Author’s note: Every week for the past month, I have been receiving a polite, kind, and respectful reminder from Taty to please write my yearly “gratitude blog.” Requiring Taty to send twenty reminders has become a favorite holiday tradition of mine. I have always appreciated the genuine kindness with which she nudges me for the twenty-first time because I am certain I would not be able to summon the same degree of patience.
I recently read a poll that asked people how often they think about death and dying, and I was fairly astonished at the results. The overwhelming majority of people seem to seldom think about death at all, while the second-largest cohort thinks about it only occasionally. A small minority, which I fall into, think about it many times a day.
While I completely understand how it could potentially sound morbid, I would argue that an ever-present awareness of our own mortality opens the door to a genuine appreciation for life and the people, animals, and experiences in it. Thinking about death in this way can inspire wisdom in us and often help us get our priorities straight. It allows for a “memento mori” approach to help us live more fully. An awareness of our mortality, when embraced correctly, brings the preciousness of life into sharp focus.
The truth is that I simply haven’t known what I want to write about, and I certainly didn’t want to be redundant. In my last blog, I wrote about my childhood dog, Tank, who suddenly and unexpectedly passed away when I was ten years old. His untimely death was pivotal in shaping my perspective on life. Losing him taught me about impermanence and our tenuous grasp on life. He was my best friend, and at the time, I felt overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. Over time, my grief was replaced by fond memories and a genuine appreciation of our short time together.
As we age, we experience loss with increasing velocity. We transition from one stage of life to another, often losing friends and the familiarity of old places and things in the process. Romantic relationships end, careers change, and we trade old friendships for new ones. It’s normal to grieve when we move from one chapter of our lives to the next, especially when turning the page means saying goodbye to cherished relationships.
Grieving the end of a relationship, especially a romantic one, in which the other person is still alive is markedly different from mourning the death of a friend or loved one. When, for example, romantic relationships end, we tend to grieve for ourselves while mourning our own loss; after all, the other person in the relationship is still alive somewhere, potentially doing even better than they were when they were with us.
Mourning tends to take a very different shape when a friend or loved one dies, however. It becomes a much more selfless species of grief. Instead of grieving for ourselves, we grieve for them, and everything they have lost and will continue to lose in the future they won’t see.
We mourn all the experiences they will cease to have and the important life events they’ll miss. We notice all their deeds and projects left undone, and we’re simply left with a stark sense of mystery in their sudden disappearance from our lives. Even when you expect it, death always feels sudden.
Last October was when I first noticed how sick my dad was. I had picked him up to take him to lunch at the only Italian restaurant in Conifer, where we had eaten many times before, and became concerned when he didn’t have the energy to walk up the ramp on his own. This event was the canary in the coal mine and the precursor to the countless hospital visits, ER trips, and ICU stays that have permeated the past year of his and my family’s lives. Congestive heart failure, COPD, and chronic anemia secondary to lymphoma were all maladies competing and collaborating in their effort to end his life.
In my most recent appearance on the Easton podcast, I spent some time maligning my father and expressing anger and frustration with our relationship. My dad has always been a difficult man, and my relationship with him has always been complicated. However, in the past year, as he became sicker, he grew more dependent on those around him. The more dependent he became, the angrier, more unruly and more insufferable he was to be around.
My dad had a hard life and a terrible upbringing. I think he always believed his life would somehow get better and that things for him would improve. I think he was angry because he began to recognize it wouldn’t and that he had run out of time. It is easy to spend life waiting to become happy at some point in the future, but when you pay close attention, the future never quite seems to arrive. It is why we must learn to simply be happy instead of waiting to become happy.
As difficult a man as he was, he is the only father I will ever have, and I loved him with all my heart. I don’t remember exactly what negative things I said on that podcast or in the countless discussions I’ve had with friends about him (some of whom are probably reading this blog), but I regret saying any of it. I was frustrated and exhausted and I wish I had been able to maintain my composure, but alas, I didn’t. It’s important to me that everyone who listened to that podcast and everyone to whom I may have spoken pejoratively about him during one of my episodes of venting know that I loved him with everything I had. I think they already do, but I need to say it. I know he always did the best he could.
My dad died yesterday morning. For the past six weeks, he had been bouncing from one hospital to the next, receiving countless blood transfusions, iron infusions, injections, and other invasive medical procedures. He didn’t want to die, and he fought hard to cling to life, opting to do everything we could to extend his time on earth.
For me, knowing how scared he was and how much he wasn’t ready to die was one of the hardest aspects of this experience. I wish he could have made peace with the fact that he was dying, and maybe he did — maybe that’s when he finally let go. On Friday night, the hospital finally discharged him, and he was able to go home for the first time in almost two full months. He saw his dogs again, my mom made him a dinner that he enjoyed, and he went to sleep in his own bed for the last time.
Losing a parent or a loved one is a life event all of us will experience; many of you reading this, I am sure, already have. In fact, the longer you live, the more people you are sure to lose. The somber phone call notifying you of the passing of a loved one, the unfavorable diagnosis, the routine doctor’s visit that changes the course of your life or the life of someone you love; these realities come for all of us. Don’t you know it’s coming?
As the first Thanksgiving without my dad approaches, I have a few requests for all of you this holiday season: connect with your life and those around you, now. Be good and kind to your neighbors, now. Do that important thing you’ve been meaning to do, now. Relinquish your regrets, now. Say you’re sorry, now. Forgive yourself and others, now. Bury the hatchet, now. Tell the people you love that you love them, now.
For me and for my family, all that is left for us to do now – is miss him.
