Yesterday, September 28th, 2023, at 12:30 p.m., via Zoom, I attended my first ever group grief counseling meeting. We had to introduce ourselves and give one word to the way we were feeling at the moment. My word was “Okay”. (I was, in fact, feeling okay. I had just left a nice get-together with some new friends over coffee). At the end of the meeting, we were asked again for one word to describe how we were feeling in the moment, now that we had all met and shared our reasons for being there. I couldn’t find one that was truly appropriate. The closest I could come up with was “scared”.

I think that “apprehensive” might actually be a better, more nuanced, description though. Then again, it could be just a synonym for “scared”. (It is. I looked it up)

I chose it because suddenly I wasn’t sure if I wanted to open up and talk about my father’s death. Like, the nitty, gritty details of how I felt back then and how it has continued to affect me. I thought that I was ready. I know that I really need to for my mental health; in order to deal with the rest of my life. Because I do know that when you don’t address something emotional, it does not evaporate. It festers and becomes rancid, sour, turns your insides to goo which eventually leak out at inopportune times. Or, it can become hardened like an abnormally massive kidney stone, that if not removed will make your life extremely painful and difficult. It will block you.

I think that’s where I am. Where I’ve been for three years. Blocked. And I know it. And my kidney stone of grief isn’t going to be able to be removed with a nice little anesthetized surgery. No. I’m gonna have to pass it on my own. And this grief group is gonna have to hold my hand while I do it. And I’m gonna have to hold theirs. And it’s gonna hurt like a bitch. And that’s why I ended the meeting feeling, not a tad bit better as others seemed to, but a tad bit worse. Because I know that it’s going to be really painful and I’ve been avoiding it.

Like I’ve been avoiding this blog. And like I’ve avoided listening to all the recorded conversations I’d had with my dad. (Because we knew he was dying and I wanted to keep all the stories he had to tell me alive and I wanted to keep his voice nearby, I recorded some of our conversations. I knew talking to him and listening to him was going to be the thing I missed the most). And like I’ve avoided writing. Because it felt like when he died, my words died with him. And I’m still avoiding those hours of recordings.

But today, here I am. Because yesterday I was “scared”. And it’s because I’ve said I’m going to face my grief. Which has lead me this morning to this draft I’d saved, has lead me to what I was writing on October 22, 2020, at my parent’s house. I got freaked out and didn’t finish it because my dad called to me from the hospice bed where he was stationed, where he was living, where he was dying, in the front room of their house.
I’d freaked out because he had started, as a lot of dying people do, to seeing people who were not there, and to somehow be able to know about stuff going on in other parts of the house, even though he was bedridden. I suddenly wondered if he was able to see what I was trying to get out of my system and into writing. And I didn’t want him to know, because all of us were in horrid emotional turmoil.

And this is what I didn’t want him to know…

It had been three days. For three days, I had been at my parent’s house, listening to my father moan and groan and yelp out – in discomfort, not pain! he insisted. He insists it isn’t pain because he knows that then my mom and I would badger him to take pain medication.

(He has an extreme aversion to pain medication for some reason. Something that I remember my late mother-in-law also had. It makes me wonder if there’s some sort of generational thing about pills. Some sort of distrust of modern medicine. Some sort of character association with people who take pills….like, weakness or something…or a fear of getting addicted?…Though, in my dad’s case, when you’re dying, what does addiction matter anymore?)

Three days looking at his emaciated face. He’s always been a thin man in normal times. Now he looks, in his own words, correctly, like someone from a concentration camp; ravaged by this cancer that has no potential for cure. He’s already bought as much extra time as he could with the chemotherapy (something that we managed to talk him into, surprisingly…) Now it’s sheer stubbornness and orneriness and will that is keeping him going.

And, I suspect, a love of life that he wouldn’t admit to.
And, a love of my mother and myself and his grandchildren that he would.
And, perhaps, a bit of fear about what’s next.

Three days listening to him complain about various things that hurt, but refusing anything that might help – medicine, shifting him on the couch that he’d been living on for … God, feels like years now….
Three days listening to him coughing up phlegm every 10 or 15 minutes. Handing him a plastic bag to spit into and then tissue to clean up his lips and his beard (which had grown in since he quit shaving – and didn’t trust anyone to shave for him – ever the perfectionist; in his mind, if you’re going to do something right, you have to do it….well, if not your own way, then his…)
Three days of the sounds of a tortured animal coming from my dad.
Something that would distress him terribly if he were the one hearing it, whether from an animal or one of us. He wouldn’t be able to tolerate it.
“Just let me make my noise!” he kept saying, adamant that it helped him with the pain. Because damn those pain pills!
Three days of taking shifts with my mom – keeping him company and catering to his needs – she, during the day, and me, at night.
Three nights of sleep – and daytime naps, too – interrupted constantly because he’s been a night owl for as long as I can remember. Normally, I’m a night owl too, but when stressed out, I tend to want to just sleep.
But mom sleeps pretty soundly, she’s always been a morning lark, and her hearing isn’t too good, and she needs her rest.

Yes. He’s stubborn and ornery. He isn’t the best patient. We still love him, no matter how frustrating he gets.

But three days of this and it was time for me to return briefly to my own home to check on my husband and my son and our house. Our own House of Stress: Husband out of work, fighting his own depression; teenage son, also depressed, struggling in school and starting to self-harm….
This year has been the worst out of already too many years of awfulness…

I’d been calm. (Thank you, Lexapro!) Until I couldn’t find the coffee pot.

I’ve left it unfinished all this time. Because my words died with him. Because I couldn’t go back to the details of the last days. Of what I witnessed. Of what my mother and myself witnessed. Of what torture it was. For all of us.

And I know I need to deal with it. To make some sense of it. Because the stress and the grief has not let up, not one iota. I’ve always experienced existential angst. My father’s death made it a tangible, solidified, objective matter.

What happened with the coffee pot? I can’t remember now.