Really Good Grief
When my father died, grief took on its own life.
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The Joke's on Them

7/22/2013

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A christening cupful of pennies.

Broken and singlet earrings.

Jet beads from the store in Pike Place Market, purchased when I was 11.

These are some of the items stolen from my house the day of my father's memorial service.

Theories abound, but the most popular one is that there is a class of thief who plans ahead, reading obituaries to find out when homes will be empty. My husband thinks they were stupid meth-heads. Whatever they were, they were smart enough to come in through the back door.

For quite a while, I found a way to blame myself. If I hadn't left the laptop in plain sight... of the neighbor's yard. If I had made sure the sliding door was not only locked, but barred... But I've had to let go of the notion of myself as a strong enough power in the universe – not to mention in the home I share with three other people – to cause thieves to target me.

Once I take responsibility for strangers entering my house – well, as soon as I write it down, it looks wrong. A little crazy, a little egocentric, not to mention megalomaniac. I have the personal power to victimize myself?

Yet the bad logic persists, and is only remedied by better logic. People like to remind me that I'm not the only person responsible for checking the doors, not the only one who could have put electronics out of sight. And with all the thought, emotion, and effort that went into Dad's obituary, it would never in a million years have occurred to me not to publicize the memorial. I can't live in defense of things I can't even imagine.

It helped that I recently discovered the sliding door frame has pry marks, and the feeble handle lock (which we never used) broken. There's my good logic: This was not an act of pure opportunity, occasioned by lax locking procedures, but an act planned out well enough that the thief or thieves didn't even notice they could have entered without destruction.

It doesn't help anything at all that I keep discovering losses anew. I didn't notice the coins missing from the christening cup until I had to move a bunch of tchotchkes around this weekend, including the empty leather case, once used to hold movie campaign buttons, a badge from a fair, half a dozen pre-1964 nickels, and a bead from the interchangeable necklace I lost in 1976. Street value: negligible. Personal value: I'm learning to let go.

Letting go was difficult early on. I arrived home from the memorial intending to rest up before rejoining the mourners for dinner and drinks. When we couldn't find the laptop right away, we assumed some person had put it somewhere weird. The search began with mild recriminations and ended with the certainty that someone had entered our home and left with an iPod, a GPS device, and my father's laptop.

I felt like I was being tested: How much can I lose? And how does losing a father's laptop compare to losing a father? How much does the universe need to take away before I attain enlightenment?

Still, every so often I open a container to find it empty of what it is supposed to contain. I have no stud earrings left; they were easy to pour out of their jewelry box and carry away. The good news I don't have to deal with the broken earrings any more, or the mixed legacy of my grandmother's charm bracelet, or toys and mementos whose primary value is endurance. The good news is that my son's bass guitar was walked past and ignored, though it was worth more than the electronics. The good news is that nobody was at home, nobody was hurt, and we didn't lose anything we can't live without.

The good news is that my dad didn't have to hear about it, and worry about me. The good news is that we came together in his name to share our love for him in the way that mattered to us.

And I was wearing the earrings he designed for me to the memorial, so I still have those, and I think about him every time I put them on.

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Mensiversary

7/13/2013

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PictureAn independent man
July 11 marked 6 months since my father died. I don't keep track of these month markers very closely, but my stepmother does, and my sister does too, and they point it out. I notice and mention a renewal of grief, reminding someone else to remind me how long it's been.

Six months without Dad. Six months of dealing with his death. That six month marker doesn't really reflect how long I've been facing it. I've been facing it since I noticed the DNR bracelet he wore during his first hospitalization, and since I noticed during the second hospitalization that he wasn't wearing one, and asked him about it.

“I guess people want to keep me around,” he said.

I told him I was one of them, and he smiled.

Noticing and marking these monthlong intervals is one way a new death is like a birth. In the days after a birth, a child is days old, then weeks old, then months old. We note developments keyed to these increments and compare the child to other children we meet of the same age, though we know we're not supposed to.

I've noticed some developmental milestones of my own since January 11. I no longer start all conversations as if I'm continuously in the middle of a thought about my feelings about Dad, or completing an interrupted story about him, or sharing a memory of a moment that keeps sticking in my head.

I no longer arrive home from the minimal obligations I was able to uphold and curl up with snacks and beer on the couch to take a break from the voices and noises inside my head. Not every day.

I no longer feel haunted by his face in the last moments, when the only question that came to mind was, “How will we know he's dead? How do we decide?”

More rarely than in earlier months, a wave of grief washes over me, and I have to surf it to shore. This week, I deleted Dad's email address from my “Family” list, and though I knew I wasn't deleting him as a member of my family, that one hurt. This time.

This time, so clearly marked. Each month counted marks a success, like keeping a baby alive. 

Happy mensiversary.

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Lucky Woman Sees Father Die

7/5/2013

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My refrain over the fall of 2012 came from a newspaper headline cited by Jay Leno many years ago concerning the questionable joy of being the only survivor of a horrible accident: Lucky Man Sees Pals Die. As I spent more time with my dying, I knew I was lucky.

Here are some ways my luck really held up: 
  • My stepmother received a windfall (family coal money) that she used for my father's care. This included salaries for my sister and me so we didn't have to work and could spend time caring for Dad, plane tickets for my elder brother so he could visit frequently, and even towing fees when my family got stuck in the mountains the day of a scary medical procedure.
  • I recorded Dad reading beloved poems: "The Old Sailor" by A.A. Milne, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by L. Carroll. We completed the whole list before reading became impossible for him.
  • I was in the room with him when he died, an experience I shared with my sister, brother-in-law, younger brother, stepmother, and a loving neighbor who stopped doing the dishes and ran down the block on pure instinct.

Much of what I categorize as luck is really something else. Was it luck that brought our family in contact with an amazing hospice team? Was it luck that my husband and children were able to take care of themselves when I had less time and emotional energy for them? Was it luck that my sister and I got along despite historical conflict and alienation?

If these are luck, I wish you luck. I wish you discovery, and strength, and the time, space and support to talk and cry and sing spontaneously, and the right people in the right place at the right time. May you be lucky enough to watch someone you love die. 

I was, and it changed my life.
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    Pearl Klein

    I'm a theater artist and poet living in Seattle, where my father lived the last and best part of his life.

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