My Father : personal reflections on grief and loss

My father died on this day 33 years ago.  The call came at work on that morning of a working week around 10 am, I think it was a Thursday.   Dad’s heart had given out in the midst of a procedure they were doing to perform a tracehoctomy so he could breathe,so he died with no family or friends around him in a very sad way.  He had been heavily sedated in the hospital he was returned to on December 25th, 1984 following an operation to remove stomach cancer, the contents of his insides ruptured in the middle of the night on the 24th and my mother who died just under 4 weeks ago on the 12th of January had to take him in, in the early hours of the 25th of December.

Did unresolved grief play some part in my Mum’s death which followed a visit by my nephew and his daughter during which she (his daughter) underwent a siezure?  They said it was due to brain infection but the seizures are continuing and there is no sign of infection.          These are questions there will never be any answers to.   I do believe there is a family unconscious and lots gets buried inside of it.

I am glad I have therapy today.  I feel quiet tired.   A lot of grief errupted over the past three days.  I thought I was ‘doing okay’????  until the hairdresser who did Mum’s hair for many years hugged me on Friday when I got the appointment wrong and something I was holding in began to burst out.  I cried then and all the way home from the changed appointment on Saturday.   I felt alone yesterday but when I reached out to my nephew’s wife she called me, so really I am not alone although death makes us feel so alone, I know that.   So many of us have lost our fathers so others know my grief even if theirs is different in some ways.

Even though my brother said to me two months ago I should ‘be over’ Dad’s death by now I am in some way through it, but will I ever be over the loss of a parent at the age of 23.  Could my brother understand how it was for me, when he had 17 more years with Dad, they worked together and shared a very different relationship?  Or how it was for Mum when he said it was ‘all in the past’ when I tried to tell her how hard I felt it was his family ignored her at this time of year (December, Chrismas, January) travelling miles away from home?

This is all I know.  We all deal with grief in our own ways.  Our loss is different for each of us.  I don’t feel we ever ‘get over’ significant losses, for they shaped who we are and what followed in their aftermath are millions of ripples with vast repercusssions far too deep and complex for one finite human mind to ever fully understand.  The most we can hope for is to find a way to grieve recognising grief is equal to love and loss, containing feelings for what we did and did not experience with that person, it is a deeply personal journey and one that needs to be respected not invalidated.