GRIEF

I tried to think of a clever title for this article and came up empty. Grief? Merriam Webster says it’s; “a deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.” There is simply nothing good about grief. Something bad has happened to cause it and it almost always involves somebody you loved having passed on. I bring this up because last week a lady I know of, but not personally, lost her Mother to cancer. Upon hearing the news I was plunged instantly into the personal dilemma of my own grief that quite frankly I thought had long since passed.

I had for the most part in my life been fortunate in the grief department. For the first forty four years of my life I never experienced it. I had a class mate die once while I was in High School, a suicide victim, but he was an odd kid and it was just weird and spooky, certainly not something that plunged me into any kind of grief. Of course my Grandma Smith passed on, but she was in her nineties and I had only seen her a couple of times those last few years, so again I was spared this malady called grief. Then it happened. My father, a robust Iowa milk hauler was just a couple of years into a well deserved retirement when he was diagnosed with Colon cancer. He was given two weeks to two months to live and our family was tossed into utter chaos. I so admired this stoic, hard working man, “My Father,” and as a young man I desperately wanted to have a closer relationship. It never happened. He was either working or too damn tired to do that bonding stuff. We didn’t have a drink together, we never played catch and he wasn’t very huggable. Finally I left and went far away to pursue the American Dream. So I was forced to watch from afar this man, “My Father,” age twenty five years and shrink into a skeleton like mask. The few times I saw him, I hardly recognized him. Unfortunately the dark drama lasted for two years, not two months.

I had traveled back to Iowa, a mere fourteen hour trip that February, to say good-bye to my father. Miracles were out of the question and he had been sent home to die. I made a terrible mistake at this point in time by listening to my favorite CD on the way out. It was a KD Lang CD and I loved it. Upon arriving I spent three painful days not knowing what to say to him and stressed to the max. My childhood home was constantly filled with guests going through some macabre ritual where people come in and say light hearted, funny things that fall thud on the floor from the utter awkwardness of the moment. Finally the morning arrived where I had to leave and return to Denver. We both knew that this would be it. As I got up that morning I grabbed some of my belongings to take down stairs to be loaded in my car. As I started down the steps I heard my Dad’s voice from his bedroom and he said, “Goodbye son.” I was devastated! MY God, he thought I was LEAVING and I wasn’t going to say GOODBYE to him? I immediately said, “Dad, I’ll be right back, I’m not leaving.” I returned and held my Father in my arms and bade him a very tearful goodbye. That was at that time, the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life. I squeezed him one last time, looked into his eyes and then walked out of the room and set a record for sobbing in a car. I was inconsolable from Eastern Iowa to Lincoln, Nebraska where I finally stopped, totally spent and got a motel room and just sat there and bawled like a child. My Father passed away four days later. OK, what’s my point?

Well it took me years to get over the loss of my Father. I have never listened to that KD Lang CD since and just being ambushed by the song “Constant Craving” causes me to lose it. My wife has seen it happen with her own two eyes. Here’s where I become confused about grief. Fast forward nine years and I’m in the Minneapolis Airport and my cell phone rings. It was my wife Laurel and she said five simple words, “Gator (My nickname) your Mother has died.” My wife, God Bless her, was a financial person. They tend to get right to the point. There was no, “Hey the weather back here has been crappy, by the way your Mother died, you OK?” No, she got right to it. I sat there among a bunch of strangers, twenty minutes away from boarding the plane, stunned, but quite calm. On the two hour flight back to Denver I sat quietly in my seat and absolutely nothing happened. I attended the funeral, buried her and still nothing! I assumed this would be one of those events where two Months down the road, on a single solitary day, maybe at the Supermarket, where all of a sudden a wave of emotion would wash over me and I would be standing in the toiletries aisle wailing away, but it never happened. What the hell was wrong with me? I loved my Mother and we had a great relationship. Hell, I had even bought her a house so that she could live comfortably and I called her every week to see how she was doing. I did not shed a tear, ever. That bothered me to no end and I tried so very hard to understand what happened. I was closer to my Mother than I was to my Father and yet nary a tear. Then things got even stranger.

My wife and I are separated, so our two dogs lived with her. They were for all practical purposes, our kids and I would go over to her house three times a week and walk them and make sure they got plenty of attention. One day in August of 2007 I went over to walk them and my precocious twelve and half year old Yellow Lab Kiowa wasn’t walking. I immediately knew this wasn’t good. I briefly walked her step brother, returned and then after consultations with the Mrs. took her to my place for the week-end to watch over her. The dog would not walk! She just lay there and panted heavily. When I went up to her she would try so damn hard to please me and she’d desperately struggle to get up. She couldn’t and it just about killed me. I had to wrap a towel around her mid-section and lift all eight five pounds of her and take her outside so she could pee. I lay there beside her for two straight nights and listened to the labored breathing and felt absolutely helpless. To keep her hydrated; I would wet my hands and let her lick the moisture from them. I smeared food on my fingers and let her lick the food, anything to get her to eat. I also played Beethoven to comfort her. That Monday we loaded her in the car and took her to the Vet where they promptly took her in on a stretcher. I sat there as the vet looked at her and I watched her shiver, the poor dog seemed so alone. Did she think I was going to just leave her like my Dad did? She just lay there. Damn it, Damn it! Damn It!! Why can’t you do anything for her? “DO SOMETHING!” The nice lady Vet gave us the look and we nodded our heads and I watched as she inserted the needle and then watched Kiowa stop shivering and the life go out of her eyes and I died just a little that day. Damn it, she was just a dog! A troublesome dog at that! What’s wrong with me? Where were those tears when my Mom died?

I now had experienced three deaths, deaths that were close to me and I was beyond consolable twice and quite fine when my Mom passed. The news last week that this gal I know had lost her Mother caused me to return to the scene of the crime and ponder how a 59 year old adult male could sob over the death of his dog, but not his Mother and then it finally hit me. After the death of my Father my Mother had made it very clear she was miserable without him and she constantly talked about death and being with my Dad once again. She really missed him. When she died, it was from a stroke and according to the coroner she never knew what hit her. She never suffered for one second and I always knew she was happy and had joined my Father on another spiritual plane. I sensed she was quite tickled about the whole set of affairs. I’m sorry, but if she’s happy, then I'm happy. Grief? For me grief is watching somebody or something you love suffer and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing you can do for them but give them your love until they’re gone. It’s painful when you want to help and even more painful if ever in YOUR own mind you think, “that THEY think, “You’re leaving them without ever saying goodbye. It’s doubly painful when you’re forced to play God and nod your head. I can finally forgive myself now, but I’ll never, ever listen to Beethoven again! I don’t think I like grief very much, it’s like so much wasted music.