Who else has lost a parent? - Page 3

Happy Birthday, Dad.

I hope you got everything you want and nothing you need.

I left a piece of cake for you in the fridge. I know you don't want it now but I know you'll be back to eat it later.

I'll leave a candle burning on the cake, and not the trick kind. Those are for amateurs.

Michigan won and Notre Dame lost.

Dinner's up to you tonight. Whatever you want to do, wherever you want to go.

I wanted to buy a card but I didn't know where I should send it, so instead I quietly told a joke to myself about dads and duct tape. After that I did an impression of you looking at me (also played by me) incredulously, wondering why you always get cards like that.

I tried to sing "Happy Birthday" but couldn't get through it, so the thought will have to count.

I have more thoughts but can't get through them either, so these will have to count for now.

I know what you're going through, Banks. My dad's birthday is coming up (next Sunday, actually), and the only thing keeping me from obsessing about it is the fact that I'm so busy with rehearsals and the like.

I'm with you in spirit, man.

Happy Birthday to Banks' dad. JB, that is one of the most iconic, gut-wrenching things I have ever read here. It's not often that a message board post makes me weep, but here we are. You're a good kid with a proud poppa.

Thanks guys. It's amazing the support I get here.

Grieving is such a strange beast. Makes you realize the merciless relativity of "fine." I think I'm fine, I feel like I'm fine, and then all the sudden it's October 15 and I'm barely getting through the day.

Tomorrow I'll probably be fine.

Chris, JB, Cogs, you've now ALL made me cry within an hour of each other. And it wasn't as sad a cry as you might expect. You have all made your losses into moving experiences for all of us who have read about them. I can imagine how little this softens your grief, but know it's appreciated. For all this snark, I come back to CHUD because it's a real, honest to god community of made up of decent people. If it was all movies and cock punches I would be a weekly instead of daily browser. So thanks for sharing these events, because they provide the fabric of this community.

Edit: I haven't lost a parent, but I plan on playing this song when the big guy goes; Flogging Molly - If I Ever Leave This World Alive (ignore the video)

This song makes me realize that you don't know how special love is until death tests it.

Many good thoughts and big "Hang in there" hugs for Jonathan and Chris O, and Happy Birthday to their Dads. My brother would have been 50 in nine days, so his birthday is relatively close to both of your Dads'.
And that's the nature of grieving, sweetheart. It really is. And it takes time, alot of it, and sometimes you just never know when it's going to rear it's head. My brother will have been gone four years this December. And with each day, I accept it a little more - I miss him every day, but I accept it a bit more. And then something just hits, and you need to cry it out again. That's how I spent about 15 minutes on Saturday morning. I just missed him the second I woke up. So I let it out - I let myself burst into tears, cried for about 15 minutes, and then got my shit together. And it's not as "scheduled" as that, but you'll both get used to the ups and downs that come with grieving and accepting it. My "cyber-hugs" (as dumb as that sounds!) go out to both of you.

How did your brother die? 46 is such a young age.

Cancer. No history of it in our family, and he didn't smoke. He just got it - it was one of those shitty, horrible curveballs that life tosses at you sometimes. We're pretty convinced it was environmental - he worked for the State Dept. and was sent to some pretty hellish places for work. Also, however, he worked downtown, and was three blocks away from the south tower when it fell on 9/11. So I've always been convinced he got a good lungful of something somewhere along the line. Although, weirdly enough, it wasn't lung cancer - it was a rare blood vessel cancer, they barely knew what to do about it over at Sloan Kettering.

This thread is great proof to why this site/forum works. This is some heartwrenching yet heartfelt stuff. Thank you all for sharing, and I hope the best for all of you.

Thanks to Lisa and Boomstick. I just want to echo what Graynadian said. There are many reasons why I keep coming back to this place on a daily basis, but the sense of community is definitely the main one.

Don't fucking read this thread while listening to Greg Graffin's "Cease".

Damn it. It's too early to be weepy. I'm turning on my XBox now.

I need a hug.

My father died a little over a week ago, at 2:15 in the morning October 11th. The cause of death was multiple blood clots. One in the leg, one in the brain which caused a stroke, and one in the lung which was ultimately fatal. He had also been having some abdominal pain for a few weeks that he had dismissed as constipation. A CT found damaged tissue in his liver. We were awaiting results of a biopsy but he went before the results were finished. The autopsy determined that he had pancreatic cancer and that was what was causing the blood clots. We have no family history of cancer and as recently as 6 to 8 weeks ago my dad was living life as an active 64 year old man in what we thought was relatively decent health. He died 23 years and 2 days within the day my mother died. When she passed our family could have went in any manner of directions, but my dad refused to let that happen. He was the rock we stood upon and the glue that kept us together. He was such an intellegent, curious and articulate man and a giver to the very end. The stroke effected the speech center in his brain and he was having trouble speaking. The morining of the stroke he was speaking gibberish but had rapidly improved to full sentences that night with a bit of trouble getting certain words in certain spots. We were optimistic, but had no idea of the cancer inside. Knowing my dad as I do I know he would never want to live in a body with a poorly functioning brain and having his speech fractured like that would be a detriment to the racconteur that he was. Additionally he was such a giver he never wanted to be a burden and I take solace in believing that his last gift to us was was to spare us of the burden of seeing him waste away while in constant agony. His work is done, it is time for him to rest. He is free.

My condolences to you, Mundt. That's terrible.

I recently had a health scare with my dad. One day about two months ago he found his speech was slightly slurred and it didn't go away the next day. He went to the emergency room and they ran all sorts of tests on him, and couldn't figure it out. They didn't think it was a stroke, but he did have some white spots on his brain. So far they're just calling them unidentified bright objects, like aliens landed in his brain, and a little less than a month later his speech went back to normal. Right now were just hoping it can be attributed to stress (he has a lot of it) and nothing worse. He has had diabetes for like 24 years now, but is in pretty good shape. Most of his business requires him to speak, so the slur would be bad on it's own, but if it went further he wouldn't know what to do. Indeed having that function taken away would be awful, and continuously degrading health is no way to live, so it's good that your dad went before it got that awful. Still a loved one is a horrible thing to lose, so again my condolences to you.

Sorry to read about the recent losses, guys. Like others have said in here, bereavement never reallly gets easy but you do find ways of coping with it eventually. For the first days/weeks/months/yearsafterwards, you may feel a little numb and detached, then the emotional numbness wears off and you kind of relive everything for the first time since it happened, which can be depressing as Hell. After that, it's usually a long hard slog up to some point at which you can deal with living out the rest of your life. I wish I knew how to tell you how to recognize that plateau but--to be truthful--I haven't really gotten there yet, so I can't tell you.

For a little quid pro quo, I'll run through my most recent losses:
1) My youngest brother on 02/07/2004 in San Francisco. Both of us were born with really rare diseases. I shared my mom's affliction of Basal Cell Carcinoma Nevus Syndrome (rare cancerous genetic disorder that makes your body spontaneously generate cancer from time to time) and my brother had a combined auto-immune deficiency disorder that affected pretty much his person and nobody else's. (Right before he died his main physician at UCSF was kind enough to level with him that there would never be adequate research funds for his case because of this and he was basically doomed to be on life support until the day he died.) Throughout our childhood, we had pretty weird passtimes like placing bets on whose medical file was larger at any given time. (We both had at least two major surgeries a year and several hospitalizations.) He was pretty much the only person I knew who knew what it ws like growing up while constnatly being confronted with your own mortality and my best friend. He died in my arms a little over six weeks after his eighteenth birthday.

Maternal grandfather: January 23, 2004. Yeah, 2004 was a great year for me. Within a few weeks, I lost my the man who raised me and my best friend and little brother within a few weeks of each other (Matt died just a few days after the first funeral). On top of that, my mom had been diagnosed with late stage breast cancer that same year. Wonderful year, really. The last thing I did with my grandfather before he slipped into a coma ws hand him a Bible with the following inscription: "Thanks for your help in raising us in the faith, Pop. You'll always be a dear part of our lives."

High School friend: October 2003. He basically shot himself in the head a few months after graduation in his parents home.

Paternal grandfather: September 10, 2001. He died just a few hours before the 9/11 news broke of complications from diabetes. He was a WWII veteran and something of a mean bastard but it was still shitty to see him go.

Mundt, I'm so sorry about your Dad. He sounds like he was a great guy, right up to the end.

Cuchulain, I'm sorry to hear about your losses too. Sounds like a tough couple of years you went through.

My sympathies and condolences go out to everyone who's contributed to this thread, and I would pos-rep every person who offered the same comfort to their fellow Chewers. It's threads like these that make this one of the best communities on the internet.

I'd also like to recommends Joan Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking" to everyone in this thread who's had someone close to them who died. I've read a lot of "grief literature," and this is by far the best. Not to mention it's wonderfully, beautifully written -- I remember reading the first excerpt in the New York Times Magazine and wanting to wake up all my friends to say, "You have to read this -- it's that good." It actually inspired/made me write the first essay I wrote about my own mother (see below) as an adult -- still one of the most cathartic things I've written, the kind of thing I should write more of.

I don't normally post about this, but the last couple of weeks have been pretty hard. As I mentioned way up above and a few years back, my mother died of breast cancer when I was five, and it's still the defining moment in my life eighteen years later. The grieving process has been made especially hard as I got older because I found that my family wasn't willing to talk much about my mom; as a result, I know little to nothing about her aside from the most basic details.

But even though the older I've gotten, the sadder I've become each October (both the anniversary of her birthday and her death), these past couple of weeks have been hard because of recent events -- starting a great new job and directing the movie I did in August. I just wish she'd been there to see it.

Still, my mother spent her entire life on the East Coast (she's buried upstate in Schenectady) and went to school in New York City. Now that I'm back in that general area, I figure it's time to start to find out who she was for myself. It's going to be hard, I know, both research-wise and emotionally, but (especially since I'm thinking of working out some of my grief/issues in script form) I want to know who she was.

Thanks for the recommendation, Rath. When I first heard about that book I didn't think it'd be very relatable since I'm not old enough to be a widower, but if you say it relates to anyone who's lost somebody I'll have to check it out.

Attempting to get to know your parents after they're gone can be a strange experience. I still lament the fact that I lost my dad when I was 14, and therefore never really got to know him as a man. Then after I lost my mom a few years ago there were secrets about her past that popped up out of nowhere. Trying to reconcile who they actually were with how I always thought of them has made for a weird journey.

My 4 year old daughter's eating her dinner tonight, watching Dora The Explorer. The episode centers around Dora helping a star back up into the night sky so everyone can make their wishes. The star makes it home and the characters all say their "Starlight, star bright, etc"... My daughter clasps her hands, closes her eyes, and says it with them. Her wish: "I wish Grandpa would come home."

I assume she's talking about Pap-pap (my step-dad) or Pop-pop (my wife's dad). I ask her "Which one?" so I can make a phonecall to the lucky grandparent, informing them that their grand-daughter misses them, and she says "Grandpa Keith" (my dad, who will have been gone 9 years in Feb). My daughter's never met him, but my wife and I mention him in conversation occasionally.

My daughter then corrects herself sadly "But he's dead... Daddy... do you miss him?" At this point, I'm barely keeping it together. I'm having a tough time typing this actually. I tell her "Yeah, sweetie. I miss Grandpa Keith sometimes." She then asks "Where is he?" I stare blankly, not sure what to say. And she suggests "Let's go pick him up."

She's in bed now, but I've been in a funk all night.

Funny that this is bumped now. My brother just a few days ago posted a link on my facebook wall - he was looking at some local companies' websites and found an archive of articles our dad had written. I haven't gone through them yet, and honestly I don't even know if I want to, but I will.

Going through some of my mothers letter's after she died was a real gift. I found a few exchanges she had with some authors. If she liked a book she always made a point to email the author. There were many replies(the only one I can recall was Sue Grafton, of the "A is for Alibi" aplhabet series), unfortunately my father has since thrown them out. But they were nice to read at the time.

I lost my father a few years ago. He was 76, and had heart problems, but we did not expect him to suddenly die. I was only 24, so it would have been nice to see more of him and for him to meet my wife.

I still miss him sometimes, but you just have to adjust to life without them.
It was nice reading all the tributes to him from his fellow club members.

We went camping a few weekends ago, and at night, a bunch of the kids were piling into a tent, and then would "summon ghosts". My son was summoning the ghost of our dog who died earlier this year and his "Grand-Pop" (on my wife's side). It was cute and a little heart-breaking at the same time.

My dad is still with us, for now, but last February he was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and given approximately 2 years to live. Fortunately, the disease has been progressing more slowly than expected for the year and a half since his diagnosis and he has been able to put off chemo... until now. I went to lunch with my mom last weekend and she said he'll probably be starting chemo in January. Until now, I've been able to put it out of mind as he's still so strong, but this has got me really upset. It could be 6 months... a year... 2 years? I have no idea what to expect. And I have to admit that I'm a little bit jealous of my little sister. She got married a year ago and just had her first baby earlier this month, and my dad was there for all of it. I'm not in any rush to do all of that, but it absolutely destroys me to think that my dad probably won't be around if/when I do.

This thread is depressing, but I'm glad it's here.

I lost my mother April 10th of this year. She had breast cancer (stage 4) back in 1991 and had a mastectomy. Her doctor did a great job in keeping her alive for 17 years, but it spread throughout her body over the past few years and ended up in her colon. She had surgery in March and never really recovered from it.

I miss her every single day.

Sorry to hear, Judas. It does get easier, believe it or not.

Jennifer - it's going to be gut-wrenching, but your dad might want to hear your feelings about him not being around for those things. The conversation that ensues might help you with those feelings.

My dad died back in 2004 a few days before Christmas, and if past years are anything to go by, I'm about to spiral into a dark, dark place until January. But I just found a frigging awesome 8x10 b&w shot from around 1970 of my dad rocking a flamethrower at some sort of weapons demonstration. I'm totally framing it.

Funny timing for a bump, indeed. Today would've been my pop's 70th birthday. Seems old in number maybe, but not if you'd met him the day before he was diagnosed.

I can't say much to make you feel better about that because I'm going through the same thing and, I won't lie, sometimes it makes me angry. But I can tell you this: I spent a lot of time right before I got married a couple months ago absolutely dreading what it would feel like to be standing up there at the ceremony with my bride, and looking back and seeing only my mom sitting there. It gnawed at me to the point where I was equally excited for and dreading my own wedding. The day itself, however, was joyous, and I spent more time among happy memories than sad regrets. Most important was that we made a respectful effort to include his memory as part of the festivities, but we allowed ourselves to enjoy the moment. It's ok to be selfish, and that includes being pissed that he's not there and being happy that it's your wedding (or the birth of your child, or anything else).

But, hey, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Enjoy what time you have, even if it's still years and years, and save your regrets and your anger until there's an empty chair on which to sit them. Because otherwise it ain't worth bringing them to the table.

Weddings: I'm sure it's different for everyone, but my mom died 10 months before my wedding, and I thought it might be rough not having her there. But there was only a moment of acute sadness, and her brother, a minister with a strong resemblance to his sister, performed the ceremony. (One of my last conversations with my mom was her helping to arrange to have her brother perform the service.) For some reason that made a big difference.

I'm sorry to hear about your dad Jennifer. I remember when I was 19 I had a realization that history was repeating. My grandmother had Multiple Sclerosis and passed away when my mother was 21, before my sister and I were born. My mother always use to tell us how much my grandmother would have loved us and how she wished she could have met us. Well my mother had been diagnosed with MS when I was 14 and at 19 it started to sink in that she didn't have much time left. So I got it in my head that I wanted to have a child that she could meet and enjoy before she died. Thankfully I got over that desire pretty quickly, but it still bugs me 7 years after her death that she never got to meet my wonderful neices and nephew, and that she'll never see me any kids I may have. I think Phil is right maybe you should have that conversation with your dad.

Judas, I'm sorry to hear about your mom's passing.

Jonathan Banks, I went back through the thread to reread the post you made a year ago. That is still one of the best posts I ever read.

It's weird. I've seen this thread pop up here and there over the years (I lost my Dad in an accident in Feb 2000). My daughter trying to wrap her head around mortality forced me to further confront "what happens after death" and then try to explain it to a 4 year old. The emotions behind the conversation (mostly mine) and my daughter's naive curiosity and earnest concern moved me to dig up the thread and give it a bump.

My father was 48, had just retired early from 25 years as a NJ corrections officer, planned to travel, etc. My wife and I were married just 8 months prior to his death, and just before that, him and I were able to reconcile a lot of tension that had been building up since my parents got divorced when I was 12. I'm thankful for that opportunity to clear the air and start fresh, but I felt it was only the start of the healing process. Having him taken from me a 2nd time just seemed shitty and unfair.

Holy crap. I teared up just reading this.

Judas, I also want to add my condolences for your loss.

Please say a prayer for my family.  My father passed away unexpectedly this morning.

Nothing but the best wishes for you in this tough time. Take care of yourself and your family.

So sorry to hear. Let the community know if there's anything we can offer you.

 

Very sorry to hear it AD.

My condolences, mate. My dad passed away in 2003, and I still remember how weird and fucked up the following hours were. Thinking of you and your family.

My condolences.  I am attending the funeral of a coworkers parent tomorrow.  I lost my mother at 52 years old very unexpectedly in 2003.  I had a girlfriend whose father passed when I was with her, and my wife lost her father a month before our wedding.  There is absolutely nothing you can say to make it feel better.  Time numbs, but never heals the pain.  The best thing that comes with time is you get to remember them for what they were to you.  Not perfect, but real, and you will carry a piece of them with you forever.  My deepest sympathies for you and your family.

My condolences to you sir.  I myself lost my mother the day after I turned 11.  To this day, 18+ years later, I can't make it through that day without at least 1 massive crying jag.

 

I'm really sorry for what it's worth sir. We're all going to go through it at one time or another, that doesn't make it any less awful.

 

 

Sometimes it feels like I slipped into a broken, dark timeline - Man In The High Castle-style - around the time Dad got told he had 6 months to live back at the start of '96 and I've been stuck living that ever since. Maybe that's why I have a beard.