( From exmearden's diary)
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.
This link will take you to past editions of The Grieving Room: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Here is the schedule for upcoming weeks:
August 4 - filled by AJsDad
August 11 - filled by Dem in the Heart of Texas
August 18 - filled by bigjacbigjacbigjac (bigjac - please confirm!)
August 25 - OPEN
September 1 - OPEN
September 8 - OPEN
September 15 - filled by NewDirectionsMom
Please contact smnytx at yahoo.com to volunteer to host an upcoming week, or respond in this diary.
When comforting friends or family after the death of a loved one, I've often said that it never really gets better. It just changes over time, the way you will change; the way your perceptions and understandings change; the way your memory of people, place and things will change.
Today would have been my mother's 84th birthday. Once again, I'll be celebrating it in my mind. She died after a battle with colon cancer 24 years ago just a few moments past New Year's Day. An awful, cold,wretched, painful, exhausting, mind-numbing day that had been preceded by an entirely sleepless night that I spent in a living room chair I had always teased her for buying. I told her the chair was too "grown up" for our family, that we needed something to slouch in. She smiled and told me that was ok, I was a grown woman, recently married, and I could have whatever chair I wanted for my living room, she'd keep this Queen Anne chair covered in cream fabric, thank you very much.
My life - and that of my sister, younger by 4 years - was punctuated by an unspeakable grief early on when our father died at age 46 of a second major coronary. Our beautiful, elegant, witty mother was widowed at 44 and left to raise a 12 year old and 8 year old on her own. I don't know how she coped, or even survived her loss. My memory is refreshed by finding a photo of her in mourning - thin beyond measure, sunken eyed, conveying the loss of the an she loved and married at 19 and with whom she began a life's adventure. First, she was a Navy bride, the wife of a naval lieutenant. My father, a brilliant, eloquent engineer, began a career in public service by becoming an early expert in radar. He put his skill and knowledge to work by safeguarding America's east coast airports through his work in the higher echelons of the Federal Aviation Administration.
They, like so many others of that Greatest Generation, wanted to build a family and move to suburbia. So it was that after almost 13 years of marriage, at the then relatively advanced maternal age of 32 (I am now 53), she gave birth to me, and four years later, to my sister. I look through my photographs and see the joy and pride they took in each of us - my mother, a talented seamstress, fashioning the latest styles for her two girls, and my father, proudly holding our hands, posed under our front lawn's majestic tree, all of us smiling for the camera. Every Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), there is a photo - of course, there are many in between as well, charting our growth, charm and talents - along with an unspoken wish for a Happy, Healthy New Year for us all.
He died suddenly at 46, of a major heart attack brought on by air travel in behalf of the government he served - in an unpressurized plane, at too high an altitude for him, he who had somehow survived an earlier massive coronary. He died in his sleep, aboard a plane returning from what was called then a "Civil Defense Drill". In going through a box of old papers last year, I found his trip expenses, recorded on Holiday Inn stationery. It had been in his inner suit pocket that day, that day when oxygen failed him. The expenses, neatly itemized, never filed. Two of his colleagues came to our door to bring the news, at first attempting, in their kindness, to soften the blow by saying he was in the hospital. One look at them told the whole story. My mother wailed an unearthly cry. I remember what I was wearing but little else of that day when as a family, our lives changed forever. We buried him in the Chevre Kadisha's plot (a Jewish burial society, commonly organized in the past by immigrants of a particular town or city) near my grandparents, whom he had loved and who loved him. We wore black ribbons, we said Kaddish (The Mourners' Prayer), we sat shiva (the traditional seven days of mourning) visited by family, neighbors and friends.
And we went on living. Not the same life, a changed life. My mother was desperately sad for many years. My sister and I - well, I will speak from my experience. I felt strange, like an outcast. I was painfully aware that everyone else had two parents - long before the explosion of single parent families - and that I did not. There was no one to help with my math and science, no one to take me shopping and embarrass me by singing or humming loudly, or to be proud of his oldest girl as she grew into young womanhood. He is frozen in my mind at 46: I cannot imagine him aging, infirm, losing his immeasurable intellectual abilities. In a way, he died whole - but we were left as three-quarters of what we had been.
We grew up in our aynagogue with our lives punctuated by the rhythm of the Jewish and academic calendars, and the years made his death and absence a little duller, like a knife becomes dull after much use. Our grief was periodically sharpened by his yahrzeit (date of death marked again by Kaddish and the lighting of a candle), or attending a family simcha (a joyous occasion) like a wedding, bar or bat mitzvah, or gathering. My own bat mitzvah took place a little more than a year after his death. I stood so proudly on the bimah (the raised platform from which the service is conducted and the Torah is read) and looked out at family and friends who had been with us on this journey. They were all crying - in some cases sobbing - partly out of joy (I come from the criers, as they say) but also out of the great sadness that he was not there to share this moment with us. The pain had eased, morphed, changed some four years later as we proudly watched my sister become a Bat Mitzvah. But as I said before, it only changed - it had not gone away.
Happily, my mother grew to love again, and our stepfather filled her life with companionship and happiness for many years. We loved him for doing that, and for being a friend to us. We all remembered my father, honored his memory and kept him in our hearts.
I went to college, then grad school, then a first job at which point I met the man who was to become my husband. My mother loved him - she said she knew he was right for me because he woke up each day, eyes twinkling. She also somehow divined that at last, I had found the person who would "let me be me"- the good, the bad and the almost ugly. She called him her darling son-in-law and he returned the adoration. My sister finished school and began her professional practice.
And then, it changed. My mother's greatest fears were realized: she had been diagnosed, as was her mother, who died before the age of 60, with colon cancer. And it was a late diagnosis, delayed because of her fear. And it was a bad, very bad diagnosis. My heart stopped when she had my stepfather tell me. She couldn't bring herself to say those terrifying words. She endured the surgery and a brief chemo stint, and then said, no more.
She let me bathe her for the first time since her surgery. She hadn't wanted me to see the scar. I said, "Mommy, it is so much smaller than I expected." She told me she hadn't wanted to frighten me. Then at that moment, when I was 29 and married less than three years, she asked for the first and only time whether we wanted chidren. I told her that we didn't think so. She looked at me and said with as much strength as she could muster,"Not even one little baby for me?"
My beautiful mother, whose voice I hear in my mind today at every turn, first lost her ability to speak as the cancer spread to her liver and brain. It was unbearable, knowing that she was there and couldn't express herself. She couldn't be funny, angry, sad. She could hear us, thought. We told her at every chance we loved her and we wanted her to get better. But it only got worse. She lost her ability to walk and was bedridden. She was stuck inside a body that was failing her, part by part.
We lived 25 mies away at the time. My sister had moved home. I was there at every opportunity. I cooked every possible combination of chicken, veal, chopped meat - things I had never cooked before - to provide meals for the freezer. Her closest friend did me the greatest kindness by telling me that my food probably kept her alive a bit longer. We stayed for several days between Christmas and New Years Day in 1983/84.
Then, there was that night. It was clear to us that death would come soon. We tried to nap in those damn, uncomfortable, formal chairs she had so wanted and I thought just weren't "us" . She rallied a bit. I went to her bedside and held her hand. I told her we were going home to pick up fresh clothes. I told her I loved her. And then, then I told her it was okay to let go. Not to fight it anymore. Not to start another year of pain and suffering, trapped in a body that was no longer hers.I love you Mommy, I told her. You can just let go.
We drove home in exhausted silence. Mysister called a few hours later and told us we needed to hurry, that she was being taken to the hospital because she was having trouble breathing. We threw our things together and began a race against time. This was 1984, before cell phones. We raced to the hospital where we thought she was - she was not there. I called the house and mys sister told me tojust come home.
We drove down the street of my childhood home - the only home we had ever lived in - and we saw a police car parked across the street. We knew. We knew. We had discussed this many times because my mother wanted to die at home and not in a hospital, but we knew that the police would come and would question all of us. We also knew we had nothing to hide or fear.
I walked through the door and my sister said "You have to say it. Say 'Baruch Dayan Emet'" -Blessed be the true judge, the words a Jew utters when hearing of a death. God, the unknowable, the Merciful One, had relieved her of her suffering, of her failing body and silent voice, of her legs which could not be made to walk. Baruch Dayan Emet.
Jewish custom and Jewish law map out caring for a dead body with respect, burial, mourning and recovery. Because it instructs us to treat a dead person with as much respect as the living, the person is never left alone. My husband sat with my mother as we answered the police officer's questions, and we watched as the funeral home's gurney took her from the only home we had ever lived in as a family.We instructed them, as is the custom, to engage someone to sit with er reciting Psalms through the night. We followed her written instructions, reminding us that she wanted a plain pine coffin with no nails, only dowels and burial in a shroud. Hundreds of people came to her funeral. Hundreds of people passed through our home to comfort us and share their memories of our mother as we sat shiva. It was exhausting, but it was a demonstration of how much her community respected her for the life she lived and created for us.
All this, 24 years ago. This is the first time I have written it all down.It has been in my head all this time. Her voice, her ethical stands, her love of Jewish life and ritual stay in my head. I have tried to live these 24 years with these things as my roadmap. They have fashioned my professional life, my commitment to social justice, my marriage, my home.
Happy birthday, Mommy. You are the proud grandmother of three beautiful, smart, sassy girls, and one of them is mine. Two are named for you, as is our tradition. You live on and on. And so does that chair, now burgundy, and in our office/den/fishroom.
My grief has changed over time, as have I. It isn't as raw or as overwhelming. Mostly it surfaces when I wish she could have been with us to share a moment,or at a holiday when we gather around a table. It does not feel as primal. May her memory be for a blessing.