I hope I’m alone in this, but right now, there’s an bizarrely
high number of people in my extended circle sloughing off the mortal coil. One
of my best friends lost her dad a few days back. He was just sixty-five, healthy active guy,
low-stress job, and BAM—heart attack.
Gone.
My dad died when I was twenty-one, and, ever since my wife,
Margaret, and I got the news from our bewildered friend, getting ready to board
a plane to go back east for the days of nightmarish crisis that follow the death
of a family member, I’ve been pacing and organizing my thoughts; trying to
figure out what information I have that’s useful to pass on, since at my age,
there’s not a load of my friends who have been through this process before.
Here’s what I got.
Ahem.
There’s a dead parent club.
If you’re in it.
Congratulations. Poor you. All of us who are lucky enough to outlive our
parents join it eventually; some of us join earlier than others. Being part of the Dead Dad Club, or it’s
sister organization, the Dead Mom Club, doesn’t make you instantly wiser; on
the contrary, it makes you more prone to wander around in a dysfunctional haze
and possibly do some stupid, dangerous, self-medicating things for the first
few months. The only benefit of
membership is that you’ve probably lost part of that buffer of assumed safety
most of us wander through the first part of our lives with. I think most of us unconsciously assume that
we’re mostly safe while we’re young, and if we’re lucky enough to have loving,
committed parents, we probably grow up assuming that they’d take that
metaphoric bullet to keep us safe.
Unless you’ve actively worked to deconstruct this belief, it’s probably
still there—until somebody dies, and it’s gone.
This is the hidden membership fee of joining the Dead Dad Club.
Peeling off that psychological layer of protection is a big
existential shift; acknowledging that you’re number’s up next. This offers you either the opportunity for
some fabulous self-destructive behavior, or the chance to get a lot more honest
about your limited time on the planet and use the fire that will inevitably
consume you to fuel your passion for whatever you want to do before you
die. Hopefully, you do a little of
both. Me? I wrote a novel because my
friends started getting wrinkles. You’re
never the wrong age for a midlife crisis. Because you never know how much longer you
have to live. Mwoooahahaha.
What’s often overlooked when we’re busy laughing, rightfully,
at forty-five-year-old dudes driving late-model penis cars, is that a crisis
like this is a shitty, painful opportunity to recognize the consequences of
your actions, and clean up your act, let go of unhealthy, draining
relationships, bad habits, or whatever is holding you back, and use that
freed-up energy to plunge heartfirst into where ever you suspect your personal
sweet, juicy, meaningful bliss might lie.
You don’t have to take advantage of this opportunity. But as long as you’re suffering, you might as
well get something beneficial out of it.
This leads me to one of the best, most useful things anybody
told me when I was grieving for my Dad; you’re
never too old to feel like an orphan. Yes,
it sounds like wallowing claptrap. Guess
what. Your parent died. Within the appropriate time frame, you’re
allowed some wallow. As we get older, being
an orphan is an increasingly universal constant. What does it mean? Orphans in children’s books get to have all
the adventures, partly because nobody’s there to protect them from having
them. But ultimately, we as readers feel
their experiences more keenly because, unlike most ten-year-olds, orphans (in
the literary, no adopted/foster/step parent sense) are entirely responsible for
their actions. Nobody is going to step
into the middle of the story and say, “I’m sorry my daughter rubbed the magic
lamp setting a djinn loose and wrecking your antiquities shop, Mr. Suleman,
I’ll pay for the damages.” Nope. If you’re an orphan, it’s up to you to
wrangle a shop-fixing wish out of that djinn yourself, and get it back in the
bottle before it wrecks Lower Manhattan.
Or whatever. It’s lonely and
scary losing that protective buffer. But
it can make you a better, more interesting person. Or not.
That’s optional too.
My best advice to someone grieving, is, as long as you’re
engaging your grief, you can’t do anything wrong. If you’re downing a half-bottle of whisky so
you can let down your guard and really be in touch with the pain, chug-a-lug,
my friend. If, however, you’re downing a
half-bottle of whisky so you don’t
feel the pain, you’re setting yourself up for a short lifetime of alcoholism. Because that pain is there until you sit with
it and let it have its way with you. You
may need to do weird things. I felt the
desperate need to be outdoors with my grief.
For me, God, or whatever I needed to draw solace from couldn’t be found
indoors. Since I was grieving on a
college campus, and had no car to get away to, say, a large park, this led to
some awkward circumstances.
But whatever. This is
your time to be an entitled bitch--as long as you’re aware of the consequences
of your actions, and can live with them.
Cry when you need to. If people
are disturbed, it’s probably because they’re out of touch and you get to be the
little blackbird of dourness that offers them the chance to enter a more
compassionate reality.
When my Dad died, I had to mourn every single way I loved
him. It’s like my mind had this giant
mourning checklist; hundreds of items long, and I’d be unpredictable around
those things until I had time to sit down, dig in, and really feel miserable
about them. Somebody would offer me
coffee, and I’d start tearing up because I’d realize I’d never get to steal another
sip of Dad’s mug of coffee, which was always a quarter milk with five rounded
teaspoons of sugar. I hated never
knowing when something would come up and I’d start crying. So I became a marathon mourner. I was going to set the world record for
getting over it and back to normal life.
When I found a new bubble of sadness, I’d try to go off by myself and
push on the idea, find what hurt, bawl if I needed, until it stopped
hurting. I was the massage therapist of
grief.
Here’s a hard-won secret.
You can only feel so bad. The
best thing to do—for me—was to let myself feel as miserable as I could. Just plunge in to grief as deep as I could
go. What I found was there’s a
bottom. You can’t go beyond a certain
point. Like the ocean floor, you can
settle in there for a while, under the weight of all that’s happened, and be
held, as long as you like. Then the
energy naturally dissipates, and you get kicked back up to the surface for some
cathartic deep breaths. After a while—and
I mean months, it became mechanical and assured.
How bad is it? That’s
completely individual, and depends on your relationship. My Dad and I weren’t super, secret-telling
close, but we loved and respected each other enormously. His death was about three times harder than
when my first partner of four-ish years left me. I figure when Dad died, I had four months of
being an utter mess, and another five of the exhausting but predictable hard
work of grieving. Take that and do your own
math.
Last advice: when the opportunity arises, don’t be afraid to
be happy. You’re not betraying
anyone. Some day in the third month, you’ll
have a really nice day. You feel
lighter, and you laugh like an idiot about something. Somebody asks you how you’re doing, and you
want to tell them you feel fantastic, but you’re embarrassed, because maybe
they’ll think your dad didn’t mean anything to you. So instead, explain that you’re living closer
to your skin. That the darks are darker,
the lights are brighter, that everything smells more intense. Because it does. You’re happy not because your relationship
was shallow, you’re happy because happiness is a biological inevitability, and
some part of your unconscious has decided to give you a well-deserved
break. Take it and be glad. Because there’ll be more work to do tomorrow.
