Mourning, Sort Of

A very strange couple of days.  I have to keep reminding myself that my father died.  It isn't top of mind.  Understandable when you think about it.  There really haven't been any cues.  I didn't know 'til late Sunday night that he was in crisis.  He died just eight hours after that.  And the only interactions I've had (apart from all of your comments, of course) were the two phone calls from the nursing home, and the series of calls I made afterward to try to get the funeral set up.  I wasn't there when he died.  I hadn't seen him for nine days.  I haven't been able to get to the funeral home (and given the latest blizzard, I might not be able to get there tomorrow).  Minute by minute, I've been much more caught up in storm preparations.  Yesterday morning, like everyone in and around DC, I rushed to the grocery store and spent a couple of hours stocking up on food and supplies.  Then I hunkered down and started praying that the power would hold this time.  Wasn't there something else, too?  Oh, yeah, my father died on Monday.  Right.

Part of this is the usual way that reality refuses to conform to your cliched notions of How Things Should Be.  Part of it is also the reality of Alzheimer's.  As you know, I'm highly resistant to Alzheimer's cliches.  One that I dislike the most is the tendency to refer to Alzheimer's as "The Long Goodbye."  When you're going through it, that's not how you experience it.  It's not the slow fade of someone you recognize, it's a descent into a nightmare world where damaged cognition turns the person into something alien and grotesque.  Beyond that, you have your hands full managing the day to day realities and don't get to linger or reflect on then/now comparisons, or think in terms of your loved one's disappearing.  But after a death you realize that there's something true about it after all, and that the person with Alzheimer's disappeared when you weren't looking.  What would you normally think about after a death?  Your last conversation?  But my last real conversation with my father happened sometime in 2007, if not earlier.  Or maybe you'd think about sharing something today, like the blizzard (my father loved severe weather), and you realize that you can't.  But there's no way I could have talked to him today about the blizzard - if he were alive, and I'd tried, he wouldn't have had any idea what I was talking about.  Or you have to go break up the family home or apartment, and deal with all those memories.  But I've already done that.  By the time died he was mostly already gone.  So yes, in that sense it was a long goodbye.  I was just too busy to notice him slipping away.

So there's no reaction.  Except that there is.  At times, without warning, there are these moments of extraordinary clarity.  At one point Monday afternoon when I'd finished the phone work and the heat had come back on, I looked out onto the snow fields and had a sudden flashback to an early family trip to a Catskills resort called Grossinger's.  It was so vivid that for an instant I was actually there, at age 5, and it was all real.  An instant later I suddenly took in my whole childhood and realized that that experience and everyone and everything in it was gone.  And then that awareness vanished and I was back to thinking about how many batteries I needed to buy for my flashlights.  A little later, there was an instant when the world seemed to be swept clean and I was alone in it and in place of the burden of caregiving there was a blank-slate future that was full of possibilities.  And then there was a moment where I had a shock of mourning for my mother.  I'd never had the chance before.  When she died, I had to jump right into managing my father, who was exhausted from caring for her and registering his grief by not experiencing any and needed everything to be business-as-usual.  One morning I went up to Woodlawn for her interment, then took the subway and a crosstown bus to his apartment and spent the afternoon helping him clean out her closets and dealing with his wonderment that she'd bought so many clothes.  He was on the leading edge of his Alzheimer's symptoms then - we had to set up a new checking account for him and he had an unusually hard time following the process.  So I stepped into Alzheimer's caregiving fairly quickly after that.  The whole mourning process got deferred and it's only now starting to kick in.  I suppose there'll be more of this as I go along.

But like the earlier moment, this one was over in a second or two.  Cognitive dissonance keeps jogging you back to the present.  Even when you're focused on his death - setting up the funeral, for example, as opposed to restocking your freezer - it's mostly the weirdness that comes through.  For example, there's the funeral home.  As an ex-New Yorker, I'm used to neighborhood funeral homes.  You always knew that Riverside was there for you and you knew you could find it at 75th and Amsterdam.  But now, after I've scrambled to pick one from a list, here's the funeral director - a nice-seeming young woman who's just a touch too eager and upbeat and customer-service oriented, telling me how to find them: "You know the Best Buy?  Well, we're right next to that!"  Oh, great.  We're taking him to a big box mortuary.  Right now, as I write this, his remains are in repose somewhere between the electronics retailer and the BMW dealership.  She also told me she was confident that she'd be able to find us a rabbi "who's been plowed out."

I suppose there'll be more of that as I go along, too.

Several years ago - not long after my mother's death - I first discovered the Zen teacher and writer John Tarrant through this extraordinary article, which is about his mother's death.  Among many other things, some of them far-reaching, he describes his last conversation with her - the one in which he called her, she picked up the phone, spoke into the wrong end, couldn't figure it out, and finally threw it aside.  Her last words to him were "Bloody thing!  I never liked it!"  That reminded me instantly of my mother's funeral - the one where my father, talking compulsively as usual out of nervousness, got into an interpretive debate with the rabbi in the middle of Kaddish.  I was immediately annoyed with him - why is he destroying my reflective experience - until a few seconds later, when the rabbi's cell phone went off in the middle of the recitation.  At that point I decided that the experience wasn't going to conform to my expectations, and the fact that it was bizarre and unpredictable was a good match for my mother, who was an acute and volatile person and who probably would have gotten a kick out of it all.  That's Tarrant's point - that life works better when you aren't trying to force it to match your concepts about it.  His article is built around the koan that begins, "The great way is not difficult if you just don't pick and choose."  I was rereading it earlier today and I'm going to keep rereading it as I go through this experience, at least 'til some of the major pieces settle.  Because under any circumstances - but especially under these circumstances, with the blizzards and the impassible roads - this is all going to go its own way.  Life is like that.  Death, too.  So I'll manage as best I can, but mostly I'm going to try to stand back and let it all be. 

Because that's what it's going to do that in any case.

Comments

[julie]

Alan, I'm still thinking about you and your family. I want you to know that with your encouragement, I have started writing my own blog and have posted about your father's death. I hope that is okay with you. It is a very therapeutic way of getting counseling without going to a physicologist. I'm also very taken with the second paragraph in your post today and wonder if you would be opposed to me posting it in my blog with credit to you? I continue to get strength and education from you and your writings which are excellent.
Positive energy coming your way.
Julie

[Nancy Frank]

Mourning the loss (death) of a parent is odd, no matter what the circumstances. I know the last coherent sentence my grandmother said to me in 1985, but I don't know what the last conversation I had with my father, who died suddenly in 1991, was about.

Alan, I'm so sorry for what I imagine you're going through. I wish there were words to calm, to soothe -- but if there are some, I haven't found them.

I won't say 'be strong,' because people tell me that all the time and I think, what else will I be, and if I am something else, I'm not necessarily going to say what it is. What I will say is, mourning is a process that comes and goes in waves, in my experience. I hope the waves will be kind to you.

XXOO

[Alan G. Ampolsk]

Julie - I'm really glad to hear about your blog, and yes, of course, by all means, go ahead and quote whatever you like. Please also add a trackback link to this post (click on "trackback" under the post itself and follow the prompts). When you get a chance, please also post your URL in another comment. I'd like to add it to the blogroll.

Nancy - yes, it's all strange, isn't it? Right now I'm not expecting anything except that I'm going to be surprised. I wanted to say also that I know you're going through some life of your own and I hope you're getting through it. Keep me posted.