Dad: 1952-2024

What do you do with your grief when the world won’t stop long enough for you to process it? It will find a place to rest if you don’t get it out. As they say, the body keeps the score.

On April 18th, 2024 my Dad passed away. I was in the room with him, alone, when he left his body. His breathing slowed and stopped, and he was at peace.

He wasn’t in particularly good health recently, but his passing was sudden and unexpected. Even when you know someone isn’t going to live a long life, you still can’t predict how the shock of them passing will affect you. Here are the things that have come to me since.

Being in the room with someone when they die is an unforgettable experience. I know I will remember it forever. It makes you so keenly aware of the existence of soul. Because you can watch someone be physically incapacitated, but you know if they opened their eyes and were able to speak to you, their body would animate in a way that cannot be explained simply by biology. Or perhaps it can, but biology is much more spiritual a thing than we tend to give it credit for. After all, our personality exists in our synapses. The thrumming of our vocal cords communicate our beliefs and songs and ideas. Our arms can wrap someone in love, our legs can carry us to our dreams, our skin can betray our emotions by blushing or prickling with fear. And when our heart stops pumping, our lungs stop filling, and our brain is deprived of oxygen, we lose that spark that we could call a soul, or whatever terms suits us best. Our body may do the moving, but it becomes bright with the unique combination of energy that is the self. I’m not a religious person, but I can’t deny that palpable relationship between flesh and spirit.

Not getting the chance to say goodbye to someone is a terrible feeling. My Father had been in the hospital for an unrelated reason for two months, earlier in the year, so when he was admitted again for something as small as abnormal blood pressure, I didn’t immediately panic. He had also been an alcoholic for my entire life, on and off but mostly on, so it wasn’t unexpected that he would have recurring health issues. For some reason, I always thought it would be more drawn out than this. Although I hoped he wouldn’t be diagnosed with something that would cause long suffering, it was still shocking when he went from the ER to Hospice in 24hrs, and then passed the next day. I had been calling him the week before, trying to get in touch without any success. I had recently taken over his finances and was in the process of attempting to organize things like recurring expenses, and was still in the weeds attempting to nail everything down by sifting through bank statements and piles of unopened bills. Turns out his phone bill hadn’t been paid, so he never got my calls and didn’t source out another way to get in touch. Because his diagnosis and downfall were so rapid, by the time I got on a ferry and arrived at the hospital, he had been unconscious for hours, and he never woke up again. I said goodbye at his bedside to his closed eyes, and hoped that he heard. I don’t know really what I could have said had he been awake, or what I would have hoped to hear from him, but it is something I am sad to have missed the chance for.

Just because you are grieving doesn’t mean the world can stop, an experience that is not unique to me. I had people show up for me in beautiful ways when he passed. To help with my children, to offer me solace. But then 5 days were up and Monday came again (like it always does) and the real world had to get back to it. Did I have more offers of help? Yes, but did I take them? Not really. I have two young children who need me. Unless I remove myself from the house, I will always be the one they ask for first in their times of distress. For play, maybe not so much. A fun Auntie is much more appealing, and I am so grateful they are blessed with many of those. I don’t feel I can ask anyone else to put their lives on hold to take on my role so I can hide and lie down and rest. I was already in maternal burnout before the death of my Father, so now I can’t seem to distinguish between my regular stress and sadness and that brought on by this loss. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

No matter if your relationship with a parent is complicated, you are still heartbroken when they die. I’ve never had what I would call a whole parent, but when my Dad died, I still wracked my body with sobs for days. Having never had a close parental relationship, I don’t know what it feels like when you lose one you are really close with; it must be so gut-wrenching. I have to imagine that I was close with my Mother, but I was weeks away from turning 5 when she passed, so I don’t remember my emotions from 30 years ago. They sit with me though. That wound is still left unhealed, that grief never truly processed. I loved my Dad, I had compassion for him, and we were friends. In the past few years though, I had to give up being the one who drove our relationship. He was becoming more and more reclusive and flakey, and I had two new lives I had created and was responsible for, and they needed me more. I hope I can have the courage to work on both my parental wounds so that I may heal and be whole for the next generation that I am already raising.

I might not be able to talk to my Dad about any of this anymore, but I know that if you don’t heal your relationship with someone, them being gone doesn’t make that mess go away. You are still there and you still have to do the work. It might be slightly less complicated, because you no longer have to fulfill the parts of the relationship that felt obligatory, but your own emotions haven’t dissipated. Yes, I feel like I should have called and visited more, but I am not letting that make me feel bad because that is in the past. And my Dad could have done better too, but we didn’t guilt one another about it. There were so many times my Dad cancelled plans with me at the last minute because he couldn’t muster the strength to leave the house, and while I sympathized with his struggles, I was still hurt. My Dad let me down a lot, but I know he was doing the best with what he had. The course of my life forced me to grow up very young in a lot of ways, and even though it was hard at the time, I think it is the key to the resilience I have now (although nothing has ever made me feel less resilient than being a parent myself). As you age, you gain the much needed perspective that allows you to see your parents as people, not just parents. You are able to cut them some slack, and recognize that they are struggling too, and they can’t always be the support you hoped for. Sometimes, the best thing they can do for you is set you free because when you fall down, they know you’ll learn to be strong enough to get back up again on your own.

Was he a good Dad? That’s up for debate, and really, how can we measure the success of how we are as parents? It is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. There were many ways in which I wish my Dad had shown up for me, but for all the things I could list as faults, I would rather focus on the things he did well. I never for a day didn’t feel like he loved me. He used to send me emails where the greeting would be something like “Dear Sweet, Intelligent, Beautiful Daughter.” He taught me to love nature and knowledge and picking up beach rocks. He was friendly with strangers, even when they didn’t know how to respond to his awkward humour. He was kind and generous. He loved art, dance, and theatre, despite not possessing a talent for any of those things himself. He used to bring me the annual schedule for performances in Victoria and we would pick three shows for the year and he would get us tickets in advance so we could look forward to them. He was a feminist and would marvel at the accomplishments of women as much as or more than those of men, which was very important for the Father of a daughter.

In an odd juxtaposition to his addiction, he was often very self-aware and reflective, not shying away from admitting to me that he was drinking too much or being too reclusive. He taught me to be brave with my emotions. When my Mom died, he didn’t fall apart, he stepped up and took care of us the best ways he knew how, despite a deeply flawed upbringing of his own. He supported me through University so I could become one of the first women in my family on either side with a degree (my Mother and her sister being the first). He planted trees for people when they were born, and when they died, a tradition I am attempting to carry on but I don’t think I inherited as much of his green thumb as I might like. When I was separated from him during my teenage years, he would call me with random, obscure words and teach me the definitions to expand my vocabulary. He wasn’t great at social cues, but he maintained a friendship with his High School best friend for over 50 years. He loved cooking and taught me to appreciate quality ingredients. He loved flowers, especially lilies, and I sent him a bouquet on his birthday for many years (did you know that for most men, the first flowers they receive is at their funerals? Buy men flowers!) and he would critique it if it wasn’t as pretty as the one I got last year. He was arrogant, but I remember him calling me back to correct himself when he had made a mistake on some sort of historical fact, not too proud to admit he was wrong (sometimes). He was an odd man, but he was open, liberal, curious, and he did his best.

Walking with him along the beach on Dallas rd in Victoria one day, something we did often, I turned to him and said “Dad, I don’t think I quite know what I want to do with my life.” I was newly 22, just graduated with an Undergraduate Degree in Business, and feeling guilty that I didn’t have a clear career path figured out (I still don’t) when my Father had, at the same age, been barreling through his medical training to become a Physician. He barely paused and replied “I think I would be worried if you did.” He always gave me grace, never bullied me or pressured me into making decisions. I was a pretty responsible young adult, but I don’t think that was why. He trusted me and never made me feel like I wasn’t capable.

I feel like my Dad waited for me to come back before he let go of this physical world. That he held on as long as he could until he knew I was there to see him off one last time. I am lucky not to have experienced intense grief much in the past decade. I have been on the support team for others going through it, and looking back now I realize there were things I could have done differently. Checking in more, like my sisters are now with me (we have different parents, so it wasn’t their Dad). When someone asks me now what I need, I try to give a realistic answer like can you take care of the kids or…mostly that. What I really want is to pause the world, for my responsibilities to halt and just be free to write or cry or lie in bed. An exhaustion has set into my bones that is more than my usual Mother-of-two-kids-under-five exhaustion. It is making my skeleton ache and hunch forward. And I have a hard time just going for a walk instead of keeping up with my regular responsibilities. Because even though I know the walk will do me well, the other things will still be there when I get back, and then I will be behind and overwhelmed. But I feel overwhelmed anyways, so why not just take the walk? Perhaps the lesson in all of this is not that I need the world to pause, but that I truly need to start reprioritizing. I always say I am going to, but in my scarce “free time” I almost always choose keeping house over reading, running, or writing. At least I am here today, to put this down and get it out. Maybe my skeleton will feel a little lighter tonight.