Tag Archives: Grief

Six years.

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I’ve been feeling “off” for about a week. As if something were approaching, or something I’d forgotten was supposed to happen.

I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I tried to experience it differently. I wanted to actually feel whatever emotion was being brought up, instead of stuffing it down with work, TV, food, Facebook, etc.

Feelings can be scary, for sure. They don’t seem safe. They never were when I was a child. I can’t tell you how many times I was told, “You’re not a nice girl,” when I would display any emotion other than happiness. I was not allowed to have any of those big feelings. They were too scary for other people. So, I would compartmentalize, not feel, eat, and do anything not to feel. Became the shell of a person I would remain for many years.

Imagine my surprise when I remembered that today is the 6th anniversary of my father’s death. No wonder I’ve been so squirrely. No wonder I’ve been off my game for a while.

And now, a whole host of other feelings come up – guilt (for not being more upset), doubt (has it really been six years?), resignation (yes, really gone, yes, never coming back). I know that there’s some residual anger in there too. Grief is SO complex. You can’t feel one thing without feeling something else too.

I guess it does get a little easier each year. It’s not because I don’t love him anymore, or have forgotten about him. It’s because the grief is not so fresh. It’s still sad. But I’ve been living for six years since – had time to work on it, express it, feel it. And by feeling all of those huge emotions, I’ve gotten through it. Gotten to the other side. Accepted it. That is the natural course of things. We are supposed to feel, to love, so that we can KEEP feeling, and loving. Stopping that is unnatural. We dam up the energy, the vibrations, the spirit and soul of being human.

I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to feel it, heal it. To be human is to feel. Someone once said to me, “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience – we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” And so, bringing the feelings down from just the “neck and above” to seat them viscerally, expands their strength exponentially. These bodies. They are incredibly beautiful with the immediacy and depth of their feelings.

Once I was able to see that feelings couldn’t kill me (although sometimes it FELT like they would), and that the sooner I really felt and dealt, the sooner I got to being better, feeling it became a habit. Almost like doing a fourth step – where you feel so clean afterwards, you don’t want to do anything to mark it up again. I don’t want to dam up the feelings again and hurt myself in the process.

Dad, I love you so much. I miss you terribly. There’s so much I want to share with you. I thank you for everything you gave me. For everything I became because of you, and in spite of you. You were human, and flawed (as we all are), but you were amazing. You are so loved. You are so missed.

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change

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As hard as we try not to change, we are doing so every minute, every second of our lives here on the planet.  Trying NOT to change is the worst feeling in the world.  Change is natural.  It might as well be a synonym to evolution (oh wait, it is).

This is a picture of my hometown.   Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  Coming up Connors Road, past the Muttart Conservatory, toward Strathearn and Bonnie Doon.

It’s in my rear view through a mirror, because Edmonton is forever changed for me now.  This picture was taken in September 2012.  I was home visiting my parents, the third such trip that year, because I was worried sick about my Dad.  It’s the last time I saw him.

Edmonton is a great city.  It was an amazing place to grow up – safe, comfortable, expanding, a little hick, a little slick. Living there requires a certain inner strength – particularly to get through the winters.

That last trip there, I borrowed my Dad’s Chrysler and filled up the tank, and just drove.  I remembered all the places I used to drive with him – Jasper Ave. to pick up my Mum after work; 17th Street where he worked; 109th Street where Grama used to live; my sister from the CN tower, where she worked.  I’d go everywhere with him. He had a little bit of the Traveler in him, and thank God I inherited it.

Dad taught me to drive – again in a Chrysler, this time a burgundy LeBaron – after getting me set up with Driver Training the summer I turned 16, I would be anxious to go with him, and this time get behind the wheel.  Dad was an assertive driver – some would say otherwise, in not so nice terms, but I am forever grateful to him for helping me with learning the privilege of driving. And learning how to do it well.  In thirty years of driving I’ve had two infractions – one for pulling a u-turn trying to get out of traffic on the way to my Dr’s office when I miscarried and was bleeding so badly I had to be hospitalized; the other, driving my husband’s car, and being behind a jerk who was texting and talking on his phone, and when I briefly honked to get him to go (as the light had been green for a few seconds), he went, then stopped short again, and not knowing this car as well as my own, I slammed on the brakes but couldn’t stop, and barely tapped his bumper (even though he harangued me and was verbally abusive, and got a whole new bumper and paint job out of it).

Lots of people are intimidated in the car with me.  I do admit, I’ve had some anger issues, and swore a lot, and maneuvered my Mazda as if it were a Porsche, but I don’t think I was ever reckless. I’ve been in cars with drivers who are worse – not confident, unsure, so scared of getting into an accident that they’re actually a liability on the road – and I’d rather be a passenger with my Dad.  I don’t think I was ever frightened when he drove.

Anyway, I got in Dad’s car, and I eased onto the roads I had once known like the back of my hand.  Edmonton is a growing city, and the vast open fields and spaces, on the roads into it, from my childhood were virtually non-existent anymore.  Yes, it was from growth, but also a little from that weird realization that everything was bigger, farther away, took longer to get to, as a child.  I remember my Western Civ teacher telling us the one way to really realize how much time had passed and how we’d grown was to reach for the doorknobs in our childhood home.  That perspective of eye level triggering memories was the harbinger of seeing how old you were.

So, with the car as my eye and the rest of the city as my doorknobs, I set out to see how much I’d grown. And how much it had changed; but mostly, how much I had changed.

The trees were so much taller.  I’d been around when a lot of them were being planted, slim trunks roped to iron bars to help keep them upright – now towering above me and their canopies full and lush.

The Walterdale bridge, close to the river and the water plant, still hummed as your tires went across it, but it was much quicker than I remembered.

The High Level Bridge, by the Legislative grounds, sucked the car in to its narrow two-lane tunnel, and dumped me out right where I had my first kiss from the man I went to Boston for – the High Level Diner. Wistfulness and sentiment washed over me.  I turned east onto Whyte Ave., and had to pull over.  The tears were streaming down my cheeks.  On my left was Gordon Price music – a favorite hangout of mine while at Grant MacEwan in the Theatre Program – I would spend many a Saturday afternoon flipping through sheet music there.

It’s also the last place I saw my Grama.  We had spent the morning together, shopping, doing errands for her.  I told her I wanted to go to the music store and look around, and would she mind waiting?  She said, no, you go on, I’m close enough to home, I will just walk back.  I didn’t want her to, but she insisted.  So I hugged her tightly and gave her a little kiss, and went off to search the aisles.  A few minutes later, I saw her, putting her face up to the plate glass front window, her hand shielding her eyes so she could see in, and I waved to her.  She saw me, waved, and smiled that wonderful smile she had, and blew a kiss, and walked with her little boots and mink coat, home.

If I had known…

How many times do we have to say that to ourselves before we learn?  Before we say “I love you” so they know. Before we look one last glance at them so we’ll remember them.

So that’s it.  Edmonton’s changed.  I’ve changed. Life’s changed.  It’s forever colored with the memories of all these lasts.  Yes, there were a lot of firsts, too, which I do remember, but it’s the lasts that are breaking my heart, that have so much of me tied there.  When did it change to that?  From the place of all my firsts, now just a place of my lasts?  It’s painful. Maybe that will change too.

Grief’s Tentacles

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No matter how prepared you are for it, Grief hits you like the blast of a furnace door opened in the middle of a snowstorm.  That difference in temperature is a shock, an uncomfortableness that prickles your skin and nauseates.  You’re constantly trying to catch up, get on an even keel, regain your footing.  And it doesn’t come.  Even someone who has been languishing between worlds for months, years, who abused you or beat you, or conversely, who adored you and thought you walked on water – when they go, when it happens, you’re different.  Immediately.  Nothing is ever the same again.  It becomes a watershed moment where everything is then measured against it – post-Loved-One.  It leaves these waves, tsunamis, actually,  that come at the most unlikely and unwelcome times.  Sometimes it’s a vise grip on your heart that wrenches brutal wracking sobs that have no sound, they just make your body heave, that awkward keening, and the tears pop out of your eyes so hard they splash feet ahead of you; sometimes it’s a feather, tickling the bottom of your heart with poignancy and softness, causing whimpers and mews, and sometimes, most of the time, it’s a stone, heavy with loss and darkness, sitting on your chest, weighing you down like a millstone on your soul, threatening to hurtle you into the chasm; that abyss of nothing – no light, no feeling, no sound.

It is useless saying to siblings or other family members that you know what they’re feeling.  They don’t know what you’re feeling either.  Empathy is just a word we use to keep connected to one another.  We may have experience with the circumstance, but it is completely different to each who goes through it.  We each meant something different to the person that was lost, we each had a different relationship to them.  That’s the curse (and sometimes the blessing) of being human – we never ever truly know exactly what another human being is thinking.  We just can’t.  We can’t crawl up into that consciousness and think their thoughts.  Even people who say they are telepathic – reading another person’s mind doesn’t give you any more insight to who they are – it’s just the words they haven’t spoken.  Their soul, their spirit, is as private as the darkness.  So when that soul, that spirit, exits this plane, it’s that light, that anima, if you will, that we miss.  This is one of the reasons I wasn’t afraid to see my father after he was gone.  I knew that it wasn’t him anymore.  I knew the thing that made him, him, was gone. What was left was just his shell, his husk, his house where he lived for 75 years, 5 months and 24 days.  I would have been more disturbed had he actually looked like I remembered – then I would have known it was a mistake.  As I touched him, his hands were cold, they didn’t reach for mine, his skin didn’t react when I touched it.  He was gone.

The friends that I have through my program have taught me so much.  One of them lost her mother and her brother within a year of each other.  The first was expected, the other, tragically.  She spoke of the privilege of being in the room with her mom when she passed.  To see the whole family gathered beside her, sending her love, knowing that her journey elsewhere was about to begin, and not be sad about it.  To witness the human being who had given birth to them, take her last breath, and to be grateful for that awesome gift.

Stupidly, I was hoping for something like that when Dad passed.  I wanted to be there, but I know now that it was OK that I wasn’t.  My niece whispered a message to him that I was on my way, and to please wait, but he couldn’t.  He was tired, and I knew that.  My mom and my sister were there when he went.  I am grateful they were there, so that he wasn’t alone, and that it was peaceful.

I used to be so afraid of death – like it was some sneaky bastard watching me and counting the minutes till I was his.  (There’s a Mr. Death at the door – oh, it was the Salmon Mousse? I’m FRIGHTFULLY embarrassed!) I used to be afraid of succeeding, or being too happy, or loving too much – because I was sure that Death was waiting to spring like a cat and devour me.  So I stay just in the middle – not too happy, not too successful, not loving too much – just enough.  Enough to be alive but not really to live, not to suck the marrow out of life and feel accomplishment and satisfaction that the day ended well.  There’s always something I could have done better, someone I could have loved more, some task I could have tried harder at.  I foolishly thought that Death would come later for those who don’t expect too much out of life, don’t live, don’t take risks, just survive.  The people who enjoy their lives always get cut short, in my world.

I remember this so vividly, like it was yesterday – in Grade 8 religion class, being with these kids I’d been with since kindergarten, who already thought I was weird, a freak – our teacher asked us, “when would you like to die? When you’re young, after your prime, or old age?” Every single person in that room, save myself, answered, “Old age.” When the teacher asked me what I said, and I replied, “after my prime” the room erupted in derisive laughter.  After he quieted the class, he asked me why, and I said, “I would rather die after my prime than sit thinking about yesterday as an old woman.  And besides, I could not hit my prime till I’m 80!”  Yup.  Definite weirdo.

Program has helped me become OK with Death.  Sometimes it’s tragic, sometimes it’s wistful, but always, always – it’s inevitable.  It’s what you do with the days in between birth and stepping off the curb in front of that bus that are important.  Cleaning up the wreckage of my past and continuing to try to keep my side of the street clean helps not have that fear.  I didn’t feel any remorse or pain that I didn’t get to say what I needed to say to my dad before he went.  I had already said it.  He knew me, warts and all.  He fathered me.  He gave me my love of traveling, of meeting people and conversing with strangers (in other words, friends I hadn’t met yet). There were probably many more things we could have talked about, and I wish that there had been that time.  There wasn’t.  That’s the thing I most regret.  I wish for more time.