The Corridor

This is the first time I have tried writing since my father passed away in April.

Grief is an insanely complex emotion, one that looks different based on the triggering loss and morphs over time as we navigate through a life that no longer looks like it once did. I’ve heard someone say recently that “grief is just the love we once felt for someone, that no longer has a vessel to embody it”. Whatever grief actually is, it’s different for all of us, and working our way through it takes time and patience that most of us simply don’t have.

I’ve learned a lot since my father died, even though writing those words causes a wellspring of emotion to overcome me, bringing an almost panicked breathe and steamy tears to rise to the corners on my eyes. Learning to accept the simple fact that he is gone, and that I will not see him again in this life time has been the greatest struggle. Though I see him every day; he died in my house, right in front of my fireplace, in a hospice bed that could not keep him comfortable in his last days. There is not a morning that has passed since that I don’t see him there, sometimes struggling with his own discomfort, other times ashen gray, jaw eschew, cold to the touch, lifeless.

His final days are a blur to me. I knew pancreatic cancer was a death sentence, as did he. The final year of his life I tried to do my best to spend time with him doing important, memorable things. Often this was for myself as much as for him, and that is a selfishness that I cannot seem to feel sorry for. We got his favorite milkshake, went to the woods, talked about his dad and the importance of their relationship. We reminisced about the sports I played as a kid with him as the coach, and the fishing trips into the hills that I still do to this day.

Early this year he had his first stroke, and what was likely a heart attack. His Oncologist, concerned that the chemo was causing these clotting events, ended his treatment. We had some hope, an Oncologist from OHSU said he looked good, and in six months we could talk about experimental trials. Within four days, dad was on hospice, though he was still walking around and taking visitors from every era of his life. Classmates from High School and College, former students, coaches he worked with in his capacity as an athletic director at a local Christian school, and family, all who loved him.

One day, he hollered for help from his bathroom. He couldn’t get off the toilet. I had to muscle him up, and more or less carry most of his weight to his bed. That was the last time his feet would carry him anywhere. Bed ridden, we were able to get local EMTs to help move him to a hospice bed set up in the living room. I remember thinking he would get to see the leaves on the trees bloom one last time, and maybe the view outside the big picture window would bring him comfort. This wasn’t to be. His liver and kindeys were shutting down, what urine came through the cath was black, and though he wanted to have a bowel movement I think he was more concerned about my sister and I having to clean him up. We would have, he changed our diapers as babies after all, but it wasn’t to be. Just three days after we moved him to the living room, he died in his sleep. My sister was sleeping on the couch next to him, she said he may have started breathing a little heavier, but who knows. We were both exhausted.

From entering hospice until the day he died was eleven days.

Prior to that he had been driving himself around, fairly active despite everything, and it still only took eleven days to fell the man who taught me how to shoot a basketball at the age of three. Losing the man who would always tower over me, even if only metaphorically, has been the hardest loss I have endured. I am lucky in that regard, that a man who for thirty-two years taught me how to be the man I am today, died when it was his time, and not before. Others have lost for more, at far worse times.

It’s been a little over seven months, and life has changed in more ways than one since his loss. My family no longer looks like it did at the beginning of this year, the patriarch is gone and my mother is in a retirement community. I am left with an empty home, and the memories of my fathers demise to haunt me when I least expect it. His lifeless body is there when I close my eyes, the ache of his absence evermore present when I enter what was his shop, the clamor of unasked questions and undefined emotions echoes through the walls of what once was the family home. Not perfect at any point, but what was once filled with a family who loved each other despite our imperfections.

When I try to look at this in a detached manner, I see that I lost the one man who I felt guided me through life. Fundamentally, I couldn’t truly be my own man until he was gone, but I’m left wondering what sort of man I am as a result. Are my hobbies and passions mine? Or did I find solace in those things because they were his that we did together? Did I ever have an opinion that was my own? Or did I form my opinions in reverence or rebellion to the man I always felt I had to challenge?

Everyone leaves someone behind, and I feel like my father left all of us as better people, but for me I feel he left me unsure of how to navigate a world in which he no longer exists. I’m doing my best to learn what I need to learn from this, while at the same time trying to see to the responsibilities I have now that he is gone. It’s wild.