And This All Bears Repeating

It has been roughly a month and a half since my father died, and I haven't really felt like writing about it during that time. Every once in a while, though, I start to think about him again, and feel the need to get something or another out. It's unpredictable, but when it strikes, it's hard to think about or accomplish anything else. I apologize in advance for the darkness of the post to come. If you don't want to read it, then don't. You've been warned.

My father was in hospice for eight days before he died. I was there for most of that time. Eventually, time just sort of ran together, and we lost track of the days. Hospice is a place with a strange gravity. It feels like some kind of purgatory, where one stops for a while before crossing over fully. It's clean and beautiful and quiet, and the staff is wonderful, but it's fundamentally somewhere that people go to die. You sit in a quiet, generally dark room, and listen to a person you love start to struggle to breathe a little more at a time, watch them get pale and waste away. I could only take so much of this at a time, so I would walk laps (the building is roughly organized as a circle, with a garden in the middle), close the door to the side room and do Sudoku, try to sleep on the profoundly uncomfortable furniture, anything for a distraction. But… you never want to go too far, because, well, … you know. Someone you love is dying, and you can't stand to be there and watch it, but you can't stand to not be there either. For some reason, even though you know it may be the most painful thing you've witnessed in your life, you don't want to miss it, the end.

I missed it, but more on that later.

My mother and I would leave the hospice home for the day at various times, to either distract ourselves or to get things done for what was to come. We went to the funeral home and planned the funeral. Parts of it felt oddly sick and commercial, like even death has been commoditized. Of course it has… everyone dies. The people at the funeral home were wonderful and everything, but I hope you can understand how the idea of a showroom of caskets would rub me the wrong way. Glossy marketing pamphlets of the virtues of various caskets and liners, funeral packages, etc. It felt… a little impersonal, but I don't know how it was supposed to feel. I will say that the funeral home did an excellent job of dealing with things that we just didn't want to deal with, like contacting the newspapers to run obituaries.

Later, we went shopping (?) for funeral plots for my mother and father. We were following a hearse on the way to the graveyard. No funeral procession or anything. I mean, I understand it's a graveyard, and that hearses occasionally stop by. It was just really strange. After walking around the graveyard, my mother found a spot she liked under a tree. She wanted dad to be buried under a tree so that he would be out of the sun. Skin cancer. It kind of weirdly made sense. I paid my respects to a dear friend's father, who is buried in the same graveyard, and we left.

More time passed, but I'm not sure how much more.

Mary and Joe got me out for dinner at some point, and may have saved my sanity in the process.

Eventually, my mother and I were at home, and got a call. Not THE call, but A call. My father was probably going to die within the next twelve hours. Things are kind of a blur, and I probably already have some of the details wrong. It's evening, and we go back to the hospice house. Dad's breathing is different… but it sounded like we had a little time. After agonizing on whether I should leave to get some sleep, or some more distractions to use in the hospice home, I leave. On my way home, mom calls and lets me know that I should just grab some stuff from home and come back if I want to be there when it happens. I run inside, grab a book, make sure the cat is ok, leave. I drive back, texting my niece to get ahold of my brother, because our dad is dying, and it's now, and he needs to come if he wants to be there. Thank goodness the other cars on the road knew enough to get the hell out of my way. Sometime within this trip to home and back, no more than 45 minutes, my father has died.

Just like that.

I didn't know, but I did know in some way. Something feels off. I have not had the best timing at these things this year. Rikki's grandmother died 15 minutes before we got there. My uncle died on a Saturday, when we had planned a Sunday visit.

When I arrived back at the hospice house, I see that the door to my father's room is closed, and the hospice nurse comes to give me a hug. Then, I really do know what's happened. I go into the room and try to comfort my mother, who is understandably a mess. My mom's friend, who also happens to be a grief counselor, shows up and does a better job of comforting her. I let Rikki know that she should just wait to come until tomorrow, because it's late, but she decides to come anyway. After some private time, I ask the nurse to call the funeral home, and they arrive eventually, and wait for us to leave before taking my father's body away.

My mother and I go home, and Rikki arrives in Ankeny late. Then, there is more planning, meeting with the family and the pastor, notifying relatives and organizations, finding out how to give memorials to the right place.

Fast forward to the wake, and I am shaking hands with people I barely remember, who fondly remember my father, and apologize for my loss. This whole thing is more or less a blur. So many of my friends show up, and we stand in a large circle in a separate room, talking. Nobody really seems to know what to say (I'm 27. I don't have a lot of friends who have lost parents), so we turned to distraction again, talking about other things. It helped a lot. We stayed for a half hour after our allotted time slot, and were more or less asked to leave.

The funeral took place at the church that I went to as a child, and where I was confirmed. The service was… ok. I didn't know what to do when we were walking down the aisle and being stared at by everyone. Do I look sad enough? Do I look callous by trying not to show emotion? In retrospect, I may have cared about these things far too much. Readings from the bible, stories and anecdotes about my father written by his family and read by someone who only tangentially knew him in life, organ music, crying, and then I am lifting a corner of my father's casket towards the hearse. It still does not seem real at this point.

Into the limo, into the funeral procession, towards the grave site. A short gravesite service, and this time my mother starts sobbing uncontrollably, and I try to comfort her, but know it's somewhat pointless. Everyone leaves, back to the church. We have the classic church ladies' luncheon, and once again talk about anything but what just happened.

Shortly after the service, Rikki, my mother, and I return to the gravesite and gather up some of the flowers. Dad's already been buried. Awkward does not begin to describe.

Rikki and I decide to get together with some of our friends later, and we do, and drink, and laugh, and generally try to feel better about life. After a couple of days, I return to Kansas City, and go back to work, still not totally sure what just happened.

So now what?

I have gone through what you might call a crisis of unfaith through this process. My beliefs generally fall under the "agnostic" banner, but through this process, I have felt something rather odd. I want there to be something better at the end of life than what the evidence suggests - pain, misery, and suffering. My pseudo-belief in a just universe cannot be reconciled with what I have witnessed, so I want there to be something more. I just can't believe in my heart that there is. I am still having some trouble reconciling these feelings, and I'm not really sure what to do. Of course, my belief in a just universe has been shaken in many ways this year, so perhaps if I can give that up, I will know some peace in this regard as well. I suppose I will have to leave that here, for now.

I have also thought about the contrast between a sudden death and a long, drawn out fight against illness. My father battled with cancer for two years, and all the while, we knew it was killing him. It would go away, it would come back, it would show up somewhere new, it would go away, it would come back, and eventually he was too weak, and the treatments stopped working, and he died. Something really strange about this, that I didn't fully realize until afterward, is that you do a lot of grieving during the whole thing, while the person is still alive. This way, The shock is perhaps not so great when death does occur. However, there is not some great emotional change when the person dies, at least in my case, so I am still grieving in the same way as I was before he died. It's an even, dull kind of emotional pain. I have to wonder what it's like to lose someone suddenly. The pain, and shock, must be awful, but I wonder if it's like a spike, a blip on the chart, and then it gets better more quickly. Harder, but quicker. I don't really know. I don't know which I would have preferred for my father, but I do know that I am having trouble shaking, or even really expressing, the feelings that I have experienced throughout this whole thing. That will perhaps come in time, but for now, I am still a little punch-drunk and bewildered.

Caring for Your Introvert

I do love this article so very much.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch

Seattle was awesome, and Portland was awesome. I won't bore you with the details for now, but I predict the rather rare occurrence of a lengthy post to this blog in the future.

(500) Days of Summer was also incredibly good, and also has a lovely soundtrack.

I want to dig into getting Stress Test finished up, but I am apparently currently lacking my headphones, and a collection of loops I used that resided on my old computer. I'm in the home stretch, and once I can rectify these two things, it's game on.

That's all for now.

P.S. How do you like the new layout?