details -- that I was fourteen when they were both diagnosed at the same time, that my father had prostate cancer and my mother stage four colon cancer. I don't necessarily mention that I'm an only child, that my mother died when I was eighteen and my father when I was twenty-five. Just that simple sentence, "My parents both died of cancer" is usually enough.
Because that's the thing about grief: One of the most powerful ways to move through it is to recognize that you're not alone, that someone else has also walked this path of heartbreak and devastation. That's why you're here tonight anyway isn't it? To read someone else's story about loss, to just for a minute immerse yourself in their shoes, to realize that no matter how bleak your own loss might feel, you're not alone. Someone else has been here too.
It took me a long time to find the other side of grief. And I'm sure that one day I'll find myself back in the world of the grieving, my chest heavy, the world a slow, quiet place. But for now, I'm on the other side. The story of how I got here isn't a short one and it certainly isn't an easy one, but for those of you who have lost someone you loved, it's a familiar one.
My father was the first to find out: prostate cancer, common in men his age and highly treatable. As the date for his surgery neared my mother pulled her tanned arms around her abdomen, complaining of stomach pain. An ulcer brought on by the stress of my father's illness? The doctors shook their heads. Colon cancer, stage four. While my father underwent radiation treatment and successfully entered into a decade's worth of remission, my mother went on to spend the next five years in and out of hospitals, always leaving behind some part of herself, four feet of her colon here, both of her ovaries there.
I curled myself into a corner of the hospital room, knees pulled to my chest, a book between my hands. I was an only child, long used to spending hours alone, to turning to myself for solace. My mother didn't want to talk about her cancer. She couldn't; she was too afraid. During brief bouts of remission she immersed herself in alternative therapies, taking macrobiotic cooking lessons, buying shark cartilage capsules and making half-hearted attempts at journaling. And so I did the same; turning to books and boys was easier anyway.
But in the end, when she was at her worst, after the doctors told her that she should go home, that she should be on hospice, that there was nothing more they could do, after she defied them by seeking out one last experimental surgery that would just ravage her wasted body even further, we simply ran out of time. My mother and I never really got to talk about the fact that she was dying. I was eighteen when she died one cold January night in 1997. I had been at college, beginning the second half of my freshman year when my father called to tell me that she was almost gone. I was on my way to her when she took her last breath.
In the years following that night, I moved to New York City. I made my best attempts to stay afloat in my world of grief and regret. But it wasn't easy. I disappeared into a cloying relationship with a man who also had his own dark past. I learned how to regularly drown myself in alcohol and some days I just wandered the streets of Manhattan, trying to understand my life as a motherless daughter. Over and over, I played out the last years of her illness in my head, all the things I wished I'd done differently, the ways I wished I'd showed her how much I loved her. None of it got me anywhere.
Six years after she died my father's cancer came back and I moved to California to be closer to him. Unlike my mother he didn't want to fight to the end and when the doctors recommended hospice, he consented. I took him home then, from the hospital to his little condominium, and I cared for him on my own through the last months of his life. I was twenty-five years old. I stood in the bathroom at night, brushing his dentures for him as he dozed off into a morphine-induced sleep and I wondered why my life had turned out this way.
But unlike the experience with my mother, my father and I spent long hours together, holding hands in the late afternoon gloom of his bedroom, saying all the things we needed and wanted to say to each other. When he died I was there, still holding his hand. He'd been unconscious for two days and I hadn't left his bedside, determined to be with him in those very last moments.
And after he was gone, after he had taken his last breath and exhaled it, after I had finally released his hand from both of mine, I backed away from his bed and walked out onto the patio. It was just after seven o’clock in the evening and the sun’s light still shimmered over the rooftops. It was a warm night—the neighbor kids were playing in the pool—and the palm fronds whispered in the breeze.
My father was dead.
I remember this feeling—this vast empty feeling at my back—as if, were I to turn around there would be nothing there to see, just space, infinity, blindness. I felt utterly still inside. The thing was done. My parents were dead.
After he died I moved into a tiny apartment by the beach, living alone for the first time in my life, and I sank into a deep depression. My life felt meaningless, my connection to the world worthless and inconsequential. I knew no one my age who had been through anything like what I had gone through and I watched my friends enviously as they went about their lives, entering into new careers, meeting their future spouses and even becoming parents themselves.
For a long time I was caught up in my own world of hurt and grief. I was selfish and angry, resentful of the things that had happened to my small family and jealous of those who went about their lives, seemingly untouched by pain and tragedy. Sometime in the first year after my father died a good friend persuaded me to go to counseling. As I write this, I’ve been working as a therapist for almost three years. And now that I’ve done this work myself, I have such a different understanding of what the process is all about. There is this initial unpacking of a person that goes on, this taking out of all the things you had so carefully tucked away, the painful memories and the shame and the sadness—all these things that you had to find a place for so that you could manage to go about your days.
My unpacking process proved incredibly painful. I’d been tucking things away for years, finding little hidden corners inside myself in which to store all those gently dripping IVs and dentures, the little box containing my mother’s hair that fell out from chemo, and the sight of my father’s hands drained of blood. In therapy, I laid all these things out on the floor around me. I continued to unpack and unpack myself until I could bear it no more. I went home from my twice-weekly sessions and curled into a corner of the couch, drained and exhausted by my life and my past. For years, I’d pushed these things away. I think it was the only way I was able to keep going. But finally, sitting there in the midst of it all, I couldn’t even move.
But eventually I began to repack myself. Some things I discarded altogether, others I put away in new places that made more sense to the person I wished to become. As I moved through this process I began to create new space inside myself, room to give and room to love. I began volunteering with under-privileged children and then with the homeless and eventually I went back to school to earn a master's degree in psychology so that I could become a therapist myself, helping others move through similar tough life transitions.
Now, six years after that summer that I spent caring for my father, I feel like a different person altogether. When I sit at the head of a table, in the opening session of a grief group that I am leading, I look out at the faces looking back at me and recognize in them a common humanity; they are walking a path that we all will eventually. And I see grief now, not as the dark painful shadow I once did, but as simple evidence of how much we are capable of loving one another.