Grieving Parent

Tag: Grieving

  • Easter

    Easter

    It’s Easter Sunday.

    Another big family gathering day.

    Another check mark on our Year of Firsts check list. Our first Easter without Richard.

    I really hate these Year of Firsts check off items. But I’m pretty sure I’ll hate the Year of Seconds, and the Year of Thirds and on and on etc., etc., just as much.

    It was a really beautiful spring day.

    We started with Easter Mass at our church. As always on Easter, it was crowded, as the twice-a-year church goer’s showed up in force.

    Most of us were dressed up for the occasion. Easter was one of the twice-a-year-I’ll-wear-dress-clothes days for Richard.

    My sister and her husband had their whole family with them. We sat behind them. We as in Debbie and me. Sarah is in Texas. And Richard isn’t here.

    But Richard wouldn’t have sat with us anyway. He always stood in the back of church. Standing back there usually meant he would get volunteered to be an usher when one of the people assigned for that mass failed to show up – which happens most weeks. He would sometime complain about having to usher so often, but he always went back for more.

    After church we went to the cemetery. We took some candy for Richard and my mom. Yeah, I know it’s pretty silly to toss candy out on the ground at somebody’s grave, but that’s what we did. We’ll do it again I’m sure.

    Later in the afternoon we went to the farm for a family get-together. Lot’s of food, lot’s of dogs and cats, but mostly lot’s of loving family.

    The cousins shared a few more of their Richard stories with us. Really enjoyed that.

    It was a very nice day. But like everyday since that awful day, it was missing something, and we were missing someone.

    I was going to use the picture below as the spotlight image at the beginning of this post, but my fabulous daughter beat me to the punch. But he looked so cute, I had to share it here too.

    Young Richard in his Easter best.
    Richard showing off his Easter best, and his trademark smile.
  • Grieving Dads Do The Funniest Things

    Grieving Dads Do The Funniest Things

    My boss at work came into our break-room last night, where I was eating my supper.

    He said, “You win the award.”

    “What award?” I asked.

    “The one for making the biggest part order in company history.”

    He handed me a sheet of paper. It was a copy of an email sent to cancel the order.

    I work in a factory in maintenance. We paint cars in my shop. One of my jobs is to rebuild paint pumps when they go bad. This involves taking them apart, cleaning them up, then putting them back together with new parts replacing any that were worn out.

    One of the parts this particular pump needed is called a displacement rod. Costs $147.10 each.

    Seems I ordered several million of them. OK, 5,133,600 to be exact.

    I guess I made one of my frequent trips into la-la-land while I was at the computer ordering my part. That happens often. I’ll find myself staring off into space, lost in my thoughts, mostly always about Richard.

    I don’t remember even typing a “1” into the quantity field on the order screen. I really don’t remember putting millions in there.

    The total came to $755,152,560 or so they tell me.

    It’s a shame they caught my mistake. It would have been interesting to see what three quarters of a billion dollars worth of pump rods looked like.

    Maybe they’d have given my one as a going away gift as they walked my out of the door.

  • When Should You Return to Work?

    When Should You Return to Work?

    A big question many of us must face after losing a child is when do I go back to work?

    Most are probably like me – you need the money, so you have to go back as soon as your employer’s funeral leave has ended.

    My employer gives us 5 days paid time off for the loss of a close family member, including one of our children. I took a week of vacation after this so we could take Sarah back to Texas.

    At first I thought it would be better to get back to some form of “normal.” Keep busy. That sort of thing.

    A coworker lost his step-daughter a few years back. He told me his wife was basically nonfunctional for three months after her death. He was able to get some medical leave for this time period.

    I’m starting to think that would be a good plan.

    I have a job that involves industrial equipment. I can be dangerous – to myself and others. I really had no business being in that position for a long time after I went back to work. I had absolutely no focus on the job.

    I can now usually concentrate enough, for long enough to get tasks accomplished.

    But I have to act like I’m not thinking about Richard all the time. And that’s exhausting.

    By the end of the week I’m worn out. I’m glad the economy has slowed and we aren’t working any weekends.

    So I’m wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to be off for several months early on. Maybe get past some of the stress.

    Or maybe you never get past the stress.

  • Miracles

    Miracles

    Church can be a dangerous place for a grieving parent.

    In his sermon Sunday, Father Bill mentioned some miracles. He started with several taken from the Bible, including the story of Christ raising a little dead girl back to life.

    Father Bill then told us of a local family. One of the boy’s in the family was getting ready for major surgery and was afraid. But he never had the surgery. When the doctors took some pre-op pictures, the mass they were intending to remove was already gone.  It had just vanished.

    And he told us about a local man with some form of cancer and in bad shape. But his illness had suddenly gone into total remission.

    And while listening to this, I looked over at Paula in the choir. Her husband had cancer. I remember when a bunch of us placed our hands on him a prayed for his cure. And his cancer took his life. I wondered if Paula was thinking, “Where was my husband’s miracle?”

    Richard was as loved and prayed for as anyone could be. From everything I knew about him and what others told me about him, he lived a good life. He had faith. Where was his miracle?

    So many questions with no answers.

  • Grieving Dad’s

    Grieving Dad’s

    The following is from We Need Not Walk Alone, the national magazine of The Compassionate Friends.

    The Father’s Grief

    By David Pellegrin
    TCF Honolulu, HI

    At my second meeting of The Compassionate Friends about three years ago, one of the mothers said how nice it was to see a man attending, since “men grieve differently from women.”

    Her remark was no doubt meant to help put me at ease. I hadn’t said a thing so far, and might have been intimidating in my silence. But it caught me off guard. What I was feeling after George’s death was so absolute, so awful, how could it possibly come with any “differences”? Would one grieve differently for an infant than for an adolescent? For a son than for a daughter? Surely, grief was absolute for both mothers and fathers.

    Over time I came to acknowledge the differences the well-meaning mother had in mind:

    • Neither I nor the other men who occasionally attended talked much; the women talked freely.
    • I sensed I was better at compartmentalizing my grief than the mothers, better at keeping a lid on it socially and at work.
    • My male friends seemed less comfortable talking about George, bringing up his name or even looking at his pictures than female friends.
    • I came to see how intensely I felt I had let my son down as his protector, the father’s primary role.

    Shortly after becoming editor of my chapter newsletter, I sent a copy to my friend Jack Knebel in California. Jack and his wife, Linda, had been involved with a Compassionate Friends chapter after the death of their daughter, Hollis. He replied, “It’s good to see that a man is taking an active role in the group.” Then he went on to write movingly about those male- female grieving differences. The rest of his letter,
    which touched me deeply, follows:

    . . . Several years after Hollis died, Linda and I were being trained by Compassionate Friends to be ‘buddies’ for newly bereaved parents. One of the exercises was to list all the unhelpful things that others had said in trying to comfort us, so that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. The other trainees, all women, made long lists, and did it with enthusiasm. When the lists were read aloud, they nodded knowingly at every entry and eventually hooted and howled with derision at the worst (some of which were pretty bad). When it came my turn, I held up an empty page and said:

    “People may have said such things to me. I just don’t recall.

    “What I do remember is that people tried to tell me how sad they were for us. I remember being told how much they loved Hollis and how much they cared about us. I remember one of my partners hugging me in the halls of my very stiff and proper law firm. I remember men who had never told me anything more personal than their reactions to a Giants’ loss crying at our loss and their fears.

    “You women are used to talking to each other about your emotions and about personal things. I wasn’t and my friends weren’t either. So the fact that we could do so was a great gift, and it wasn’t marred in the slightest by someone’s choice of words.”

    Now, the shell has been broken and I find it easier to talk about my emotions, my hopes and fears, about those things that really are important. And that for me was one of Hollis’ greatest gifts.

    I know that even after George’s death, he is a major part of your life. My guess is that you’re becoming more open to the gifts that he and those who care about you are able to give.

    Yours, with compassion and friendship,
    Jack

    Another difference I notice about how men and women handle grief – women write poetry, men not so much. I’ve looked at a lot of memorial websites put up by other grieving parents. I’ve seen lot’s of poetry. And I think every poem was written by a woman. Newsletters from TCF and Hospice have published poems, all by grieving moms.

    Why is that?

    Well I’m not a poet, and I know it. So you’ll probably never see a poem written by me on here.

    And that’s probably a good thing.