It's been a quiet, grey winter - a time of isolation as I work my way through the pile of grief that I've been accumulating.
I'm no stranger to death, to loss. Dad died in 1979, when I was just 18, in the spring of my senior year in high school. In some ways that inoculated me - I had that big freaking death long before many of my peers. But in other ways, it barely registered, for a bunch of reasons:
- I was 18, an age when a kid is naturally drifting towards autonomy - pulling away from family, parent, home
- Dad was a bit of a cypher - a little lost boy in a man's body. He liked college hoops, playing bridge. We'd share a chess game now and then. But there was no sign of a serious hobby or passion - fishing or golf or woodworking or lawn care or cars or any of the dozens of things men of that era might have gotten wrapped up in. In some ways he seemed to be playing the part of husband and father, and died long before he could figure out who he really was or wanted to be.
- Dad had been sick for a few years - on a bit of a roller coaster of heart attack, hospital, home, back to work - rinse and repeat. My sister and I would visit him in the hospital after school (blocks away). But he was practically a ghost years before he actually died.
- I spent a busy "last summer" with high school and work friends, and then headed off to college. I never really lived in the house without dad - and did not have to deal with his absence in the same way that mom, my sister, or my brothers did.
- I was on my way to following in dad's footsteps at the time - locking up my essence underneath a socially and culturally sanctioned shell. I insisted on stepping into the hospital room to see his lifeless body. There was a somewhat perverse pride at how armored, how immune to emotion I was.
Then many years without death. Grandparents we rarely saw or spent time with (distance). My godfather, after a long and debilitating illness that lent many years to get used to the idea. A few pets - our family dog Kyla, my beloved springer spaniel Nipsy. But mostly, death and grief remained a memory or a distant concept.
That ended when Mom died at the tail end of 2016. It was not quite so traumatic - she had lived a reasonably long life (80); I was somehow comforted to hear that Mary Tyler Moore, with her wealth and access to care died at the same age as mom. Mom had been dealing with vascular and pulmonary issues for many years, but remained independent pretty much up to her final year, and she gracefully divested herself of home and belongings, took up in an assisted living facility, and we each spent a lot of time with her in her final year - up to and including a Christmas meal at the facility and a family holiday dinner outside the facility just a week or so before she passed.
We each mourned, but none more than our (adopted) brother Tom, for whom the loss of mom was devastating. He'd already had one brush with mortality (alcohol related health issues, in 2011-12, that pushed him to early / medical retirement). Mom cared for him after he was discharged; he lived with her for a time as she cooked and mothered him and no doubt kept him sober even as she was in denial as to his addiction. No idea when he restarted on the booze, but he was certainly checked out during mom's final year, choosing not to participate in family decisions, and letting us know that he thought we were pushing her to the graveyard. Without a doubt, the world without his mother was more than he could stand.
When Tom's health started to fail in April of 2019, we switched into crisis mode, and for two solid months we got on the treadmill of hospital, home care, cleaning up his place, shuttling him to dialysis, etc. He would have best found convalescent care but he would have none of that - so back and forth to a cluttered, dirty, yet familiar home a few times before a final trip to hospice. Another few months of taking care of his affairs (mostly sorting through decades worth of treasures) before we could catch our breaths.
And then, this past fall, I let go of my little guy Elo - who had gone from being a handful in his youth to being a very wonderful little dog. When I bought my condo in 2008, Elo stayed with my ex for a time, thinking the dogs (we had two at the time) would be better off together and condo living would not be best for either of them. Elo ended up moving in a few months later, and he was a perfect fit. Heartbreaking to let him go but also very sweet - he lived a good long doggie life (16) and when the time came, it felt right, without a lot of second guessing or life extending measures.
So, as I wrote this back in early March it felt like I was moving to a place of stillness, a place of taking a dive into grief. The universe clearly had other plans.
