On December 17th, 2008, my father succumbed to kidney failure while under the stress of a malignant brain tumor. Clinically, it was the kidney failure that killed him, but it was the brain tumor which sapped him of the will to live. Would it have been better to endure the pain of ongoing hemo-dialysis knowing that eventually his mind would fail? Probably not. Despite observing this inevitable parade of events for several weeks, Dad's death was and remains a stunning loss.
My mother died when I was 3. From the age of about 3 to 10, my grandparents raised me.When my grandfather died, I was quite stoic, “I’ve been through death before, after the initial shock and rage, it will become a fact.” This at the ripe old age of 16. But the fact was, every death is different. The greatest impact of my Grandfather’s death was not so much his absence from day to day life, but that the potential to see him at all was just gone. And it wasn’t so much that there was any great conversation that I hope to have, it was that all conversations were no longer possible.
About 16 years later, my Grandma’s death was hard to reconcile because she always seemed so bulletproof. She wasn’t a towering “in your face” presence, but she was so stubborn, it just didn’t seem possible that she would die. Although she was getting forgetful, she just didn’t seem unhealthy.
Uncle John’s death was the most surreal to me. I hadn’t seen him for years, when I went to the service, they had a picture of him from many years ago and again it just didn’t seem that he could die due to his defiant nature. My uncle and I always butted heads, even when I was younger. I guess there’s still some bad feelings there, that really are pointless now.
The hardest death to take, at least in the short term was our dog. Elsa was just a dog and she was only my dog for about five years when she died. She wasn’t particularly well-behaved, she didn’t save anyone from a fire or drowning. In fact, we had to take her to a dog shrink to figure out why she was snapping at Benj, then only a year old. She was clearly miserable in her last few days, her kidneys failing due to a poisoning incident as a puppy. In her prime she would ferret out loaves of bread, devour the bread, then leave the bag in the middle of the kitchen. As soon as we came home, she would start circling the bag as if confessing some sin. In the end, she wouldn’t eat bread at all and only grudgingly gnaw at a hamburger. She perked up on the day we put her down, apparently to say good bye. After we buried her I just broke down. A few weeks later, Grandma died, and while it was devastating and seemed to last a lot longer, Elsa’s death just seemed harder.
For a long time, I was really embarrassed about the difference in grief I felt between the death of a dog and the death of the woman who raised me. At last I came to realize that Elsa’s death meant not only the loss of a pack member, but the reinforcement of my fear of deep unexpected change. An always present fixture in my world was suddenly gone. For days I thought I could hear her in the kitchen. One day I thought she was wrapped up in a blanket on the floor. For several weeks it took me a few minutes to re-orient. Elsa was a presence that was gone, a part of my environment no longer available. It made her loss jarringly immediate every day.
I guess the good news is that now I rarely think of Elsa’s death. We still watch videos of her now and then, but these are more simple memories was than poignant vignettes of loss.
On the other hand, I still often think about Grandma and Granddad. Aside from an array of historical questions I never asked, I miss their well-grounded advice. They were a window to way of living and thinking about life that I still miss very much.
Dad’s death really hasn’t sunk in. I can feel I am still in denial about it. Intellectually I know he’s gone, I felt the weight of casket, I saw the flag and felt the emptiness in the house. I feel a certain need to assess my own life and legacy, to perform the strange calculation of “I’m only x years younger than my Dad, what can I accomplish in that time?” Yet, I can’t get over the thought that I’ll see him again. Often these fantasies relate to fishing. But sometimes I think that I’ll see him at the big oak table, bent over a notebook and a genealogy book, intently copying facts in his elegant longhand.
Sometimes the realization that he’s gone ambushes me in some moment when I’m not worrying about a job and not paying attention to what I’m doing. Typically, these occasions are on the drive to work through a long straight valley that I should avoid. It’s such a beautiful and undemanding stretch of road, I can’t stay away from it. It’s also the shortest way to Microsoft. But I’ll be driving along looking out over the fields, and I’ll think of the deer or the hawks and of being outside and I’ll remember how Dad once said he wanted to be a fishing guide, or how he wanted to go back to Georgetown. Then I’ll realize, these things can never happen, and then I realize he’s really gone.
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