Category: Grief

Today kind of hurts

It’s one of those days.  Tuesdays to be specific. Tuesday is the day I go to my “suicide survivor group”.  I signed a confidentiality agreement regarding the group and I’m trying to take it seriously so will say no more about it except that I tend to leave those groups feeling a little battered.  I think going is productive but it is tough and I feel like I’ve worked when I leave. Inevitably I cry on the way home and am usually a bit more emotional the day after than I am most other days.  I see an Ativan in my very near future so I can go to sleep tonight.  Tonight is a bit extra painful because on the way home I called my dad.

He had written to ask for my social security number.  He is preparing his bank accounts for his death, adding me and my siblings as ‘pay on death’ beneficiaries.  A lawyer has advised it.  I understand and suppose it is the smart way to set things up but it also feels gross to be doing this sort of business with him.  But that wasn’t the painful part of the conversation.  My Dad is ostensibly very healthy and I don’t anticipate his death in the near future.  That part of the conversation just felt like an exercise in preparedness.

The hard part of tonight’s conversation was that I  also told him that when I talk to him I feel sad because he seems to not be sad about Nelson dying.  What does that look like?  Well, when we talk I inevitably ask “how are you?” with meaning hanging heavy in my voice.  I’m not asking how the day is going, I’m asking how he is doing with the grieving.  I have to believe he knows that is what I am asking.  But inevitably his response is “I am doing good, Teresa” said with emphasis on good.  At first I wondered if this was his way of making sure I don’t spend energy worrying about him?  Was he saying this to be protective of me?   Was he being paternal? But in the back of my head has been a growing discomfort because I think I’ve known it was no such thing.  What if he really is doing “good”?   How do I feel about the idea of him feeling “good”?

Let’s back up.  It’s important to know that I come from a long line of criers on my father’s side.  Growing up I thought of my father as the emotionally in touch one of my parents.  I saw my mother as tough, stoic and holding feelings at arm’s length.  I thought of my father as being more affectionate than my mother and more capable of being emotionally vulnerable.  Growing up I had seen my father break down in tears a multitude of times and can vividly remember the one time I saw my mother cry.  A four-year old Nelson had used one of her college papers as a practice sheet for his scissor skills and had shredded it pretty thoroughly the night before it was due.  So I thought of my dad as the feeling parent; the one who was emotionally available.  All of that may actually be true but it’s all relative.  The more time I spend in therapy the more I come to realize that our household didn’t lend itself to emotional honesty.  Like at all.   The fact that I thought of my dad as being emotionally available didn’t mean  he was.  it meant he was more so than my mother who had defense mechanisms on top of her defense mechanisims.  Crying about something isn’t the same as talking about something.  Caring isn’t communication.

When I was in highschool I spent a summer living with a friend’s mother.  It was a pretty big crisis point in my family up until that point.  My parents really struggled with how to parent me and things weren’t going smoothly.  During the events that lead to me leaving to go live with this family friend and also during the months of that summer my parents wrote each other letters discussing what they thought about how to handle the situation.  Let me say that again, they wrote letters.  To each other.  THEY LIVED TOGETHER and slept in the same bed but they left each other letters rather than talk about these emotionally charged concerns.  I’m not sure that they didn’t talk but I certainly know the letters happened and I found them and read them my senior year.  At the time they were a fount of information for me about the thought process my parents were each using to approach the subject of parenting me; the things they wanted to happen, the things that worried them, the strategies that would be employed.    I wish I could read those letters now because I’d be curious to see if they contained any reference to actual feelings about what was happening.  I am going to guess they did not.  I feel so surprised to realize how little we all talked about feelings.  I had such emotional upheaval as a teenager and spent so much time embattled with them and slamming doors and crying and seeing my dad cry that I think I thought of us as being an in touch group.  But we weren’t.  Not really.  Maybe more than some other families of the day and my dad was certainly more comfortable being sad than many of the other dads I knew but we weren’t skilled at talking to each other about how we felt.  We said I love you and at birthdays and other family celebrations we would talk about what we liked about each other and things we were grateful for and I confused that with emotional connection.  It was the tip of the emotional iceberg but it didn’t mean we were comfortable or practiced at speaking truthfully about difficult emotions.  I continue to get my arms around that.  We would read books and cry about the things that happened to the characters and I felt very deeply which made me think I was part of a deeply feeling tribe.  Maybe I was but feeling isn’t expressing.

When my Dad left us – and that is how we describe it – when Dad left us he gave us each a pretty silted phone call.  I think he cried and tried to  say that he just had to do this but it was a month or so later that we got a much more in-depth letter explaining his decisions.  As I write this it occurs to me that Dad is much more comfortable talking about his own feelings than receiving the feelings of others.  I’m not sure what I am trying to say.  Or what significance any of that has on anything.

Anyway.  So I told my Dad I needed him to be honest with me and tell me if he was really okay because I’m not okay and I feel really alone in that.  No one seems to be sad like me and I don’t understand why and THAT makes me sad too.  But he told me he is doing good.  He said he is an old man with an old man’s perspective.  He thinks it’s neither good nor bad that Nelson is gone – it is just is.  It happened.  He kept saying that.  It happened.  Which I guess means he is not struggling to accept it.  I should be relieved for him.  I continue to struggle with accepting it.  I just have this notion in my head that parents who lose their children are devastated.  I think of that as the worst pain a person could face.  No one wants to outlive their children.  Right?  Talking to Dad it sounded like he was talking about the death of a houseplant.  I can’t imagine he meant for me to feel this way about our conversation but it gutted me. I imagine he wanted the things he was saying to comfort me but I felt so distant from him.  People can be at different places, I get that and talking about this stuff can make people uncomfortable and as I have already described raw emotions aren’t our strong suit.  I get that too.  And maybe there is something about being in the twilight of your life where you have a perspective that the rest of us don’t and you can put things into their place and process it without all the tears.  I just don’t know.  I just know I’m not in that place and it hurt me to talk to him and I can’t imagine wanting to talk to him again any time soon.

I feel so lonely with this grief.  Both of my siblings have made statements that this loss is different from losing our mother.  The context is that it is not as earth shattering for them.  For me it is the exact opposite.  My world was rocked when my mother died and I grieved hard and heavy but this hurts in a very different way.  To me this is tragedy.  My mother’s death was so hard but it was not a tragedy.   There were even parts of her life that I felt profound sadness and regret about both on her behalf and on my own.  She had a tough life and a lot of emotional upheaval that she didn’t know how to cope with until the very end of her life.  She died just as she was beginning to live.  And that is tragic but her death was not a tragedy.  Nelson’s death is a tragedy to me.

Talking to Dad I think he also pointed out that he had not seen Nelson in some time and I suppose that makes him more removed?  I don’t know.  I miss Nelson’s presence for sure.  There is a void on Friday evenings.  There is an emptiness in my phone.  It hurts.  It is ongoing hurt.  I feel like I just want (need!) to find someone who is as sad as I am about Nelson but that person can’t be found.  And the looking for that person, that reaching out to others and finding such a disconnection is just too much.

Not every day feels like this.  I readily admit that I am now in the possession of many good days, better days.  But this has not been one of them.

I picked up a pen

There were several days between my brother’s death and his memorial.  We needed the time to assemble the family from far and wide and to let people know and to dislodge the lump which was perpetually stuck in our throats.

In hindsight I feel good about the memorial we put together.  I may have written about it before.  Intense grief seems to produce amnesia about things for me.  Anyway.  The memorial was held at the funeral home in Nelson’s home town.  It was the quintesential small southern town funeral home.  In other words, men in suits and southern accents who probably expected things to be done a ‘certain’ way.  We were most definitely not the ‘certain way’.  We brought in a projector and a macbook and a huge screen and John Moreland music.   We brought in a 10 gallon bucket and straw hats and guitars.  We created a busking spot a-la Nelson style at the front of our designated room.  The memorial service itself was comprised of three slideshows set to music – good music; intersperced by addresses from each of Nelson’s siblings and an open mic portion for anyone who wanted to speak.  It was moving and it felt like Nelson and I wish he could have known that the place was packed, every overflow room utilized and that he was greatly missed and mourned.

I suppose I took the lead with the planning of the memorial.  The highschool version of me that had perfected procrastination has long ago been banished and the replacement version of me overplans and works voraciously to meet deadlines and exceed expectations.  The memorial was no exception.  I slept very little that first week as I culled together hundreds of images of Nelson and arranged and rearranged slideshows so that they held a theme or complimented the music.  I rehearsed their execution and left absolute nothing to chance.  I wrote my remarks for the memorial after thinking for days about what I wanted to say and throwing away several drafts that proved inadequate.  I made a photobook for my son that included hundred of pictures of Nelson with his uncle Nelson and had it printed in hardback book format and delivered prior to the memorial.   I was exhausted but I was determined to treat the occasion with the respect it deserved.  I wanted very much, to do right by Nelson.  In so many ways he didn’t treat himself well and I wanted to offer the counter balance to that by honoring his memory with care and attention to all the details. Many people commented about the amount of work I had done in those few short days.  They remarked about it as if it was somehow unusual or implausible that I would be able to do such a thing in the midst of the tragedy.  I must admit I was somewhat bewildered that others weren’t attacking the planning with the same gusto.  It was such a comfort to me to be so immersed in the music my brother loved while pouring over images of him.  It was good for me to journey through my memories looking at the pictures and organizing and chronicling them.  I felt like it was keeping my brain moving and my thoughts revolving around Nelson in a way that, while sad, also gave me great comfort.  I felt compelled to work on the memorial.  It gave me somewhere to place my grief.

And then it was over.  And there was a strong sensation of now what?  We almost immediately went to Portland and then we were back and off to the beach for a few days with friends but then we were home and it was too quiet and I didn’t have a memorial to plan and I didn’t know what to do with myself.  It was such a dark time.  I felt like I cried so much and the future seemed so bleak.  At some point during this time my friend Chris remarked that I didn’t seem to have any defense mechanisms to help me deal with the grief.  He pointed out that I seemed to stay in a perpetually raw state.  I remember thinking at the time ‘why would I want any defense mechanisms?’   I needed, wanted to feel the sadness.  My brother was so important to me.  I didn’t want to defend myself against the loss.  I wanted to sit with it and hope that maybe it would swallow me up and that would just be the end of it all.  But it didn’t work that way.  I was just adrift with my pain.  And it wasn’t good.  I worried that I might really lose myself.  I was having dark thoughts.  Very dark thoughts.  I didn’t know if it was normal but I was very overwhelmed.  And that dark, overwhelming sensation was also static.  Day after day I would wake up and burst into tears.  I would cry off and on all day long and ended each day sobbing into my pillow.  I wasn’t able to articulate it then but I needed a place to put the energy of my grief.  Planning the memorial had given me that but it was temporary.

While we were in Portland Judd found a painted rock at the Japanese Gardens.  It had a positive message painted on it.  When we got home I found two more rocks at Target of all places.  It got me thinking.  I took a trip to Michaels to buy paints and brushes and I started gathering rocks.   I had actually had the idea of painting rocks germinate in Portland and I picked up a couple rocks from Portland and brought them home.  I decided I would make my brother a rock garden in my backyard.  The first rock I painted was big and I painted small dots all over it.  It wasn’t very creative or artistic but it was tedious and it took hours of concentration.  It was the sort of concentration that requires you to focus on what you’re doing but with room for thoughts to move about which was the magical combination I apparently needed.  What happened next has felt like a miracle to me.  I started painting rocks – badly and with little vision but while I was doing it I wasn’t crying; usually.  I started to look at rocks other people had painted to give me inspiration (direction) and I discovered Mandala stones which I thought were extremly beautiful.  I tried in vain to create one myself.  Mine were so sloppy and horrible I often painted over them and started over.  It wasn’t rocket science but I was making something and I was using my brain.  I was practicing being focused again.  It felt medatative in some strange way.

All this painting necessitated the buying of more supplies.  And on one of the trips to buy more paint or some such thing I wandered the aisles of the store and found something called ‘artist tiles’.  It was nothing more than a small pad of black paper squares.  On the cover was an illustration of a doodle done in white ink.  Hey, that’s neat, I thought to myself.  I should try that.  And so I bought a pad of artist tiles and a pen with white ink.  I felt pretty unencumbered to sit down with a piece of paper and pen when I had become adjusted to paint bottles and brushes and cups of water and rocks and paper towels and lots of prep and even more clean up.  I don’t know what I was hoping to do.  I just wanted to try to draw something with white ink on black paper.  I simultaneously bought new colored brush pens and a couple books on hand lettering.  I was on some creative high.  The hand lettering, while very appealing to me, didn’t catch fire.  Not yet.  I tried it and realized my mind wasn’t able to take on the task of learning this skill.  I put the books and pens in my closet.  But I put the artist tiles and the pen on my kitchen table.  And I went back to mostly crying all day.  One day, while crying I picked up the pen and drew a flower on one of the black paper tiles.  It didn’t look half bad.  I think most of the credit goes to the fact that it’s white ink on a black background but I liked it and I drew another flower next to it and then another and then another.  Before I knew it, I had made a drawing.  I had made a drawing!  I made another.  I kind of liked them.  I surprised myself.  I was drawing flowers and thinking about Nelson and it was focused and it was comforting.  And then I drew more.  And then I drew so many that I bought a box to put them all in.  I began to realize that at some point I might look in this box and think about where my life and heart were when I was doing these drawings.  I tried not to care if they were good or not.  They were quite definitely medicinal for me.  But Judd told me they were good.  He made me feel so good about them.  He made me feel artistic.  Never would I have identified myself as artistic.  Can trauma make turn you into an artistic person?  I tried painting Mandala stones again and finally they started to look better; not great perhaps but better.  It was a new experience for me to create something and feel that it looked good.  How emotionally rewarding.  I own a lot of supplies now and I worry a bit that all this desire to create may come to a screetching halt particularily when the rigors of the real world, paying job and school work  come pressing in.  But for now, I am drawing and painting and grieving for my very precious brother.