Grief In the Strangest Places

Do you ever go into therapy thinking that you have one thing to talk about and instead you end up talking about something else entirely?

That was my day today. I went into the room expecting to talk about a number of things. Topics that we did make our way through. I wanted to talk about my endless dance with moving out. I wanted to talk about the preparation I’ve been doing for the upcoming school year. And I wanted to talk about the feelings of discomfort I had after the experience I posted about yesterday.

So we were talking about that. We were talking about the reaction I had to the situation and J was validating many of my feelings. She wanted to delve more into the feelings of shame I had surrounding the experience. She wanted to explore why I was feeling so affected by the death of a cousin I only met briefly and had not seen in years.

I didn’t know how to explain it at first, but eventually I think we dug deep enough that the triggers for these feelings started to become clear to me.

This cousin of mine that just died, he was part of such a large, busy, caring family. I’ve seen pictures of them in hordes, getting ice cream, going for hikes, vacationing. They’ve posted about how grateful they are for each other and how much they loved their father. I mentioned in my post how part of me was always secretly yearning to have that. Wishing that my family was a fractional as close as these people.

As I’m thinking about the person they lost, my heart physically aches for them, because I see what value this man was for their family. I think about how their lives have changed so deeply and feel empathy for the grief they must be feeling. But I think my heart was also aching for me, as a type of grief for the relationships and connection I will never have with my own family.

My father is one in a family of six. I would characterize the relationship he brothers and sisters as marginal. I know that a piece of him cares for them, because they’re siblings, but mostly I think they share a common love for my grandfather. They don’t seem to know how to relate to each other as siblings.  Year ago, when my father was hospitalized, not one of his siblings came to visit one, including his sister who was coincidentally visiting from out of state. When my aunt was diagnosed with cancer, my dad didn’t even call her, because in his words “what would I say?”

My dad’s family is loud and opinionated and judgmental. They’re not bad people and I wouldn’t necessarily say they have bad intentions. All the same, these are not people that I feel comfortable sharing my values or thoughts with. There’s no emotional closeness. They’re not people I would ever trust with my vulnerability.

As much as I love my grandfather, each one them is like a replica of him. They come with his stereotypical views about race and gender, complete with the discriminatory remarks that make me shudder. They are all set in their ways, close-minded to the rest of the world’s perspective and uninterested in hearing what others have to say. They are so intensely negative, always with a complaint and less often with any type of gratitude or satisfaction. It’s frustrating to be around them, because politics are a constant discussion and I know that my opinion would put me at odds with them. So I’m always torn between speaking up, starting the war and feeling even more out of place, or stewing in my own resentment.

Either way, family functions are not enjoyable to me. It’s gotten to the point that I avoid them and when I do attend, I interact exclusively with my cousins. Not that I’ve ever been, but if I were out in public with them, I would feel ashamed. Worried about the comments they might make. Worried about how loud and overbearing they might be. Worried about how being seen with them would affect the perception of others on me.

Case in point. My grandmother discussed having my uncle attend the wake with me and I vehemently rejected it.

I think that maybe some of this additional anxiety I was feeling on Sunday comes from the fact that I am ashamed to be a part of them. It’s a label I can’t just shake. I am naturally associated with them, and associated with any negative behaviors, even if I very much disapprove of the behavior. So when I said something I later self-evaluated as stupid or fumbled with my words, even though no one from my family was there, it was like I felt the weight of being “one of them” and worried even more about what they were thinking of me as a person.

I know that all families can be loud or chaotic at times. Likely, these siblings and their kids have unpleasant moments. But while they cherish their family time and present it proudly, I do not.

I think that knowing this family, seeing their experience with the loss of their father over Facebook through words and pictures, and then living it at the funeral home, has reminded me so clearly that I do not have what they do: supportive relationships with siblings, aunts, and uncles, a family value system of kindness, generosity, and positivity, and emotional investment in each other.

I never will have these things, because as much as I wish my family was like theirs, it isn’t. It just seems so unfair sometimes that they’ve lucked out in that way and I haven’t. Perhaps that’s why this has affected me so much. J called me empathetic, and that could be true as well. Like I said, it’s almost like grieving the absence of my own family existing in the same way theirs does.

Even with my mom’s family, it’s hardly the picture of connection. Things are definitely there. I enjoy my time with them and feel freer to express my true self. All the same, I’ve always felt somewhat out of place.

What makes it harder is that while I’ve worked hard to move past some of my difficult feelings with them, my mom still has her own issues with her family. Her own emotional baggage has had an affect on her relationship with them and their perception of her.

It puts me in a difficult position. I’m aware that they don’t understand my mom and have their own opinions.  I have to live with that knowledge while I’m striving to develop a separate relationship with them. All while also feeling protective of my mother and finding ways to jump to her defense if those opinions bleed out.

The same way I worry about me being associated with my family leaves this mark on me, I think it’s even more overt with my parents. I spoke in another post about the things I know about myself to be true: That I’m not worthy of good things and that there’s something inherently unlikeable or unattractive about me. Sometimes, I think that I worry that these truths come from the things I inherited from them and that being around them illuminates those truths to others. Sometimes, I have trouble being around my parents because it almost feels like a foreboding dread that since I come from them, I cannot separate from them. My parents experience similar intense social-emotional challenges as I do and I worry that I’ll never escape these truths and challenges no matter how hard I work.

That sounds awful. It feels awful. Even though J reassured me that my feelings do not make me a bad person, I am overcome with guilt just for putting them out there. I wish things were different than they are.

J summed it up best. I’m desperate for the connection with my parents, yearning for things to be better between us, and trying to take the steps on my end to do so. I’ll think about how I should go and initiate a conversation or make an effort to spend some time with them. But I cannot forget that we are so vastly different in terms of values, interests, and personality. Those differences complicate things and interrupt our closeness.

Sometimes, my frustration about about those differences, my frustration with who they are, gets in the way of my intentions when they utter a word or do something that bothers.  Sometimes just being in their presence frustrates me because of my resentment from the past, even if they haven’t done anything wrong at all.

I’ve spoken before about the resentment I have towards my parents for not teaching me how to identify and regulate my emotions as a child and for not modeling positive social relationships. My negative emotions were often matched with anger so I didn’t learn how to process them, and we didn’t talk through conflict so I didn’t learn how to navigate beyond it. Difficult feelings exploded and then they disappeared, glossed over and not discussed.  It left me unable to tolerate my emotions, very much an inflexible thinker and often confused by the actions of others.

How do I reconcile my differences with them and my lingering feelings about the past? How do I find a way to appreciated them for both what they can and have provided and  accept them for what they couldn’t? How do I separate their own faults with mine?

I continue to struggle in finding answers to those questions.

I have no idea how all of this rose from the depths of my brain from the death of a person that I barely knew, but it’s been in there. Triggering feelings. Leaving me with that sense that something’s wrong, even when there’s no evidence to support it.

Today, I went to a movie with my friends. At the end of the movie, one of the characters makes a choice to leave the friends he has had for his entire time behind for a new relationship and a new life. It was a very touching moment as he bid them goodbye. While I felt the sadness, I also felt disappointment and grief at the choice of this fictional character.

Most people were probably thinking how wonderful that it was that this character was finally reunited with someone whom he cared about deeply. They may have been interested in his next adventure. Not me. I still find myself perturbed and frustrated by the ending.

All I could think was: He had a group of people that adored him. He knew that their support was around him every day, knew what each day would look like? How could he leave the people with whom he’s forged these close relationships behind? Why would anyone give up the consistency and comfort of a home to be “lost” out in the world? 

You find grief and sadness in the strangest places.

Drowning Out Guilt

Four years ago today, I woke up and decided to accompany my friend on a drive. It was a Friday, but I didn’t have class. So we went to complete an errand, went out for lunch, and then headed back to campus. As we exited the highway and stopped at a red light, my phone rang.

It was my father, who never calls me in the middle of the day. I froze, knowing immediately something was wrong. After a minute, I picked up the phone and was given the news that my grandmother had died.

My grandmother had lung cancer. Three months earlier she’d been officially diagnosed and started undergoing treatment , but she’d been visibly sick for months before that. She was a nurse and a lifelong smoker. She knew the signs, but never sought help from a doctor until a friend saw her cough up blood. After her diagnosis she got chemotherapy, more for us than for herself, but she didn’t stop smoking.

On the morning of February 7, 2014, or possibly the night before, she began coughing and her carotid artery burst. That was the end. She knew this could a possibility, a side effect of her treatment and her type of cancer, but she never warned us.

She was ready to go, I think. I just wasn’t ready to lose her.

I have a lot of guilt surrounding my grandmother’s death and the end of her life. I was in my junior year of college, which means I was away at school during most of this. When she was first diagnosed, I called her but did not come home. Two days before she died, I came home to surprise my parents. I remember suggesting I go visit her, but it had been snowing and icy, so my mom said I should stay home and I listened. I rarely reached out to her, rarely called or did anything to check in. Then she died, and I still didn’t come home right away. Not until the morning of her viewing.

As I re-read what I have written, it sounds horrible. How could I have kept such distance from her? In looking back, a small part of that was illness-driven. She was sick and I didn’t want to witness it. I thought that if I kept my space, it wouldn’t hurt so much when she was gone. Wrong. 

But also, Grandma and my mother had a complicated relationship (not unlike the one I have with my mom now) and I think that bled into my own relationship with her. I felt like she loved my cousin more than me, valued him more, because that was what I’d grown up hearing from my mother. I felt like she didn’t understand the person I was and the things that were important to me. When I was with her, I didn’t know how to be or what to say to her. So I avoided.

Some of this was definitely a figment of my BPD brain: the black-and-white all-or-nothing perspective, the sensitivity to invalidation. My grandmother was a difficult person to get close to in the sense that she didn’t express her love directly with words, which was hard for me as a person who needed that.

When she died, all of those her flaws and my qualms with her vanished from my mind. She showed her love in the things she did for us, and I appreciate that so much more now. All that remains when I think of my grandmother is love.

My grandmother, who, along with my grandfather, saved the money that put me through college. My grandmother, who once bought my cousin and I pizza at 9pm just because we said we were hungry. My grandmother, who made sure there was always an ice cream cake at family gatherings, because she knew it was my favorite. My grandmother, who saved the last piece of jewelry my grandfather had given her as a special gift for me. My grandmother, who always made sure the family was together, fed, and happy on holidays. My grandmother, who told me in the last conversation that we ever had how lucky she was to have my cousin and I, the “two very best.” My grandmother, who drew crowds of people to her funeral who told us how cherished we were and how much they admired, respected, and valued her.

I try to drown out my guilt with these memories. As the years have passed, it’s eased some. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully forgive myself for those choices, but I’m trying.

And so today, I think of her with a mix of love and grief, as I remember the person she was and the unfairness that she was taken by that awful cancer sooner than she should have been.

These anniversaries are so very tough for me.

Grandpa.

I’ve never been one for goodbyes
So, till I meet you there, I’m singing
A traveling song to ease the ride and so you know
Everywhere I roam
I’ll see you on the road
– Ryn Weaver, Traveling Song 

In the last memory I have of you, it is Christmas Eve. I am seven years old, young and innocent and excited to open Christmas presents. Everyone is at the house, celebrating. Trying to. Putting on a good show for me and my cousin, because we are kids and this is supposed to be a happy time.

You are supposed to be behind the video camera, capturing our joy as we tear open endless packages that you and grandma have bought for us. But you’re not. You’re laying in a bed in mom’s old room, barely conscious.

At one point, I wander upstairs looking for mom, who is sitting with you, crying. She tells me to give you a kiss and tell you that I love you, so I do as I’m told. I can’t remember if you are able to tell me that you love me back. I don’t know if you even hear me.

We still open gifts. I remember that. And I have to imagine, now, that this is a painful experience for everyone who understands what is going on.

I am not one of those people. I understand that you are sick. I know this, because I have visited you in the hospital. I have seen nurses in the house. I know that you did not take us trick or treating this year like you always have. But I don’t understand how gravely ill you are. I don’t understand that you are days from leaving us. So when my cousin and I come upstairs from playing and everyone is crying, and then he is crying too, I seek out mom in confusion. Why are they crying? Why are you crying? I don’t understand.

It doesn’t make sense to me. I know that I should be sad, because everyone else is sad, but I don’t know why. I want you to be better and I expect that you will be eventually. Death is not an ending to your story that my mind is capable of conjuring up. It is not an experience I am familiar with.

Days later, I am at my babysitter’s house. I am playing with another girl, when my babysitter calls me downstairs to tell me that you are gone. My aunt and cousin are there crying, and they pull me into a hug to cry with them. Except I don’t cry, because I don’t grasp the brevity of what has just been taken from me.

That was 17 years ago today. 17. I can hardly believe it.

I don’t fully comprehend your death when it happens, not right away. It’s just a fact that becomes a part of my life. You were sick and you died.  I have a grandfather that’s in heaven now. Only three living grandparents. I return to school. I go to grandma’s and slowly come to learn that you will not be there too. We talk about you sometimes. A new normal settles in our lives.

Christmas does not have the same joy. Our family does not have the same laughter. I don’t realize any of this until years later. It’s not until I’m older that I really come to understand just how much I’ve truly been cheated by having you taken away. I begin to feel your absence more tangibly.  I listen to mom tell me that you would have been at every competition, every event, and I feel a stab of grief each time.

My heart aches as I think of what you must have gone through, the physical pain of illness and the mental pain of knowing you would have to leave us. Knowing you wouldn’t be there as my cousin and I grew up. All anyone ever tells me is how we brought you so much joy. How when I was born, you thanked mom for giving you a granddaughter.

It makes me so deeply sad and so outrageously angry that we didn’t have each other for longer. You were so young and it is so unfair that it makes me want to scream. You did not deserve what cancer did to you. You deserved better. And I deserved you.

I think that grief is supposed to get easier as you get further from the loss, but I’m finding the more time that has eclipsed since we lost you, the harder it is that you aren’t here. Seventeen years later and the pain is so raw. You were gone before I ever had the chance to really remember you. The memories I do have degraded with time. I don’t know anymore if some of the things I remember are actually products of my own mind or are just things I’ve been told by other people.

Here it what I remember for sure. I remember spelling bees on the trips to see Nona. I remember Easter egg hunts, where you moved the egg when my cousin tried to cheat. I remember going mini golfing. I remember trips to Toys R Us, struggling to choose between two toys and you buying me both. I remember you taking us in the car to find Santa on Christmas Eve when he did not show up on the firetruck like usual.

I remember knowing I was loved. The memories come in flashes, but I remember your love without any doubt in my mind.

I wonder if you’d be proud of the person I became. I hope you would be, because it has been a tough road for me but I am still trying. Growing. If could make a wish, it would be for you to see me now.

If I could have that one wish, no strings attached, it would be one more day with you. I would let you tell me stories about your childhood and when mom was little. You could tell me about grandma. You could tell me about your values and your opinions. Give me advice. I would listen to anything you had to say, want to know everything about you. I would let you hold me for as long as I could. I would soak in the sound of your voice, your mannerisms, and that laugh.

But this is real life. I know that can never happen, so I rely on the videos. The ten years of Christmas that you and mom taped so long ago. My birthdays. My first Halloween. Summer afternoons out in your backyard. The videos that I watch whenever I’m missing you and grandma a little extra. The ones I’ve watched so much that I can practically quote them word for word. Watching them, for those few minutes, makes you come alive again for me.

You gave me a gift with those videos. Even though you are mostly behind the camera, with my cousin and I as the main focus. I wish there was a little more of you, a little more than just your voice. But I will take the few minutes we have. The precious footage of you on camera opening presents, laughing with our family, holding me on the day I was born. I will watch that as much as I need to so that I never forget your voice, your laugh, your spark.

Wherever you are now, wherever your spirit has gone, I want you to know how much I miss you. I miss you in ways that I can’t accurately express. I was so lucky to have you, blessed with a man that gave us his whole heart. I wish I could have told you that when you were alive.  The tears I cry today are those of love and grief for the incredible man you were.

I love you, Papa. Always.

Your bird.

Empty Chairs

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you out there! Especially to those of you who have been struggling lately. I feel like many of the bloggers I follow are having a hard time and I have been too. Holidays, although they are meant to be joyous, can be a trigger for many.

I am lucky that I always have a place to go on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have always split time between both sides of the family and I have gratitude for that because I know many aren’t as fortunate. While I (mostly) love the opportunity to spend time with my family, the holidays can be a difficult time for me because of the people who aren’t here to spend it with us anymore.

Namely, my grandparents.

My mother’s father died when I was only seven and we lost both of my grandmothers months apart in 2014. They were really great people, at least as far as I ever knew and can remember. My grandfather doted on my cousin and I, we were his everything. My grandmothers both showed their love in their own way, and were such stable, enduring parts of our family. Their love was always implied in the way they took care of us, quietly and without asking for things in return. Looking back at this, I was so very lucky to have them and so very unaware of that when they were actually here.

As a little kid, all four of my grandparents lived close and were very involved in my life. I saw them a lot, especially on holidays. Time was shared equally between sides. We spent Christmas Eve with my mother’s parents and saw my father’s parents Christmas morning. I don’t specifically remember where Thanksgiving was always spent, but I know it was likely a mix of both of them. They were usually the hosts, the central hub where everyone came together.

Then my grandfather died. Three days after Christmas, no less.

I won’t say that my family fractured at the loss, but it was a devastating blow to us. I didn’t realize the magnitude of how we stumbled until years later, when I found out how grief truly affected my mother and uncle. We recovered, but that started the transition.  A divorce in the family changed Christmas Eve celebrations to the 23rd and my grandmother didn’t host Christmas anymore. My parents didn’t want to travel the distance to where Christmas was relocated, so holidays became split of sides. My mother’s side for Thanksgiving, my father’s for Christmas.

This is, by the way, about the point where Christmas stopped being such a magical time for me. To this day, I still love the holiday most of all, but my best memories are from those years where I had all four of my grandparents and that sense of loss was far from anyone’s mind.

So anyway, this was how it was for many years. Somewhere in that time period, we lost my uncle. And we went on. Then my grandmother got sick. That year, we spent both holidays with my mother’s side, knowing it would be her last with us. And it was, but what I didn’t know at the time was that it was also my Nana’s. We lost her just a week before the following Thanksgiving.

Holidays since 2014 have been a mismatch of family get-togethers. There is always somewhere to go, but no longer any routine to where I end up. Sometimes, for reasons I won’t go into, I don’t even spend Thanksgiving with my parents anymore. It’s such a weird thing to discover that certain people are the glue in your family. Usually, you only discover this once those people are gone and you get to see what happens now that the glue is no longer there to support everyone else.

We are still a family. We are still together. I have one living grandparent left at this point in my life and he is such a vital part of it. But we are two distinctly different families than we were three years ago, twelve years ago, seventeen years ago.

While I love the holidays, they are a period of reminders for me. Reminders of the people they were and what we were robbed of when they were taken from us by illness. Reminders of what might still be if they were still here. And the worst, the reminder that the chair they should be filling is empty, because they are not here. Not anymore.

That’s the part I hate most about holidays. Those empty chairs. It makes my heart hurt, because I would give literally anything to fill them. Anything to hear those voices, see their faces. To spend five minutes with them. If that were only possible…

Instead, I’m forever stuck with memories of tearful relatives as my grandfather lay dying in his bed on Christmas Eve. Of my grandma giving me a necklace that she had engraved for me, knowing it would be the last gift she’d ever give me. Of my family all together at Thanksgiving, trying hard to forget the reason so many of us are there is because we buried my nana days earlier.

It’s a pervasive grief that I haven’t let go of, and probably won’t for a long time, maybe ever. It’s a grief I don’t know how to talk about, because there is a statue of limitations on how long it is okay to openly and emotionally miss them. Because no one in my family ever seems to want to verbalize it aloud, when that’s all I want on those days. To say “I miss her. I miss him.” and have someone echo that sentiment. To hear that they ache for my grandparents too, the same way I do.

But no, we don’t talk about that. So I quietly miss them, remember them, love them. I love their memory so much that just thinking about them brings tears to my eyes.

I loved the laughter of today. I loved the gentle teasing, reminiscing about our childhood, the sports talk. I love that we will be back together in a month to do it again.

It would just have been so much better had those empty chairs been a little less empty.