Grief – Page 13 – Mary Tyler Mom

April 15, 2015

The Call

A few hours ago the phone rang. Typically, this is not a big deal. Six o’clock, cooking dinner, the telemarketers know and use this time to reach you at home. Except this wasn’t a telemarketer, it was my Dad. And my Dad, as of one week ago, is on hospice care. I literally cannot remember the last time my Dad called me.

Six months ago, a call from my Dad would have been a regular thing. He, my aging aunt, my stubborn sister who spurns technology, and telemarketers are about the only folks who reach me on the landline. And, full confession, had my Dad called me six months ago at six o’clock on a week night, I guarantee you I would have shut that call down and fast, probably with a sigh of exasperation for good measure, just so my Dad knew it was an inconvenient time for me.

6 PM is the height of the bewitching hour where the kids are losing steam before bedtime, I am juggling dinner and homework and a melting down toddler, and counting down the minutes before my husband walks through the door after long days for both of us.

But when your dear Dad who is on hospice calls you at 6 PM, you take the call and you’re grateful for it. You realize, even while you’re talking to him, what a gift that call is and that you may never get another one like it.

I spent a couple of hours at my Dad’s bedside today. He didn’t really talk to me. He slept, ate about eight sips of soup for me, grimaced every time he tried to turn over in bed, and didn’t respond when I said goodbye.

Hospice is the real deal, folks. My Dad knows his time is coming to an end and we talk about it regularly now. I don’t know if it is the quality of relationship we have, or that I worked with older adults and hospice as a social worker, but we speak about his death with ease. We have both made our peace with it, it seems.

All of this makes me sad, so very sad. I will miss my Dad terribly, something I was sure to tell him last week just after I informed him the docs thought he was hospice appropriate. I also told him he was one of my very few anchors — one of the people I rely on most for advice, guidance, support.

Did I mention how much I will miss my Dad? How much I have missed my Dad these past five months of medical turmoil?

I used to help people — older adults and their families — cope with this stage of life. I have sat at the bedside of countless dying people. Seriously, I don’t even know how many. It was my job and my passion and I was good at it.

So much of being helpful is just about showing up. Being there, being present, and bearing witness is the only thing a dying person needs at this stage of the game. I did this for many clients over the years and now I am doing it for my Dad.

It’s a different experience with my Dad. I go home heavy, feeling the weight of his soon to be absence. I want to cocoon up in my bed, alone and silent, thinking, until the next time I can be at his bedside. I don’t truly want to be anywhere else right now.

But that’s not realistic for me. I have kids and a husband and a badly neglected blog. The dinner must still be made, the laundry must still be washed, the kids must still be bathed and shuttled back and forth and cared for. So tonight, at 6 PM, I was doing just that — tidying the house, supervising homework, wondering what I could pull out of the fridge and call dinner when the phone rang.

And there was my Dad. “What’s happening?” he asked. Just like that. Just like it was six months ago and he was perfectly independent and perfectly healthy — well, as healthy as an 81 year old man with a history of lung cancer, heart attacks, COPD, and emphysema can be.

He asked what I had done all day, not remembering that it was me who had fed him his soup at lunch, me who had stuffed the pillows behind his back to help achieve some level of comfort. He wanted to know when I would return. He wanted to talk about money, “Who’s paying for all this?” he wanted to know. I am hoping that by tomorrow he forgets he was curious about money. My Dad might shoot me if he knew how expensive it is to die these days.

For those few moments, on a call at six o’clock, it was just me and my Dad talking about our days. What a gift.

March 26, 2015

You Are My Sunshine

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine

You make me happy when skies are gray.

There is not a mother or child in my orbit that does not know the lyrics to this song. My guess is that even reading those words above, you are singing it, on tune, inside your head. It appears coded in our DNA somehow, an act of love like a kiss, a hug, a sweet caress on the cheek. Singing it and hearing it is a rite of passage in caring and being cared for.

You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you

Please don’t take my sunshine away.

My mother sang it to me. She had a sweet voice, gentle, warm, nothing flashy, but it got the job done. Hearing it made me feel loved, held, and cherished. In March of 2004, days after bleeding out from an undiagnosed brain tumor in front of a slot machine in the unlikely Biloxi, Mississippi, her children gathered around her hospital bed and sang it to her. A primitive act of love and fear.

The other night dear, as I lay sleeping

I dreamt I held you in my arms

It is an unlikely song to sing to a child, a babe in your arms, isn’t it? The loss in it is brutal and naked. It is written as a song for lovers, but has been co-opted by those who care for us first, our parents, our first loves. Love at first sight has never been as intense as that between parent and child. Lovers come and go, but, in the natural order of things, parents stay, their love unconditional. In a just world, that is how it should be.

When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken

So I hung my head and I cried

I cringe when I find myself in a setting with music and children and, invariably, this song finds its way into the repertoire of some overly cheerful performer who has the audacity to switch the lyrics up, masking the pain and loss, swapping its glorious humanity with some nonsense about lollipops and rainbows. Blasphemous drivel that underestimates the capacity of children to learn and know that life can be hard and people may leave us.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine

You make me happy when skies are gray.

Like my mother, I sang this song to my daughter. Like my mother, her name was Donna. Like my mother, she died of a brain tumor. Like my mother, she heard these words countless times, sung with love and heartbreak, from one who loved her most in the world, me.

You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you

Please don’t take my sunshine away.

It is impossible to convey what it is like to hold your child in your arms and on your lap, sing these words to her, knowing what she does not know, that she is dying. Your sunshine, despite your pleas and prayers, will leave you, ferocious gray skies in its wake. Your sunshine will go and your arms will ache and now you sing the words to yourself to recall those times you sang those words to the girl you loved most.

When you hear these lyrics, no matter where, you will sometimes find yourself telling a stranger, the now sad and awkward stranger devastated by your confession, that you sang that song at your daughter’s memorial service.

One time, you will hear that song in the middle of a Wiggleworms class, surrounded by mothers much younger than yourself, not yet broken by life and loss, and you will cry, then sob, remembering the girl you sang it to first, and you will feel badly and a little embarrassed for a moment, but then you won’t, because you don’t care, you stopped caring when you started grieving.

Another time, just a few months after your second sunshine named Donna died, you will walk into a tiny little shop in Northhampton, Massachusetts with your mother-in-law and see this on the wall:

And your mother-in-law, the one who first sang these words to the man you love most in this world, will see it, too. And she will buy it for you, cost be damned, and you will cry together in that little shop in Northhampton, and then, a few weeks later, a slim cardboard box will arrive on your doorstep and you will open it and hammer a nail on your living room wall and hang the words that mean so very much to mothers and children everywhere, reminding you of your own mother and your own child you love dearly, the ones who left you, but who brought an intense and lasting sunshine to your life.

March 12, 2015

The Lion and the Lamb

I’ve written about spring before. I do it every year, actually, as I feel so profoundly grateful and moved to share that gratitude by pounding it out on the keyboard. Thank you, spring! Thank you, warmth! Thank you, lions and lambs! I love you, both, but damn if I don’t feel moved to tears and reflection every year when the lamb overtakes the lion.

It is so unexpected, so David and Goliath, when that lion has a firm hold on you in January and February, to think that sweet, gentle lamb even stands a chance. You pine for that lamb, but wishing and hoping sometimes get lost in the dark and the cold and the ice and the relentless UGH of the formidable lion’s jaw you find yourself in.

This year, the lamb has arrived early in Chicago. Thank you, Universe!

Spring is a beautiful and profound and sacred return. It is confirmation that light and warmth follow cold and dark. Always. Spring is our annual reward and promise as human beings that things do, in fact, get better, even in nature. As a family who has buried one of our children, this promised and expected annual return to life and growth and hope is so very needed.

As time passes after the death of our daughter, my need to find hope seems to increase. Hope is like food, water, or air to me. I need it to survive. I need to feel and believe that the bad times subside, that life overtakes death, that even when it seems impossible, we will get through whatever it is we are needing to get through.

Spring is a tangible reminder of that for me, especially in the absence of a religion that assures me of the same thing. My religion is the growing light, the warming temperatures, the melting ice, the fading cold and dark days of deep winter.

Spring lifts me up when I need it most. It reminds me that life is a cycle, full of good and bad, both of which pass. When things are bad, you must hope and trust that good will return. And when things are good, savor it, enjoy it, knowing that things will shift and you will find yourself challenged again.

Life, folks. It is what it is. Sometimes it roars like an angry lion, and sometimes it gently rests in the growing grass, like a sweet lamb. For right now, I am grateful that the lamb is back, bringing warmth and light and Reese’s chocolate peanut butter eggs with it.

Love to you this fine spring day (not technically, of course, but mentally and emotionally, yo). xox

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If you need another dose of spring, read this beautiful reflection by my fellow ChicagoNow blogger, Amy Litterski DeSario.

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