Darkening Days: Grieving

This year will mark my fiftieth wedding anniversary. I can’t help but think of my parents because beside my bed is a photo of them celebrating their fiftieth. In the photo, they are looking fondly at each other. My father is in a sports jacket with a boutonniere, the few remaining strands of his hair combed over his head. His glasses have slid down his nose as he looks down at my mother. My mother, her hair dyed a brittle reddish brown, returns his gaze. They are both laughing. It’s the last anniversary that would celebrate together.

The previous year, in November, I visited my maternal grandfather who lived outside of Cleveland in a condominium with my aunt, his eldest child. Veterans Day had given me a holiday from teaching at Columbus State, and I had agreed to drive up from Columbus to watch my grandfather while my aunt was off somewhere for the day. He had turned 98 in September. He had been active and good natured in his senior years. He use to spend a week at my place in the summer, building cabinets or shelves or planing doors or doing other household projects, all with tools he had been using for decades. He had been a carpenter since apprenticing as a boy. He built me a piano bench when he was 92. He was also an avid gardener and loved being outdoors.

But now he was in the decline that would end in his death the following year. I enjoyed his company, but at this point in his deteriorating health he mostly slept. Three times in his life he had escaped death’s grasp. As a child on a farm in Europe, a wagon wheel had run over his chest, and his family held what they believed was a death watch. Yet he recovered. In his forties, he developed an ulcer and a doctor told him that he would be dead by age fifty. He liked to tell that story, laugh, and say, “That doctor has been dead a long time!” Then at 85 he had open heart surgery and spent a summer in painful recouperation. He credited his recovery to a diet of watermelon and beer. As a good German, he would insist that beer was food. I wanted to believe that he would somehow escape death again and reach his goal of living to a hundred. Now, though, his world was reduced to the short path between his bed and the bathroom off his bedroom. It hurt to see him this way.

He sat a short while with me at the kitchen table for lunch. The rest of the time he slept while I graded papers. As an adjunct English teacher, I was forced to patch together as many teaching assignments as I could to eke out my meager living, and it seemed like I was always grading papers. I sat at my aunt’s dining room table. Her living room and dining were decorated in off white and looked like they were a display in a show room. I always wrote my end note on a student paper in pencil because I would frequently change my mind about how I wanted to frame the student’s writing problems, and, consequently, I would have to erase and start again. I spend the entire time there anxious that I would get eraser shavings on the floor and stain the immaculately clean white carpet.

The little time that I did talk to my grandfather I tried to interest him in an article in Prevention Magazine on some natural cure for his failing heart. He read Prevention and swore by those sort of health practices. But he didn’t show any interest. He was ready for the end. I wasn’t. I selfishly didn’t want to part with him. Looking back now, I wish that I had simply told him that I loved him, and it was ok to want to let go of a world devoid of the pleasures he had so deeply enjoyed.

His time was approaching, and, though I resisted accepting the fact, I had no sense of injustice or shock at his passing. He was full of days, as the Bible says, or ripe for death, to echo Shakespeare. Still, he was holding on when February arrived and my parents celebrated their 50th anniversary. My mother in her 72nd year brimmed with life, with laughter and talk and with energy when playing with her grandchildren. My father, two years older, was the one about whose health I was concerned. He had spent most of his life smoking and evolved into an alcoholic. He only stopped his drinking when he had a seizure at work. He had retired early because he had gotten increasingly slow performing his engineering work. He had been hospitalized for a stroke and treated for an ulcer. He lived on a diet of beef and bacon, and his complexion was the color of their congealed fat renderings.

To add to this health situation, he was reluctant to see doctors and not an easy person to advise in that regard. When the family grew worried that his persistent sore throat was a sign of throat cancer, I, as the oldest child, was selected to approach the irascible old man about our concerns. I put my hand his shoulder and said, “Dad, we’re worried about that sore throat.” He roughly pushed my hand from his shoulder and said gruffy, “Mind your own damn business!”

At the anniversary celebration, though, he seemed fine, in good humor, and I didn’t have any immediate fears about my parents’ health.

Later that month, I visited my grandfather in the hospital. I brought along Tommy, who was not yet a year old, hoping my grandfather would take an interest and be a little cheered up. He could only smile weakly, though. He was in too much pain. He looked so sad, trapped in his dying body and only wanting release from it. He died early the following Monday morning, alone in the hospital.

That summer my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. That fall she was receiving radiation treatment. That December, she was hospitalized with a bladder infection. I visited her in the hospital. As I left, she said, “Don’t worry about me, honey.” That was the last thing she ever said to me.

Monday, December 20, I got my grades in. I was officially done for the term. I had put off another visit to my mother until I had completed my teaching duties. Now I was free and the next day would drive up to be with her. But as I prepared for the drive to Cleveland, the phone rang. It was my brother, Gary. Mom was dying.

When I arrived, the doctor came out to talk to me and the other attendant family members. Her heart rate was slowing. Three times they had tried to shock it back into a normal rhythm, but nothing could restore it. My aunt, my mom’s older sister, let out a sob and lamented, “This can’t be happening to Jos.” Then she said, “We should pray now. Everyone, let’s all pray!” We all bowed our heads, but I thought, “I don’t believe any of this praying business. They’re just the undeniable medical facts. Nothing else. When science can do no more, there’s nothing more to be done. Mom is dying.”

It was a moment of clarity for me, of firm and final belief. As a child, I was the fearful and confused inductee into religious dogma, as a middle schooler, a pious believer, in high school, a rebellious atheist. Then it was the Age of Aquarius and indulgence in varieties of spiritualism. When that all seemed a bunch of hokum, I turned to reading the theologians and the mystics. Surely, I thought, these brainy scholars must understand something that I don’t. These mystics must see something I don’t see. But none of it ever made sense. Trying to believe felt phony. Nothing in religion ever felt as real as a child’s laugh, a moving melody, a satisfying meal, a pretty girl’s smile. It all just seemed something tacked on. I had no desire to disrespect the beliefs of others (as long as not imposed on me) or to deprive others of comfort in a world that abounds in distress and misery. And, of course, I hoped there was something beyond this world, a place where loved ones are reunited. But what I knew for sure was that in the next room my mother’s natural life was coming to an end.

Beside her bed, the heart monitor displayed the weak beat of her heart. As we sat with her, the peaks of each beat were lower and lower, the time between longer and longer. When the monitor’s line went flat, the nurse disconnected the machine and withdrew from the room to allow us to grieve as a family. I touched my mother’s head and felt the unsoft hair permeated with reddish dye, the color that I recollected from the 50th anniversary celebration. I laid my head on her chest that would no longer rise and fall with the breath of life, rise and fall as it must have countless times as she pressed me to her, hugging me as a child. The heart, that I slept under the first nine months of my life, that heart now gone quiet within her. I wept without reserve.

“Don’t, Dale,” my aunt chastised me. To hell with you, I thought. I’ll weep as long and hard as I want to.

To me, it seemed like my grandfather had, thankfully, escaped from this world. But it felt like my mother had been abducted, taken before her rightful time. Later, seeing her name in white letters against the black background of the placard, the sign marking her viewing room at the funeral parlor, seeing her name felt dreamlike, a surreal scene in a nightmare. When my grandfather died, I thought of the passage in Shakespeare’s King Lear, where Edgar tells his despairing father not quit on life until it is his time to do so: “Ripeness is all.” But when my mother died so unexpectedly, I thought of the end of the play, where Lear laments the death of his daughter: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all? / Thou’lt come no more; / Never, never, never, never, never!”

For days afterward, whenever in a crowd and I would see a woman of my mother’s age, I would think: why is that woman alive and not my mother?

Then what do you turn to in grief? If you spurn religious consolations? I turned to lessons from the natural world. The body will most often try to heal itself. If you break an arm and have it set, it heals whether you are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Moslem or an atheist. Is there something akin to bodily healing in our emotional make-up? Could eons of evolution have left us helpless before such sorrow? Later in my life, I would learn more about grief and better understand its complexity. But in that phrase of my life, I simply waited for my grief to run its course.

My mother had died the day before the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the darkest day of the year. After the solstice, the days grow longer, but the weather gets colder. The weather doesn’t instantly become better with the lengthening days. So my mood didn’t get better in the months following her death. The sadness that seemed overwhelming. But like we wait on spring, I waited patiently for my grief to resolve itself.

After such a loss, you resume your roles in life, fulfill your obligations. Students soon were handing in those papers to be graded. I drove Desiree back to college. Phillip was still in high school. Tom wasn’t yet two, and although Marcia was his main caregiver, she was still home not working due to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I had a spouse and kids to look after and be involved with.

Slowly the unbearable becomes forgotten for longer and longer periods of time, in what seems like an act of betrayal. Yet the sorrow is always there. A heaviness on the heart. One year. Two years. Three years passed. I began to abandon my hope for healing. I became resigned to carrying the weight of loss, still locked in Lear’s moment of sorrow: “Thou’lt come no more; Never, never, never, never, never!”

In the seventh year after her passing, though, I had driven up to my parents’ home, now my father’s home. It was there that my period of mourning ended, ended abruptly. Why it happened at that particular moment, I don’t know. But as I pulled into the driveway, I saw in my mind’s eye, myself as a child, playing on the front lawn, playing under the watchful eye of my mother. And I realized my supreme good fortune in having the happy childhood that she had given me. And gratitude replaced grief. The gratitude has never left, and the grief has never returned.

THE END