Tag: grief

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The Beacon of Light in Grieving my Father

I found myself at the Vancouver airport early in the morning on June 15, 2017. As I hustled through security, waited at the boarding gate, and tried to sleep on the flight, I kept my sunglasses on to hide my tears. I made it back to my apartment in Calgary by noon. It was messy and cluttered with half-packed moving boxes, and standing in the middle of the chaos, a new wave of emotions washed over me, causing overwhelm on top of the heavy grief my heart felt. My father had passed away the night before from cancer and I had been in Vancouver to spend time with him and be with my family in his very last days. Now, I was here, by myself, my life feeling like it was all out of sorts.   

The timing was not great; it hadn’t even been 24 hours since my father had officially been pronounced no longer alive, and I had already left my family behind so I could finish packing my things and move to Edmonton for a new job that started in a few days. Onward to a new job in a new city that was fairly unfamiliar to me – I had done this ordeal before. But this was the first time I was packing, moving, and starting fresh without my father’s help or without him being just a phone call away when I eventually ran into a minor hiccup. I wasn’t ready to do this endeavour without him; I wasn’t ready to embrace that the rest of my life was going to unfold and continue without him there. To make matters worse, I didn’t even have my family to console me in person; they were an entire province away. I was about to start the next chapter of my life in an unfamiliar place, and I had never felt so alone.

In his 2017 article titled Researching Grief: Cultural, Relational, and Individual Possibilities, Paul Rosenblatt discusses how “family members are not good at providing grief support for one another”, going on to explain the limited capacity a family might have to support one another after losing a loved one. In just a few weeks after my father had passed, it was evident that my mother and I had different ways of processing our grief and emotions. She seemed less sentimental and more focused on next steps, and I wondered if maybe it was because she had spent so much time in the hospital with my father and therefore felt more prepared for this new reality than I was. The only other family my father and I shared aside from my mom were my half-brother and half-sister, neither of whom I had a close enough relationship to find comfort in. While feeling excruciatingly separated from my family, I found myself in a position where it felt necessary to make good impressions with my new colleagues and potential new friends, while also enjoying the beginning of summer in Alberta. I did my best to suppress any signs that I was sad and have the best time possible as I found myself in the presence of so many people who had never met my dad. The grief felt increasingly substantial for me in almost every moment, but simultaneously didn’t seem applicable in my everyday life. So often, I felt as though I had no other choice but to brave the world and live my life as though everything was fine, waiting until I returned to my apartment alone to grieve.

My strategy of grieving aligned with a theory of bereavement coping methods known as the dual process model. Proposed by psychologists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, the model explains that the way an individual experiences or copes with their grief can ebb and flow between loss-oriented stressors and restoration-oriented stressors; loss-oriented stressors focus on the pain and anguish, while restoration-oriented stressors act as a distraction from the grief and inspiration to restore normality in one’s life despite the loss of a loved one. According to Stroebe and Schut, the restoration-oriented experience is necessary to ensuring people are productively taking care of themselves as life goes on, and that oscillating between the two can help an individual confront the reality of life without their loved one there anymore.

This dual process model is the primary component engaged in designing Good Grief, a program that aims to provide support and coping mechanisms for grieving young people who lost a family member to cancer. Within this program, people move between different activities aligned with the bereavement coping model that also focus on other frameworks including constructivism, self-compassion, and continuing bonds. One of the activities is the Life Imprint session, which is an exercise that encourages grieving participants to learn and remember facets of their loved one through letters written by other family members or friends. Along with reading about their loved one, participants engage in a group session where they reflect on their loss, the connection they shared with their loved one, and recognize opportunities to maintain that connection moving forward. A 2019 evaluation of Life Imprint reported that young people who participated in Good Grief found the program enjoyable and meaningful. Participant testimonials included individuals who said they felt reassured in the relationship they had had with the person who passed away and felt confident in being able to honour their loved one’s legacy while also moving on with their own life.

It was August when we finally decided to host my father’s Celebration of Life. Not knowing who exactly to invite, my mother and I invited everyone we could think of, including my father’s old friends and colleagues from before I was even born and a lot of people who had been my friends throughout grade school. Unexpectedly, many people replied that they would be there, eager to share their condolences in person and their own memories of my father’s kind, friendly, and sometimes oddly funny demeanour. In a small recreational room, catered with small finger sandwiches and sugary cupcakes, all sorts of people young and old exchanged both tales as old as time about a man I’ve never known and classic recollections of the father I had grown up admiring. A man introduced himself as the best man of my parent’s wedding and shared his fondest memories of my father from way back before I was born. Former classmates of mine from elementary school took the time to express how instrumental my father was in helping them learn and understand English, finish their homework, or even just feel valuable and seen as young students when he volunteered as a teacher’s aide in the 90’s. With other lifelong friends and cousins, I reminisced about my father’s seemingly strict parenting styles or his preference for encouraging us to use our imagination for playtime instead of watching TV all day. The entire event was an afternoon spent connecting with friends, family members, former neighbours, and strangers who had loved, valued, and respected my father for so many reasons. They had freed up time in their schedule to attend this event, to honour my father, and to share all the ways he was special. Most importantly, they went out of their way to remind me of all the ways I was an extension of who he was, because of the way I looked, behaved, and moved through the world.

On that day, for the first time since my father had passed away, I finally felt like I could comprehend the heaviness of my loss and the grief with it; the excruciating heartache I had been experiencing felt validated. Up until this point, I had spent so much of my time with people who weren’t able to speak to how significant my loss felt because they didn’t know my father, and I had really started to question the validity of my grief. Learning more, sharing stories, and reflecting on who my father was, instilled confidence in knowing that the loss I felt was big and hard. I also felt reassured that I was not the only one who felt the grand impact of my father’s passing.

Published in the New York Times, a letter titled “My Father Died Young, His Sisters Kept Me from Losing Him Entirely” by Kristen Martin talks about how her aunts have reinforced the existence of Martin’s father through their own stories of him. Martin writes, “One of the hardest parts of my grief has been never getting to have an adult relationship with my parents, that the memories I have of them are finite. But by teaching me new things about him — even silly things like his obsession, toward the end, with fried ham sandwiches — my father’s sisters can open doors to rooms I didn’t know existed. They keep him alive for me.”

I relate to Martin’s experience of qualifying the existence of her parent(s). I was fortunate to have built a relationship with my father up until I was 30 years old, but my experience with him feels limited. There was so much I didn’t know and wanted to learn about him. I’m sure there were stories that we didn’t get a chance to share or bond over. My entire adult life awaits, and I no longer have the patient guidance and advice I had lovingly relied on my father for. In so many moments, I’ve found myself stuck between feeling as though I couldn’t possibly live my life without him and wondering how I could possibly move forward without being afraid of leaving him behind. My biggest fear, even now, continues to be that I and everyone will keep moving on with life and unintentionally forget how my father had somehow influenced the journey to wherever we end up.

It has been six years since my father passed away. I am still living in Edmonton with a circle of friends who never had the pleasure of meeting my father. Often, I continue to grieve alone in my apartment, surrounded by physical reminders of my father including his favourite shirts, a pair of his glasses, his books, and a giant portrait of him hanging in my hallway. On some days, as life propels forward in a myriad of ways, I wonder if I’m the only who is thinking of my father and what life would be like if he was still alive. As I grow and my live evolves, I regularly wish that he could still be a part of it all and catch myself ready to call him, only to remember he won’t be there to pick up the phone and cheer me on.

Writing this has been a reminder that he is a part of my life, still. Validated by my own friends and family, as well as other people who considered my father to be their friend and chosen family, I am a valuable extension of so many of my father’s great qualities; I am kind, unpretentious, and a great writer because my father showed and encouraged me to be so. I also know that I am not the only person who was positively impacted by my father’s personality and behaviours, because I’ve shared sentimental memories and the incredible impression my father had with so many other people.

In what I imagined would be the darkest time of my life, I found a beacon of light through other people; most importantly, my father. Through him, both because he passed away and because of who he was, I connected to a community of people who miss him too and who will help me in keeping his spirit alive. While the grief continues to weave through moments of my life, even very recently, it no longer feels impossible. I may have lost someone I couldn’t imagine my life without, but one day with a group of people reminded that I am not alone in acknowledging his absence and I no longer feel on my own as I navigate the world without him physically here.

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Hard.

I never imagined that it would be this hard.

It, in this case, being writing while simultaneously grieving and trying to move forward after the loss of my father. I have sat here, staring at this blinking cursor on the computer screen for months. A few words into my thoughts, and my attention would wander to memories of Dad.

His presence these days is suffocating.

And if I’m being honest, I sometimes get tired of talking about it him. I feel guilty saying that, since there aren’t that many things in this life I wouldn’t suddenly trade in if it meant bringing him back to real life. But the grief is heavy and tiresome and it just won’t go away. I know why; I get it.

But I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to deal with it.

And it’s just so hard.

Mr. T – he’s everywhere I am.

Some of this is my very own fault. I’ve purposely given him space to hang out and be present all around me. His identifiable plaid shirts hang nicely (to Dad’s standards) in frames along my bedroom wall, saddled with the last two chap-sticks he’d used until his very last days. In my living room, an iconic portrait of him hangs on the wall.

A few books from his personal collection are nestled in the rows of romantic fairy tales, female memoirs and self-help books of my own that Dad would have likely never been interested in. My couch, that just so happens to be perfectly designed for movie nights and cozy naps, was a gift from Dear ol’ Dad; he insisted on buying it for me, which saved me from the cheaply built and likely uncomfortable futon I almost bought from Walmart.

When the “check engine!” light glows upon my dashboard, Dad is the first person I think to call. The same thing for when my oil light beams, but I know he’d likely give me shit – since he once (or several times) tried to teach me the importance of diligently checking my oil and I never listened, and then blew up my engine.
OOPS.

My favourite pair of cold weather boots: Dad bought ’em, when we were in Scotland and I had arrived ill-prepared for the frigid temperatures. That was the only vacation that Dad and I ever took together, just the two of us. And when someone recently reminded me it was tax season, I fell apart at the thought of actually hiring someone to do my taxes for me or the horror of having to do them myself. Dad always took the lead on that one and did them for the whole family.

Then every single time I sit down to write on this laptop: my Dad. He was generous enough to buy me this MacBook, and the two I owned before it.

Welp. It’s no wonder I’m having a hard time getting any writing done.

I’m having a really difficult time embracing the reality of living life without a father.

Sometimes I forget about it, and then I remember. I remember his cold, limp hand in mine as I tried desperately to refrain from blinking in hopes that I wouldn’t miss the moment when he might take one last breath, until my family kindly pulled me out of the hospital room on that final day.

So it’s not that I have nothing to write these days, but it’s seemingly tougher to do with grief latching tightly to me. My thoughts, some of them not even not directly related to my father, keep me up at night. They take up space for much too long, dispersing weight, stress, tension through every channel and area of my body. Eventually, I’m just sort of lost for words and feeling defeated by the heartache that’s engulfed my body. Because I’m human and naturally care what other people think of me to some extent, I’ve put my best face forward as often as possible, to fit in and make good impressions with fairly new faces and “move on” – because, that’s what I’m *supposed* to do, right? (Wrong)

The truth is that I’m just half-decent at pretending that I’m okay and that I’ve sort of got it all figured out; that there’s more good days than bad. It’s been about 8 months since my Dad passed away though and some of my biggest wins are days when I manage to get myself back in bed at the end of the day without tears rolling down my cheeks just thinking about the fact that he’s gone.

Most days, he’s all I think about. At any given moment, I suddenly remember that I can’t email him, hear his voice, see his face in real life or even try to text him on his old T9 texting flip phone – and it’s over.

The grief rushes over me and I’m stuck.

I’ve been paralyzed since the moment I found out my father slipped away. Which is sort of ironic really, since I actually haven’t stopped moving or taken a hot minute to really, truly grieve since I found out he died.

For real.

It was the early evening on Wednesday in June when Mr. T passed away. Before the sun had even started to rise the next morning, I was already standing in the security lineup at the airport waiting to fly back to the city I called “home”, where I needed to finish packing my apartment. By Saturday morning, I had gone out for lunch, dinner and drinks on different occasions with different friends and was all moved into a new apartment in a different city by the Saturday evening. I was back at the airport Monday morning for training and officially started my new job the following Monday. By that point, it had been almost two weeks since Dad had passed. The whole experience was so fresh that it still didn’t feel real, and maybe that made it easy for me to just put my head down and push forward with trying to settle into new digs, new friendships, new relationships, and the every day hustle and grind of life as per usual.

This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced a death of someone close to me. I’ve unfortunately lost both my grandmothers, an uncle, a great-aunt and a few family friends. But, even though I’m aware of the truth that eventually we all die, and that there are occasional circumstance where sometimes the people we love leave this earth sooner than we expected them too, I just let the ugly truth of my father dying one day just slip away and sort of hoped it might just miraculously never happen.

Because, let’s be real: we don’t ever want our heroes to die. My Dad was a HUGE part of my life; he raised me for all the memorable years of my life as a stay-at-home husband, always available father, chaperone for school field trips, someone to converse on the way to and from school, and maker of some mediocre but made-with-love lunches. He never failed to only give me sage advice when I mostly wanted easy answers, and always challenged me to become a better version of the person I thought I should be. No, he was never my best friend – but he believed in me and loved me tremendously in quiet but meaningful gestures.

So as I continue to pass through daily, monthly and yearly milestones without him, I find myself slowing down, pausing, and holding on so tight to the memories and times when I got to share those little moments with him – wishing that he could still be there now, because I’m clueless as to how to proceed alone. I stall indefinitely in those times, my heart clenching tighter around them, leaving no space for potentially new experiences to breathe into existence.

I’m just not ready.

CHANGE. It’s a subject I’ve talked about a lot on this dusty old blog. I’ve also mentioned before that although change is one of life’s few constants, it still remains to be a subject that many, including myself struggle with.

For me, this change is so significant and suffocating. I’m traumatized by grief, and it shows.

It’s sitting in those bags under my eyes and it’s the reason I complain about how tired I feel all.the.time. It’s the main event of the nightmares in my broken sleep at night, and the vivid dreams that continue to cling to me long after I’ve crawled out of bed and ventured into my day. It’s the root of aching pain in my back, carried into my shoulders and pinning them to my ears. It’s the seized up muscles in my neck causing debilitating headaches and the stress that’s encouraged me to clench and grind my teeth.

Almost 8 months since my heart was completely shattered, and there’s a ripple effect surging throughout my body still.

I have been frantically trying to holding the seams of myself together, putting band-aids on gaping wounds. I’ve foolishly tried to pretend that death is “no big deal”, because it’s an inevitable element of life and something we just have to embrace and move forward from. I’ve tried to conceal my sadness with fake smiles and false enthusiasm, good deeds and best friends, hard work, fun adventures, retail therapy, and any other distraction that deters me away from the harsh reality of having to figure out how to live my life without my Dad.

But quick fixes never work. Somewhere in the midst of silence and over-stimulation, I’ve unravelled and fallen apart from the inside, out.

As I write this, I’m trying to watch the words appear on the screen through a waterfall of tears. There is a hole in my heart, in my existence. And similiar to a deflating balloon, everything about life as I once knew it has sort of just diminished. Everything feels different and the littlest things in life just feel torturous.

Including pouring my heart into a blog post.

It took me approximately 3 months to put together the words in this piece. I struggled to make it through single sentences, tears streaming down my face in sadness and frustration.

I lost track of how many times I thought about deleting the whole thing; I didn’t want it to seem like I was throwing a pity party for myself. But as many people have continued to remind me, I’m not crying for attention. I’m crying, sulking, mourning and wondering what the fuck is happening – because that’s a most reasonable reaction to the reality I face, day in and day out, after such a major loss. Sure, it’s not the only reaction, but it’s one that makes total sense.

As much as I don’t want to believe he’s gone, I knew deep down that Mr. T would die eventually; he was an “old man with grey hair” ever since I’d been a little kid, so I had tried to somehow mentally prepare for this day. And even though I  tried to imagine the scenario in my head numerous times, I don’t think it helped. To be honest, I don’t know that I expected it to or that I knew what to expect. And moving forward, I still don’t know where to set my expectations.

But I don’t think that I’m supposed to understand it or know anything for sure about this – the raw reality of losing someone you love(d) more than anything else, grief, life without that person. I don’t think anyone does, because I don’t think there are concrete answers or solutions to this experience. It’s different for everyone, every single time.

It’s been 8 months and it still hurts the same – if not more – than it did when I got dragged out of that hospital room after Dad died. It might hurt that way for awhile.

I don’t really know.

I just know that it’s hard.

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Life: Beyond Comprehension

I’ll never forget the moment I found out my Dad had passed away.

I had selfishly decided to leave the hospital for the first time in 28 hours to have a shower – I wanted to wash the stale scent of mystery meat and excessively pureed vegetables from my skin. In the back of my mind and in my heart, I was hoping that he would find the strength to open his eyes and see me; if by some magical miracle that moment happened, I wanted to look almost my best. But after one of the fastest showers I’d ever taken, I was on my way back to the hospital when my Mom called to break the news (and my heart). I had barely pulled over to the side of the road and from behind the wheel, my road rage had gone from non-existent to full throttle. In a matter of seconds, I was suddenly screaming in tears for other drivers to get out of my way, for the traffic lights to hurry up and give me a green light, for the universe to turn back time and take me out of this nightmare.

Within the hour, that anger was suppressed in the presence of staggering heartbreak. I sat there staring at my Dad with a shattered heart and a fierce regret for leaving his side for a damn shower. I knew that even if I had been there, I would have never been able to execute a suitable goodbye, but I never got the chance to try – and I only had myself to blame. By the next morning and as the days slowly passed, the unaddressed anger lingered in my body. When friends would check-in to see how I was coping, I’d scowl at my phone while pretending I was pleased to hear from them. On my flight to Toronto just a few days later, I had to exert all my effort into not blowing up to my neighbouring passenger while she told me stories about the family she was on the way to visit. I withheld my anger in business meetings – because, I didn’t want to be the one to make others uncomfortable with my unfortunate series of events.

For the past 4 months, anger has been simmering inside me with nowhere to go. I’ve been wandering, working, and filling my time with anything to stay distracted; to avoid unleashing my emotions where people can see them. Because death – the idea of it, the subject of it, the reality of it and the concept of it happening to us and to people we love is fucking uncomfortable and no one wants to talk about it, especially not for months on end. So yeah, at work and when (on the rare occasion) I meet new friends in this city that doesn’t feel like home yet, we don’t talk about it. Why would we want to talk about losing the people we love, when we can simply talk about what we love (that we still have)? Why talk about devastating circumstances, when there’s a million other even-just-slightly-less devastating events we can discuss? Why should everyone else feel uncomfortable, just because I’m not sure how to wrap my brain around the way my life’s unfolded over the summer?

No, I’m not trying to guilt trip anyone for living their own life and focusing on life moments that make them happy instead of sad. I’m just voicing my frustrations (because it’s my blog and I do what I want).

It’s just a bit discouraging how afraid so many of us are when the topic of death is brought to the table. It’s this outstanding part of life that we all experience in some form or another; it breaks all of us apart from the inside – yet no one wants to acknowledge the pain and maybe work together to find our way through it. I understand that it’s depressing, but it’s an element of life that we can’t just ignore; I mean, we can for a while, but you can’t outrun it forever.

So, what do you do when death unfolds right in front of you and takes over?

I’ve been trying to find an answer for months; I don’t think there’s anything really concrete. Whether it’s something we’re waiting on or an event that happens when we weren’t even a little bit ready for it, I’ve realized that death has different effects on every person it encounters. Some of us feel sad. Or maybe you get mad like I do. Or perhaps, it just doesn’t bother you at all. Actually, I think that last one is a lie – unless you actually do have a decrepit rock for a heart. But some of us are better at just not letting our emotions get the best of us and just plugging along with minimal fucks to give about what we can’t control.

But I think what I really want to get across with my words here is that if you’re ever going through something so utterly painful as someone you love passing away, you’re allowed to feel however the fuck you want to feel. If your heart just keeps breaking no matter how many ways you’ve tried to tape it up, that’s understandable. If you’re a little down and out and just not feeling yourself, that makes sense too. If you’re maybe a tad anxious, a bit unsure, slightly uncomfortable without the presence of someone who was always there – it’s not surprising. And hey, if you’re pissed right off that there’s absolutely nothing you can do to make things feel better right down at the root of it all – I feel you.

Just as discouraging as our minimal discussion about death, is the fact that so many people don’t recognize anger as a healthy emotion. Maybe it’s not healthy to be consistently angry – so angry and unstable that we let it fuel our habits and turn into destructive monsters – but I think it’s necessary for us to be mad about things that happen and to recognize what makes us tick. If we’re bothered and really shaken up about something, we shouldn’t just throw that away. Except, all too often I think we just feel the need to find a way to calm down, let go, distract ourselves with positivity.

Anger is just as important as any other emotion and if it’s surging through your body, I highly recommend taking the time to feel it (feel it hard!). I mean, if your lover broke your heart or the universe lit a match to your carefully thought out plans or if someone stabbed you in the back – or if your parent died the moment you stepped away for a 20 minutes – then I think you’re more than deserving to be mad about it — on top of whatever other emotion(s) you feel, too. In fact, I’d be super curious as to how dark and empty your soul is if you felt close to nothing at all in any close to awful scenario that happened to you.

It’s important to remember that you’re entitled to however you feel, but also to be mindful that other people may not feel the same or understand what you’re feeling. I’ve constantly tried to make my pain relatable to others, but no matter how I try to explain it – they’ll never feel the pain the way I do. And as frustrating as that truth is, that’s just how it goes.

So no matter how jealous, bitter, pensive, sad, or just plain miserable I feel — I’m just learning to live with it. Unfortunately, that means other people sort of have to, too. I’m doing my best not to lose my cool or cry excessively, and I’m trying to similiar to the fun, energetic self I was 5 months ago (before everything changed) but sometimes it just happens all that stuff just happens because I’m just too tired to stop it. Sometimes, getting upset  and feeling unhappy just needs to happen.

Grief seems to do whatever it wants to, and it seems as though the healthiest way to deal with it – is to just let it do it’s thing without feeling too bad about it.

If you haven’t faced it already, I’m sorry to say – but you will eventually. And when you do, I hope that you’re not too hard on yourself and give yourself permission to be incredibly imperfect in the process of navigating the pain, hurt, and uncontrollable way it affects your life – whatever that turns out to be. It may be bearable or it may feel impossible, and there’s really no way to prepare for it. The only thing I can tell you is that it probably won’t make sense.

But hey – neither did taking a shower, just to smell and look good at the hospital.

I guess that’s just how life unfolds sometimes. We just gotta’ keep doing what feels necessary in each moment that presents itself,  and the do our best  to take another step forward and figure out the rest from there.