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Like many, my life has been affected by multiple deaths; each one brings its own heartaches and lessons.
When I signed up to do this week’s Grieving Room diary, I thought I’d be writing about just one of them. But as the closer I’ve come to my assigned day, the more I realized I can’t write about one without writing about the others. And I can’t write about these four deaths without talking a bit about how the grieving process was different for each, and the impressions their deaths have left on me.
The first of these deaths is that of my father, Richard Carlton Debus, on December 17, 1984. I was just 20, a college junior, and Dad’s death, just 5 days shy of his 61st birthday, was an incredible shock. I knew I’d lose my parents a bit earlier than most people my age – my parents were 40 when I was born. But I never expected it so soon. My much older brother and sister (13 and 15 years older) lost a father, a friend, and a mentor. Their relationship with him helped shaped their adult lives. Dad was there when my sister decided to go into teaching and needed advice on contracts. Dad was there when my brother decided to build a house nearby and needed advice on contractors. Dad was there when my nephew and niece were born, and he was there to watch his adult children come into their own.
I sadly didn’t get that chance. I lost a daddy, and more than that, I lost the chance for him to become a friend and mentor. I sometimes turn to my siblings and ask ‘what would Dad have thought of this’ – longing for a sense of the man who would have advised his third adult child. I grieved for Dad the way a child grieves, and 24 years later, I’m left with a longing.
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Contrast that with the death of my mother, Miriam Fielding Debus, just a year ago, on November 21. Mom was 83 when she died. She got to see her grandchildren grow up and blossom in their adulthood. She stood by all of us during incredibly difficult times – my brother’s divorce, my sister’s bout with serious illness, my own nervous breakdown. She lived a full life, enjoying friends and family, doing things she wanted to do, traveling to places she’d always longed to see. Even in her last years, when her health was declining, her mind was sharp as ever, and caring for her in those last years was as full of her friendship and sound counsel as it had been.
I miss my mom – and my siblings and I joke often, when we start to do something she’d have quarrel with (like not lining up the marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes), we know she’d come from ‘the other side’ and give us a smack on the head. We hear her voice when we sing songs she loved. We feel her arms around us when we slip on her old sweaters. What I’m left with is not longing, but almost satisfaction, that she is living on in us, the way she wanted to live.
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Grief doesn’t always have easy closures, however. Some deaths take ages to get past, if you do get past them at all. And the impressions left are indelible, like the charred corner of a burned-down barn. This third loss is that of my life partner Tricia Marie Goebel, who died suddenly at age 37 on April 7, 1998.
Tricia was life itself. She lived life large and took big bites. She was a woman of enormous appetites and energy, and when she loved, she loved fiercely. There was no question Tricia was "the one" – we were a perfect match intellectually, physically, emotionally. We had complimentary skills in performance. We used our varied skills as activists in the Raleigh/Durham GLBT community – our kiss at the 1997 pride march in Carrboro was splashed across several newspapers' front pages. But with her large appetites for life came her penchant for addiction, and although her death was truly accidental – a heart attack – I have come in recent years to understand that her addiction weakened her system and may have been a contributing factor.
I spent the first year in utter shock, the next two trying to ignore the well of emptiness, and the next five angry at her, at the drugs, at myself. In the last two years, I’ve stopped being angry but am left with this impression that I am never going to be quite whole again. There is a gnawing emptiness to this day that activities, friends, and even other relationships cannot fill. It’s been over ten years and there are still days when her death feels like it just happened. I have yet to find closure, yet to find a way to fill this hole inside.
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The last of the four losses seems on one hand almost superfluous – it involves someone I never knew in a situation I could never have imagined. And yet this death too has had an impact on me, and certainly on how I view the fragility of existence.
The story starts on September 14, 2006, with my leaving the Unitarian Universalist church late one evening after a rehearsal and an ad hoc counseling session with my minister. It was the typical ‘dark and stormy night,’ and the road I was traveling was notorious for lack of lighting. I was going slowly because it was so dark and rainy, but it wasn’t enough. In a flash, I saw something black in front of me, then felt multiple impacts in front of and on my car. I stopped, I screamed for what felt like five minutes, then called the police. Others stopped as well – two went to tend to the pedestrian I’d hit, one came to me and made sure I was okay. Within minutes, emergency services were there; I was questioned in the detective’s car, where my minister joined me to lend support. Right from the start, there was no question it was an accident; a witness confirmed that a person dressed head-to-toe in black ran in front of my car and that I was not speeding or driving recklessly. I agreed to let them test my blood alcohol and found myself in the ER with a group of rather supportive officers, my sister, and my minister. Remarkably, the man did not die at the scene, but at the hospital an hour or so later. I went home, shaken, assured there would be no charges, but shaken nonetheless. For I had taken a life.
It took nearly a week for police to identify the man as Michael Thompson, a 43-year old Gulf War vet who had been homeless and battling alcoholism for the last five years. It was, in fact, not until the Albany Times-Union, with the support of their readership, published the morgue photo of him that he was identified by family in a nearby town. It was so strange to live that week, not knowing who he was or how he happened to be running in front of my car that night. Was it vehicular suicide? A drunken stumble? We may never know. I do know that the only way I could deal with the fact that I was driving the car that killed him was to take, oddly enough, a page from Family Guy. In an early episode, Death comes to visit but sprains his ankle and must rest on the Griffin family’s couch to let it heal. He makes Peter become Death in his place – because the world needs to be secure in the fact that death still exists – and so he goes out and carries out Death’s job. I cannot say whether Michael’s death was an accident or a suicide; I can only say that Death needed help that night, and for a moment, I was his instrument. That any of us – even the purest of heart among us – can cause someone’s death reminds me how frail and tender is life, how necessary and cyclical is death.
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There is one last impression all four of these deaths has left on me – and that is the social justice aspect. For my father, it’s about health education; my father died because he didn’t take care of himself. For my mother, it’s about care for the elderly; she was lucky that she had her kids, but many of the elderly do not have people to advocate for them with doctors and financial institutions and other places where they can often fall prey. For Tricia, it’s a constant battle for effective recovery programs and for marriage equality. And for Michael, it’s about care for our veterans, making sure they’re not adrift, stumbling in the dark, looking for a moment of peace.
Peace.
Thank you for reading.