The Wordmistress

Death Trip

So now I guess I'm an expert at saying good-bye. Getting the phone call, making arrangements, accepting condolences: I'm a pro. Do you need to tell your toddler about death? I'm your woman. Accept a terminal cancer diagnosis? Let's sit down. In the past two years, I've lost the two family members I love the most --- and now I am left caring for my dad. He keeps re-treading the details surrounding my mother's death, just as my sister-in-law did after my brother died. And it hurts me to hear it over and over again. Just as it did before.

When someone in your family dies, people flock to you right away. They want to do the right thing. They ask, "What can I do? I'll help you with anything you need." Thing is, you don't need anything. More to the point, you don't know what you need. Even more pointedly, you don't know anything. A couple of weeks later, you just feel lonely. You miss the person who is gone. And you could use some help. Not much, but some company. Someone to order some food when you just want to stare at the wall. But those people, the people who did the right thing right away, are off doing some other right thing, right now.

But you can't blame them. You can't blame anyone for anything. You've got to be looking onward and upward. Sometimes hard, but always necessary.

Alone Again, Naturally

My father is alone tonight and he has been every night since my mom died this past Tuesday. Turns out she was very, very sick. And we are very sad.

She was in the hospital for five weeks and worked hard with rehab to walk again. She underwent radiation 26 times on her brain and lungs. And she came home for three weeks to spend with my dad, going to the casinos and buffets and meeting me and Mia.

And last Thursday we got a very optimistic report from the doctor, who thought she looked terrific and pleased with her progress. We were over the moon. But my mom did not want to die a long lingering death. She didn't want to be fawned over and tended to. She wanted to go out her own way. And so on Tuesday, one day after her 75th birthday, she let herself go. Like that.

So, for the second time in the span of two and a half years, I was responsible for eulogizing a person who is as dear to me as life itself. I buried her in a double plot that I had picked out in the Jewish cemetery where her parents are buried. It was a lovely graveside funeral. Mia was unbelievable, so pretty and perceptive.

The Jewish rituals surrounding death, grief and burial are wonderful and supremely comforting. Everything was simple and had a meaning. When they lowered her into the ground, I felt like my mom was at peace.

But my father is not. I am not sure what to do. My dad and I were never all that close. He would be very hard on my mom, which I now see was just his way of trying to make her feel better. When my mom's hearing went bad, she'd put my dad on the phone and I hated telling him all the things I wanted to say directly to her. It was my mom that I felt close to. I even had the audacity to suggest to her about six months ago that she leave him.

How dumb am I? How could I know that he would stand by my mom with all of his strength and love and spirit and show me the most important lesson of my life? What an asshat I am.

But I guess that's the way life goes. I could have never believed that I would be left with only my dad and my sister when I was 42. But life never turns out how you planned. I want to help my dad, but I don't know what to do. He seems so helpless and he keeps blaming himself ... I keep trying to soothe him, I know that it just takes time. I haven't even really begun to grieve yet ...

My faith, though, remains unbroken.