It's January 17th and in just about 5 days it will be 6 months since my Father died.
I am checking in because there are some important components for those who are still living:
Coping
Reasoning
Acceptance
I believe that I picked a poor way to manage the post-death experience I have had in these 6 months. Each person will deal with death in their own way and no single path is right for everyone.
For me, I have been running as fast as I can not from the death, the event, nor because of fear but because it was the easiest choice. My life is chaos with moments of bliss sprinkled in there like hidden coveted gems in a favorite ice cream.
It was just a week ago when I really made some important realizations. I spent a Friday in the Emergency Room in a local hospital. I had been suffering from abdominal pain and reluctantly went in to have them check to see if my gall bladder needed to come out.
I laid on the gurney in my hospital gown and felt such loneliness. I was wheeled to a nearby department for an ultrasound. While in motion I just watched the acoustic ceiling tiles, lights, and it hit me.
I wasn't sad that my Father had died. It had been 14 years of sheer hell for him and to be honest, for all of us in the family. There are few things worse than being on edge and thinking that each medical challenge meant it was his time to go only to find that it wasn't. The tragedy is that he never got better, there were no days where he felt normal again, there was never a day free of pain or complications.
What did make me sad was how lonely he must have been during all of those hospital stays. It filled my soul rapidly while laying there and my eyes welled up with tears.
An administrative office employee came in to gather information from me while I awaited the results of the ultrasound. She asked me a series of questions and obtained all the information they needed from me. When I explained my situation (i.e. no medical insurance, a son with autism, unemployment, mortgage, three people counting on me) I also had tears streaming down my face. I felt bad for the woman because she felt awful.
Not a day goes by where I find myself regretting anything I fought for or did for my parents in the summer of 2009. It was as if I received cosmic signals as early as June that I needed to take the role of advocate and assume my old position as the 'voice of reason and calm' in my family.
Now that I have been able to empathize with my father, it is time for me to seek out some other therapeutic ways of coping with the experience. I think that I should observe my mother and her courage as she had been seeing a counselor to help her through the grief process.
So, as I mentioned above, I think it is important that people take some time AFTER the death of a loved one and find out what you're going to be doing to cope, what you are going to do to reason with this situation and last, accepting that it happened and that you cannot change it. What you can do is LIVE. Move forward knowing that it is your job to hold that spirit in your heart.
We'll see how this goes. I'll check back soon to let you know.
