Since the summer of 2010, my family has been walking through a difficult, significant, and occasionally traumatic process. On a hot August afternoon my wife and I made a hurried trip to the emergency room where her mother was being treated. It was obvious to me her condition was quite serious and we spoke very directly about the likelihood of this being a terminal situation. By mid-November, she had begun hospice care and she soon passed while I held her hand bedside.
In more recent days, we observed my father’s cognitive and then physical decline across three years, and then more rapidly across a couple of months, prior to six days of hospice care in an assisted care facility. My dad passed as I was standing with my mother beside his bed.
Earlier this year, my father-in-law also began to decline in health and passed in mid-September. For the last five years or so, Sharon had been caring for him as he lived alone in his home. Despite numerous physical and cognitive conditions, he wanted to remain independent. Sharon managed his finances and drove him to the grocery store, doctor’s appointments, and more. Eventually, a fall and a more rapid decline required a move to the same assisted living facility in which my father passed. A couple of weeks of hospice care and being surrounded by his children preceded his eventual passing early on a Sunday morning.
My ninety-year-old mother made the decision to move from her home to a supportive living facility as she was lonely and knew she could not maintain her home any longer. A couple of good conversations between Mom, my two brothers, and me made the process of moving her, selling the home and its contents, a much smoother process. She is in a good apartment, has plenty of independence, is very happy and secure. This pleases all of us.
Across these fourteen years, I have observed a number of things about the process itself and how it has shaped us as we have walked through it. Those observations follow.
I believe I am far too hurried, rushed, and too easily distracted from important matters and significant moments. In the normal busyness of life as a fifty-four to sixty-eight-year-old person, it’s really easy to miss the important moments of life because I am buzzing by them in a blur. Even in my visits to my parents’ home I would be preoccupied with text messages or phone calls, when I could have been paying better attention to their questions or concerns. I am sure I would have gleaned more wisdom from my father if I had simply left my phone in the car, stayed longer, and listened more intently.
There is a wide variety of ways families deal with crisis and stress. Some families deal with these matters by acting if they are not real, hoping it all works out, denying the gravity of the moment. Later in this process the grim reality hits them with a profound thud and it crushes them emotionally. Other families deal directly with a crisis, look it dead in the eye, and stoically move through the process. If they respond emotionally, it’s done privately and all along the way. By the time the crisis has culminated in death, they have largely processed the grief and appear to others to be cold, emotionless, and even uncaring. None of those perceptions are true; they have simply processed the grief across weeks or months, rather than in hours or days. Neither way is better than the other. There is plenty of room for grief and mourning to be done differently.
One can improve his approach to these matters, even if he would rather simply avoid them. I grew up with a large extended family, including grandparents and great-grandparents in both my paternal and maternal families. Because of this I grew up in funeral homes. It was most common to be at funeral visitations with my brothers, parents, dozens of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. I thought this was everyone’s experience until I married my wife. We were twenty-one and had welcomed our son to our young family before she ever attended a funeral. It happened to be my great-grandmother’s funeral and I was stunned by her response to what she was seeing. It was a very emotionally difficult situation for her. In the years since then, she is much better with crises, emergencies, and death, but it’s certainly still very difficult.
After her mother’s passing, my wife took on the role of matriarch for her entire family and she does it quite well. It certainly stresses her, but she carries the responsibility with grace and dignity. I now find myself as patriarch for our clan and feel the weight of it. It comes with being the eldest brother and the one living in closest proximity to our mother. Sharon and I are certainly better at dealing with such issues of life today than we were in our twenties. We have learned. We have grown. We have matured.
Embracing these situations enriches one’s soul. I think there’s a natural, human desire to avoid pain, crisis, and emotional trauma. We’re human and don’t like the pain. However, I have learned that leaning into, embracing, and dealing directly with all such matters enrich one’s soul. As painful as it was to witness the final breaths of my mother-in-law and my father, these moments were full of important connections, grieving expressions of release, and mournful emotions of profound loss. I wear theses memories like scars on my soul; reminders of pain, but memorials to rich relationships.
Having walked through these experiences emboldens my heart for the arrival of the next crisis. I don’t fear it, nor do I want to hasten it. I no longer see it as something to avoid as a lethal enemy, rather I see it coming as a familiar, severe acquaintance with whom to walk for a few hours, days, months, or years.
