mourning dove
I have found myself making funeral plans and even funeral programs despite having no ability to predict dates of death. This might come from my dad’s mom, my grandma Colleen. She was a planner. She planned every detail of the end of her life and its coming days like she had done it a thousand times. I suppose she had, in her head. This seems to have passed on to my father; with his unwillingness to burden anyone, by way of planning ahead, striking while the iron is not hot.
So it was that when we walked this medical road together last week in which we found out his illness is back, he asked me to pull out a notebook to make sure my sister and I don’t have to make any decisions after he’s gone. This, within hours of the news.
I did as I was told, only able to find a red pen in the hospital room in the moment.
Now that we are back home and I’m coming to terms with what this past week means, I cry at random times, go numb, try to read a poem and make it through two lines, and remain constantly in hyper-vigilant caregiver mode for both mom and dad.
In the wee hours of the morning, after the dogs wake me up to go out, I sit with all of this. I don’t know how you can be in shock at the news of a sick man in his seventies getting ready for palliative care, but you can, trust me. Or maybe it’s not shock, I don’t know. Maybe there aren’t words for losing parents that have adored you and taken care of you and vice versa.
No one else can give you the words either. No one else has been through this. I mean, I know everyone goes through the loss of their parents in one way or another but no one is going through this. You see, as much as we want to encourage each other with a been there-done that, we have not. It’s the same as saying we have had the same childhood or romantic relationship or friendship or personality or experiences. Every common marker of a life fully lived is incredibly individual; uncommon. Maybe this is why grief is lonely like divorce or addiction or mental illness. No matter all the other humans that have walked the same road, not one road has ever been just the same. Even love has different shapes.
Every mourning dove’s coo song has something about it that sets it apart.
So as I preemptively work on funeral programs, mostly so I won’t forget what I’ve been asked, and I write about my parents, obituary-style, only I can know the mother and father of two beloved daughters the way that I do, and that’s beautiful. Lonely and terrible and beautiful. Just the same as the healing will be.
Good Grief
Let your heart break
So your spirit doesn’t.
