Grief

Not Coping With Grief and Loss

Written by Gerard on Wednesday 18 November 2009

As the regular readers among you will know, my father died in June from lung cancer. I guess the survivors have dealt with the grief in their own individual ways.

For my own part, I was devastated and temporarily paralysed by the grief I felt afterward. A cornerstone of my life...gone. But strangely enough, real life intruded, and I was forced to snap out of it. The possibility of returning to work, as well as dealing with my father's financial affairs certainly kept me grounded. As well as that, my own family needed me.

One last letter...

Written by Gerard on Tuesday 14 July 2009

I don't think I've called you 'father' in years. I adopted the monkier of 'Chib' for you after years of cleaning chimneys together. It got shortened and distorted from 'chimney sweep', didn't it? But it stuck. My nicknames always stick.

The point is, you're gone now, and everything you are or were has been added up: father, friend, protector, provider, verbal sparring partner, simultaneously my biggest supporter and critic, grandfather to my children and so much more. And all that you were is suddenly taken away. For such an unassuming guy, the void you left behind is incredible.

I thought the worst of it was watching you in pain. Suffering, declining. Your legs and arms getting thinner until the skin wrinkled around your joints. Your hacking cough that would overtake speech and leave us unable to talk. And those dreadful, painful sores that covered your tongue because of the oxygen. One of your sisters put it brilliantly in the obituary column: "a short tragic death, suffered with dignity" or words to that effect.

And for a brief while after you died, we were consumed with arrangements: wakes, funerals and paperwork. Still are. I felt strangely disconnected from your body in the coffin. You looked overdressed in that suit. I could see discolouration starting to creep in. I often wonder that people find comfort in visiting graves when the person they loved is decaying beneath their feet. What strange customs we have. All of it reminded me that you were gone.

Lourdes and home again: The death of my father

Written by Gerard on Monday 29 June 2009

My father died at roughly 5:30am on Thursday 25 June 2009. Later that day, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett would follow him, a fact I’m sure he would not care about.

As you know, he died from lung cancer and the weakening side-effects of chemotherapy which left him vulnerable to pneumonia. This is the story of his final journey, the discovery of his cancer and those short, final two months which led to his end.