Listening For Cranes

 

Whether it’s someone we love who died or we’re looking for our birth parents, we are searching for something lost and hoping to find.

 

We are trying to give form to our shadows.

 

            With adoption, you’ve already lost growing up with your birth parents. Even if you have wonderful, considerate, and loving adoptive parents, you will wonder what this other life would have been like, and if who your birth parents are has influence your life in some unseen way. 

 

Widowed Fathers

I have read few books that speak honestly and in detail about being a widowed father. Compared to the number of grief memoirs written by women, there aren’t many written by men. There should be more of both.

 

A recent book by Donald Rosenstein and Justin Yopp is excellent—The Group: Seven Widowed Fathers Reimagine Life. It shares the stories of men in a support group that met monthly and talked through their struggles of suddenly having to raise children as a solo parent. As they shared their insights and emotions, they helped each other navigate and survive their new challenge. 

 

Empty Journals

The mother of writer Terry Tempest Williams left Terry her journals but said she could not read them until after she died. When it was time, Terry opened them and discovered the pages were blank. Why would her mother take such care to nicely bind her journals yet leave the pages empty? 

When a Parent Dies

for T

Losing a parent is never straight forward because the relationship is one that we were born into and not one that we chose. We may not like both of our parents, and one we only tolerate until we’re old enough to get out of the house. When they die, we can experience a wide range of feelings—grief of various intensities, but also love, hate, relief, despair, sadness, anger, and guilt.

Even if our relationships with our parents weren’t the best when we were growing up, they are still family, and in the long run this may mean more to us than we realize at the time. Whether they were good parents or bad, we only have two of them, and when they die, we become orphans. 

After the Holidays

The holidays are finally over. We probably partied too much. Ate too much. Watched too much TV. We’re lethargic and exhausted. Yet, if we’re grieving, we finally no longer have to pretend that we’re happy and that life is a fantasy land of happy-happy. But now an unstructured year stretches out before us like a big lump of dough. What will we do with it? More to the point, do we have the energy or desire to cross grief’s boundaries and make any changes?

Grieving In the Woods

Book: Here If You Need Me, Kate Braestrup

Kate Braestrup writes about her life after husband Drew, a Maine state trooper, was killed by a driver who lost control. This isn’t a memoir of grieving. It’s a memoir of learning to live with grief.

She accepts the cards she’s been dealt, having learned from the loss of a beloved family pet when she was a teenager, that death was part of life. She buried her dog with her own hands and stacked rocks on top to keep animals out. She rebuilt that stack six times until she thought it was right for honoring her friend.

The Worst Grief

Sometimes when we’re feeling bitten hard by grief, or just snarky, we try to prove that we are hurting the most, and that our grief is the worst that anyone has ever experienced. In the entire world. Ever.

I’ve lost a wife in her 40s, three beloved pets (well, one not so beloved), both parents (one to dementia), all my grandparents, a pair of in-laws, a friend to AIDS, two to murder, several to cancer, one to suicide, and a number of young friends to car accidents. As I walk among the tombstones in my personal cemetery, it would be hard to put them on a scale of the worst because they each hit me hard in different ways.

Retiring Into the Forest

I am not happy with my parents. Or my wife’s parents. Or your parents, even though I’ve never met them, because they’re probably like mine. 

Throughout our lives, we’re always planning ahead for what comes next. Getting our ducks in order. Then we retire and stop making adjustments. We settle into a comfortable routine and let life go on without us. Except that life doesn’t stop changing.

Death of a Parent

“The journey of walking with a dying parent has no roadmap,” my friend Beth said. “It’s uncharted territory.” Our parents often die before we expect them to, and in ways for which we aren’t prepared, not that we are ever prepared for death.

            We know that our parents will die someday, and we expect that this will happen before we die. Yet we don’t know how we are going to react to their passing until the time comes and reality knocks us off our hinges. Some parents die early from a car accident or heart attack, and we have to deal with their sudden loss. Some parents die slowly, with our hopes rising and falling as they lose ground, rally, and then succumb to diseases like cancer. Some parents die from alcoholism, and some die when we are young and needed their advice and support.

Hospice and Parents

It was hard watching dad in his chair, tucked under a blanket, eyes closed, mumbling, “Help me,” and not know what kind of help he wanted. He hadn’t talked much in the last week. Was he thirsty? Hungry? Uncomfortable? Perhaps he was afraid of dying?

I’m often moved by the stories that Elaine, Kerry and Larry, who work in hospice, tell of the grace they encounter as people ready themselves to die, the regrets they express, the things they wish they had done, and the quiet presence that inhabits many of their last days. My friends are dying midwives, death doulas, who are like birth doulas because they help people make the transition from this life to the next.

Men and the Death of Their Fathers: Neil Chethik

Neil Chethik, FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms with the Deaths of Their Dads, Hachette Books, 2001.

            Neil Chethik provides insights into how men grieve death in his book, FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms with the Deaths of Their Dads.

            Through interviews and questionnaires of hundreds of men who lost a father, some when they were in their teens and all the way up to men in their sixties, Chethik presents the scope of male reactions. Some men were on good terms with their fathers when they died, others were not. Some were physically taking care of their fathers in their last years, while others hadn’t seen their fathers in decades.