“Love ya, Dad!” These were the last words I spoke to my father as I gave him a side hug inside my mother’s car. He was fiddling with his oxygen tanks, and we didn’t get an opportunity to have a full embrace. His anxiety was spiking as he prepared to head home. I wonder if he knew, in some way, that this would be the last time we would see each other. In the car, he went and away went the car. I watched as it drove out of sight.
Over the next few weeks, my father’s cancer would advance. He would have moments of sheer confusion and delusion. He frightened my mother as his deteriorated mental state expressed itself in moments of manic energy. You never wish for death, but you never feel at home with dying. Such was my experience when I received the call that he had been given medicine for terminal respiratory secretions, also known as “death rattle.” His breathing became labored, and the morphine was being increased.
I had scheduled several times to return to Virginia to be with him that fall. He didn’t even make it to my first trip down. On the evening of September 15, 2021, I received a call from my brother, informing me that Dad had died. My mother and brother were by his side.
Death is an event, and dying is the process. The residue is grief, in many ways, a terminal diagnosis in and of itself. It’s the diagnosis of a disease that won’t kill you but will drag out and inflict its symptoms for a lifetime. Or maybe grief is like a phantom limb, removed by surgery, still felt present by memory. Such was the haunting description by C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed: “[Death]…is an amputation.” Or, perhaps, grief is an unwanted houseguest who doesn’t pick up cues that their presence is no longer welcome.
But grief is not the same thing as sadness. Sadness is one of many by-products of grief. Anger bubbles up when I recall my age and that of my father at his passing. Happiness bubbles up when I think of fishing trips. Bitterness emerges when I ponder the rare cancer that he could not have prevented. Lethargy subdues me when I think of the years left without him. I will not hear him call me again. I cannot call him for help with an issue with my mower. I will never see his truck drive down his country lane again.
The mystery of death is only reinforced by the many different images and phrases we employ to describe it. Death is a “passing away.” Our loved ones long for a “quick death” or to die “peacefully in their sleep,” while the ancients feared such a timeframe. Some people “bite the dust,” while others “kick the bucket.” Some, like a vagabond, “leave this life,” while others “slip away” like sand in our hands. Communal societies remark that the deceased has “joined their ancestors,” while more individualistic ones have “departed” and are always in “ a better place.”
Perhaps the language for death requires a mosaic of images and words. This may be the linguistic liturgy that allows us to cope with a strangely familiar absence. We often feel that death is a petty thief, but this is a burglary we see well in advance. As Anne Sexton reminds us, “Death’s in the goodbye.”
The good-bye is tragic because it is never commensurate with the millions of little reasons that made our love distinct and authentic. We reflect on good times and bad moments. We recall arguments and uncontrollable laughter. Most of all, we remember the last time we touched our loved ones. I have a chest in my house, and I smell my grandmother’s house every time I open it. Indeed, I smell her. Who knew that grief could encompass all the senses? Death is simply a diffuser of memories.
All of these thoughts remind me that, in a meta sense, grief is simply the reminder, the cost, of love. To experience it is to be reminded that our hearts were knit to someone and that death violated us. Maybe grief is our inner world attempting to find where our loved ones are hiding. I long for the day when I find my father again. He’ll exclaim my nickname, “Barney boy!” and I’ll embrace him and whisper, “Dad.”