I am slowly posting the entirety of Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents, here on Patience & Fortitude for free. You can still buy the book if you would like (doing so helps support my writing!). I am doing this to make it as available as possible because I want anyone who might relate to the situation I found myself in during the mid-1990s to know they are not alone. General warnings are in place: this book address grief, mourning, self-harm, anger, poverty, and pet death, all in the context of becoming an adult orphan in my twenties.
I often relive moments of destruction. I cannot call them moments of fear or sadness or even grief, which, as words, fail to convey the feeling of being emotionally shattered. Destruction, on the other hand, is perfect. It beats you down for no reason and makes your heart thump wildly and painfully while you try to breathe.
The first moment I replay is the phone call from my father that I got in early 1993. I had graduated from college less than a year before, and for all intents and purposes I was taking a gap year before going to graduate school. I had my GREs under my belt and my letters of recommendations lined up, and a few nebulous ideas about what I wanted to do for a career. It was pretty obvious even to me that I was not really committed to continuing on with graduate school any time soon. Instead I was living in Sarasota, FL, working shitty secretarial jobs while hoping that inspiration would strike.
What struck, instead, was colon-rectal cancer. My mother had been very sick for months, and uncharacteristically did not tell me about it. On the other hand, she very characteristically decided not to see a doctor until it was to the point of my father driving her to the emergency room while she was bleeding out and delirious in pain. I knew nothing of this until I got the call from my father, a message he left on my answering machine that afternoon. I remember this moment of destruction clearly because it was like watching a car plow into a crowd of pedestrians: you know it is going to be horrible, and that there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.
My father was a retired military officer and so made it a point not to use the phone after 30+ years of constantly being on call. He hated phones, and while he would agree to talk to me on the phone, he never, ever initiated a call for any reason. I think that call might have been the first and last time my father ever dialed me directly. It was Mother’s job to call, and the fact that it was Poppa’s voice on the phone was a dead giveaway that something was wrong, terribly awfully tragically wrong, and I knew it the moment I heard him on the answering machine.
He did not really say much other than, “Hey honey, hope you are doing okay. Things got interesting here, call home.” I remember it verbatim sixteen years later.
I called, of course, and neither of us bothered with pleasantries. We both knew the universe had tipped sideways. Poppa filled me in quickly that Mother was at the hospital, that she had been in pain for a while, and that the doctors were holding her for tests. (To this day I do not know what tests were run, or how they stopped the immediate problem of bleeding; I still have the hospital paperwork, so I could find out any time I want, but I prefer to hold those dark days in a blur of indistinct memories as much as I can). I told him I was on the way and hung up. I am sure I asked friends to watch my cats and called my job supervisor at her home about being MIA for the rest of the week. I did not know I was already on the list to be fired within a month, but it was just as well, as I knew I was going to have to move home to take care of Mother. There was no question in my mind about it. What I do not remember clearly is the time between hanging up on Poppa and walking into Mother’s hospital room the following day.
As moments of destruction go, that phone call was pretty complete. I knew instinctively that everything had changed, and I suspect everyone comes up against that terrible awareness at the point when they least expect it. The insight did not hit when mother died, or father died, or when I gave up the house; it hit years before, during that one incredibly short and unforeseen phone call.
The resulting three years were, in many ways, more about caretaking, which is a different story altogether. I do not want to delve too deeply into it because this story is about grief, and while taking care of people you love who are dying is to live in suspended mourning for long and exhausting periods of time, it is not the same experience as surviving the death of a loved one. Honestly, they were about equally traumatic in my case, but still, they were and are different experiences.
The death of my mother was slow and protracted and agonizing, literally. She was in pain all the time and I was helpless in the face of her pain and her death. I did everything I could, despite her basic refusal to consciously accept the fact she was dying while at the same time crumbling under the weight of the knowledge. For her, the future simply stopped existing, good or bad. For us as a family it was a blood bath of medicine, surgery, and treatments. In the end just getting her off life support was a goddamn fight in the hospital hallways, which as a metaphor stands pretty well for the whole experience start to finish. She had her own triumph in the fact that they gave her three months to live and she survived for thirteen, but nonetheless she died on September 15, 1994, one month after her fifty-second birthday.
I was one month into being twenty-four years old.
My father had suffered a major stroke that same year on Father’s Day, whenever it was in June. So while my mother entered her declining final four months, my father’s health nosedived creating a significant impact on his quality of life. I remember sitting in the living room with my parents, my mother sickly and bloated and drugged to the gills and my father stroking out, begging them to let me call for paramedics for him. I should have done it anyway, something I’ll never forgive myself for, but I think it shows how muddled my own brain was by exhaustion and stress that it did not occur to me at all. I went back to my bedroom and cried for hours, refusing to come out – quite the rebellion in my household—although it had little impact. From that point on, Poppa was crippled by the effects of the stroke and somewhat (in his words) “addlebrained” about things like leaving the stove on, or doors open. I was on constant watch.
Poppa was twenty years older than my mother (yes yes, cradle robber!), so at 71 he was suffering from a lifetime of post-war PTSD and alcoholism (neither ever diagnosed, but I assure you both conditions were real) and chain smoking. His family generally lived to 100 (literally) so while I accepted his declining health, I did not fear it as much as I should have. As the saying goes, “denial is not just a river in Egypt.”
During preparation for an angioplasty surgery on Poppa’s left leg, heart flutters showed up and the surgeon called off the operation in order to monitor Poppa’s condition. That was in February, 1996, and kicked off three months of Poppa shuffling off this mortal coil in defeat. Nothing I did nor said gave him the will power to keep going; he was tired and sick and worried about me, and finally his body collapsed on April 25, 1996. I drove two hours to get to him. The nurses at the out-of-town V.A. hospital had sent me home that very afternoon for fear that I was driving myself to collapse, a plan that backfired on all of us spectacularly, I think. By the time I arrived, it was after midnight and I had to “call it,” although he was pretty much already gone by the time I got there. His official death day is April 26 because he was taken off life support at around 2am in the morning. I still get it mixed up, thinking he died on the 25th, because to me it was just one long day. I was shocked when he died because despite all evidence to the contrary, I really had expected Poppa to keep going for another decade or more. My denial about what I had been facing was tremendous, and in hindsight fairly embarrassing.
I was twenty-five, just shy of twenty-six.
For me, this was the end of my whole immediate family. All of my grandparents were already dead (the last survivor, my paternal grandmother Granny, died in 1992), and I have no brothers or sisters. My parents worked long and hard to alienate their own siblings (they were the black sheep of their respective families by choice) and while Mother’s whole tribe showed up for her final days, they did not stick around or have much to offer me. I do not throw that out as an accusation; after years of training, I only knew how to alienate them myself, and they did not know me at all. There were overtures, which I let fall dead at my feet, and after that a respectful distance was maintained by all parties. When my mother’s older sister, Aunt Barbara, died two years later from breast cancer, I cried but did not bother going to the funeral. I did not feel that I belonged there, or that I would be welcome. A fallacy on both counts, I think, but what is done is done.
In the background, Aunt Sheila (mother’s younger sister) and Cousin Jimbo (and his partner Paul) shadowed me for years, sending holiday cards and irregular emails. They seemed desperate to at least stay in touch, something I did not put much thought toward because I felt I had nothing to offer them. My immediate family unit was destroyed, and without it I was not sure why anyone else who is related to me would care about my life. Part of that stemmed from a feeling that I needed to prove myself worthy of their attention, and an even larger part of that came from an ignorance of how extended families work. It was unfortunate and sometimes I still wonder what the heck I was thinking, but that was my mentality at the time. I just did not know any better.
Nonetheless, the bridges my parents burned were never rebuilt. Since their deaths, I have never been invited to family holidays or reunions, and I am sure that will not change. Who am I, to them? No one at all.
In the end I know I was fortunate to be able to move home and devote myself to taking care of my folks*. Many children, especially adult children, do not get that kind of opportunity, and while being their caretaker was a Hell I would not wish on my worst enemies, I am glad I was there as much as I was. In the end that was all I had to take with me: memories.
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Footnote: In retrospect I think someone should have insisted I get at least a part time job if only to socialize outside of the house. Again, this is an issue having to do with being a caretaker, so is not really pertinent except to show how completely isolated I was and how my entire life was wrapped around two people who were terminally ill. In a way, it put a deadline on my own life, in that I had no concept of a world outside taking care of my parents. It is, sadly, a compulsion many caretakers feel.
