When Words Fail Us Both

Grief is odd. It is disturbing to feel, to experience, and it is often difficult for many to just be near. It makes people uncomfortable speaking about it; we are sometimes not really sure what to say in situations of others’ grief, and when we do, we intuitively know that whatever we say cannot equate with the intensity of their emotional experience.

Take, for instance, the interaction I had with friends and acquaintances and peers the first week I returned to work following my father’s funeral. Most conversations began something like this:

“I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

It’s a perfectly normal thing to say, and I appreciated the sentiments of everyone who took the time to express them. But, as the week wore on and I would have first, or chance, encounters with people, it seemed as if they all had the same thing to say.

“I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

There were those who actually sought me out those first few days, and they were thoughtful enough to ask about how I was feeling, how things went, or about my father and his life. Their compassion was genuine. Yet invariably we would reach that awkward moment where we both felt the need to segue to topics of work, or news, or just simple, friendly chatter. Then we would part, I would move on, and, moments later, I would run into the next person.

“I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

After a couple of days I developed a succinct “Thank you” as a reply, and I would couple it with a sincere and appreciative smile in response to their equally sincere look of sorrow and empathy. I think we struggled with how to communicate the nonverbal, just as much as we wrestled with the words we chose.

There came a time when everyone’s comments became a disruption of my attempts to return to the rhythm of life, where each exchange served as a reminder of my father’s death, and of the start-stop emotions of the previous week. Their kind offerings also began to sound like a mantra.

“I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

I thought I recognized code in what everyone was saying and possibly not actually expressing. It was as if they were warding off the same for themselves, because they recognized that the loss of a parent can, and will, happen for every one of us. It was possible my father’s death made their parents more mortal, and by extension, themselves more mortal as well. In their words, I began to hear hushed prayers.

“I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

For some it may not have been what they feared in their future, but instead a remembrance of the same event previously happening in their lives. A few people spoke to me about the previous losses they’d experienced, but they often spoke of it with the detachment of something which took place long ago. I wondered if cataloging it in such a manner was their way of eventually coping with it, and if I would one day do the same with my father’s death.

After a few days a card came in the mail. I recognized it as one of the cards we keep around the office and leave at the central desk for everyone to sign. There may have been over a hundred different signatures squeezed on to this card from various people with whom I work, all written in the tiniest of handwriting to accommodate space for everyone that might want to sign the card. We’ve become practiced at such things.

I read through each of the comments. They were all well-intended and—I am sure—heartfelt, but even in that I saw a pattern of difficult communication. “Sorry for your loss,” and “Thoughts and prayers with you,” were among the most common expressions scribbled into all of the available space of the stark, white cardstock. The miniscule writing and the density of the comments made me hear a chorus of whispers as I read them.

We do, say, what we can, I thought to myself, when I finished reading them all and set the card aside for safekeeping. I’m still not sure what to do with it now.

Late in the week I ran into a friend and peer who is similar to me in age and who had recently come to work with me in the same building. She also had lost her father just a few short weeks before my father died.

“I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “How are you doing?” In my voice inflection I heard my involuntary reach toward someone I knew must truly understand something I was still attempting to wrap my head around.

She smiled, and I thought I could see her eyes moisten a little.

“I’m okay,” she said. “But, every once in a while I feel like there are things about it that are still hitting me, still settling in. It’s like it is still becoming real to me. I think there is still more to come.”

“I know,” I added.

We talked for a few minutes more. I think she was the first person all week with whom I could make prolonged and sincere eye contact. It felt as if our two separate experiences folded together in the small space between us. For a brief moment, we each knew the other’s feelings on an almost palpable, and deeply personal, level. It was comforting.

Eventually work called us each separate ways. We promised to talk more when we had the chance, and we went back to our beckoning tasks. Walking away, I turned to find someone approaching me, and I felt myself brace in anticipation:

“I’m sorry to hear about your father,” they said.
   
© 2011 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

Scarecrows

The other night I went out for a run, a test run of sorts; I wanted to see just how far I was capable of running with my current conditioning, and check how I was recovering from some recent running injuries. I also had a larger question weighing on my mind, which I would only be able to answer or resolve with a very long run: I wanted to know if I could resume my interrupted training for a fall marathon, and dedicate my effort to the memory of my father.

I’d been thinking about this run all day. I knew a run would help me focus, clear out some mental clutter, and shift gears away from all of the activity and emotions of the preceding week. I needed that release, particularly after the first day of being away from the constant company of family and friends, and without the girls.

But, I waited until that night to go out. I enjoy running during the night because it is usually much cooler than our summer days here, and the neighborhoods in which I run are less trafficked and quieter at that time. I find it relaxing to go out for miles uninterrupted by any cars at intersections, or the din of lawn mowers, or all of the other nuisances that comprise the suburban cacophony. You can only get that in the middle of the night, or in the early morning hours.

On this particular night, I left the house around midnight, and without any real design as to exactly where I was going to run; my only plan was to run long. The night was as quiet as I had hoped it would be, and I started at a very comfortable pace, thinking I needed to preserve my energy for the long haul, rather than burning it up for a better time. I promised myself I would not look at my GPS unit until I knew I had run several miles. I didn’t want to know my pace; knowing it would only distract me from what I really preferred to do on this run, and checking it would probably make me quicken my pace.

I wound my way through the neighboring housing additions during the first few miles, in temps I found nearly perfect for running. No one was out. It was just me, and the sounds of my breathing and my footfall, which I soon found hypnotic. Even my thoughts were absent.

Eventually my route through these neighborhoods made its way back to the local trail that leads past several schools, until it came to the end in downtown Waukee, and when I arrived there I had to make a choice about where I wanted to run next. I felt really good at this juncture, so I cut over one block to run through the downtown triangle, and caught a street that led me to another, longer trail that runs alongside the highway leading out of town.

I had it in mind to run this long, straight, flat trail until I reached a distance in my run where I could tell—either from the way it felt as I ran, or from other signals I sensed from my body—that I was about halfway of what I was capable of running that night. Given that I was running at a slower than usual pace, I wasn’t exactly sure where that mark would be this time, only where I had hoped it would be.

But, at some point along this trail I began to feel like I was operating on two levels. My body was enjoying the exertion and rhythmic movements of running, and my mind, as was usually the case, was entranced by the physical activity. However, at the same time, I became aware of a feeling that seemed both strange and uncomfortable. For some reason, I began to feel solitude on a level I am not sure I’ve felt often, if at all, in my life. I felt very alone.

Maybe it was the setting. There were no streetlights to light the way along the trail outside of town, and very few landmarks. The stretch on which I was running monotonously made its way west, bordered by the expanse of grass which separated it from the parallel highway on one side, and crop fields on the other side. There was a farmhouse every mile or two, but other than that, there was no other sign of life, with the highway absent of any traffic. The dark of the night seemed voluminous, and I really only knew the way of the path because it was illuminated by a full moon, and stood in stark contrast to its borders.

I’m not sure how to explain it or describe it, but after a few miles on this path I began to feel like the night air around me was so much larger than me, that I was so small compared to the immensity of the darkened sky around me. It wasn’t frightening, but it was certainly something I would describe as humbling.

I ran on, carried by the enjoyment I got from running, while still thinking about how I felt there in that somewhat overwhelming environ. The mixture of the two must have kept me fairly preoccupied, because before I knew it, I had run all the way from Waukee to the edge of Adel, the next town down the highway. I stopped there on the outskirts, not really wanting to continue on and into the lights of town, and I checked my GPS for the first time. I was a little over seven miles from home.

And as I turned to run back toward home, the distance I knew I had to cover to get home added to that feeling of being alone, and of being small. The run home seemed daunting.

In time, and with some effort, I eventually made it back to within the city limits of Waukee, and at about the twelve-and-a-half mile point in my run, I came to a spot along the trail where there is a water fountain and a couple of park benches. Even though the night was cool and I was not dehydrating under a hot sun, I was thirsty and knew I should drink something.

So I stopped for a drink. When I no longer had the cadence and muscle memory and motion that carried me and focused me as I ran, I was more aware of how my body felt, its wear and its pains. I took a long drink, and another, and then I sat on the bench for a bit. It was there that my will to run fell too low to overcome the fatigue, and the aches.

I sat there for a while longer and thought about my efforts, and limitations, and capabilities, and potential, and examples I had to set for people for whom my examples were important. I thought about loss, and about missed opportunities, and I thought about fundamental life changes. I thought about responsibilities. I thought about things many of us probably don’t contemplate until we are in the exact position where we are forced to consider them. And, when I really didn’t see the point of dwelling on it any longer and I became frustrated, I rose to go home.

I walked most of the remaining way home, disappointed in myself for not being capable of running longer. I tried to run briefly at times, but it didn’t feel right. The enjoyment was gone by that point. It was purely mechanical, and without much heart.

Eventually, I made it home, and the next morning I felt rested, and I didn’t feel any of the remnant pains I was certain I would feel from such a careless attempt to run way beyond my abilities. No real harm done.

I think, possibly, my desire to run long that night was a product of a week of emotions, some of them mixed up, and some of them pent up. It felt like a week of stopping and starting, and pausing and running. At times, I felt like I was thinking a great deal, and at other times I thought it was all I could do to feel without really thinking.

I said to myself that night before I began that I needed to go for a run to clear my head. But I never really anticipated that by dumping all my reasoning and thought through physical exhaustion, I would create a vacuum which would be filled by something, maybe the one thing, I never really took the time to consider during all of the previous week. Something I previously had only had to think of in the abstract.

© 2011 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.

A Power No One Wants

As I write this, I am sitting a few feet away from my father, who is resting somewhat comfortably in his hospital bed. I’m not sure anyone can really rest very well in such a bed; what distant memory I have of one from my childhood reminds me that they never seem to be able to be positioned in just the right way, or in a way that I could withstand for very long. Maybe it was my youthful impatience.

Dad’s comfort is further challenged by the fact that we are waiting for him to be taken down for a procedure, and waiting far too long. He was checked in here on Friday night (three days ago) and has been doing little more than waiting for something since he was admitted. Waiting for his MD to come in and speak with him. Waiting for his heart doctor to come in and speak with him. Waiting for a nurse to come in and either bring him some news about when his procedure is scheduled or help him with something.

In the time I have spent with him here in his room over the weekend and today, I have decided that the medical profession has a two-pronged approach to their care: waiting things out might possibly make the problem go away (what I call “Head In the Sand Treatment”), and patients are people to merely be tolerated through their stay, and occasionally placated by doctors with ambiguity and thinly-veiled condescension in their voice. The nurses are nice and well-meaning enough, but it was about all I could do to keep from shredding his heart doctor in the brief time he was here, restrain myself from lecturing him on the pompous pratfalls of his God Complex. I remembered, before I vomited that all over him, that I would have been just as pompous to do so.

My father, lying there in his bed, is not quite the same person I have known most of my life. I always remember him looking much more physically fit than I see him now, which is the way I think we all want to envision our parents. But I have this idea about Kilgore men, only a theory really, that we seem to be blessed with a gene or two that slows our aging process, or at least the appearance of it. I am sure that theory is wishful thinking on my part, but it has its roots in how I remember my dad being fairly fit, trim, and active for much of my adult life. Attractive too. Okay, so maybe I am wishing.

Dad doesn’t need much from me here. We talk from time to time, but neither of us feel the need to fill the room with conversation. There is a comfort between us in the silence. It’s not an ignorance of anything needing to be said, but more a fulfillment created by just being around each other. Reassurance through small talk is not so necessary between two men of our age, and our shared history creates more of a palpable connection that hangs in the air between us. Conversation may only disturb that, interrupt the silent movie memories that are a part of our current stream of consciousness.

I do have something I want to talk about with Dad, but now is not the time. He is due any time now to be taken down for a heart catheterization to help diagnose what is causing his recent spate of coronary issues, and I worry that if I raise the subject with him now, it will only raise his anxieties. There is no need. The waiting already has sufficiently rasied his anxieties.

A few years ago, dad asked me to be the one to make any decisions should he ever be incapacitated to do so himself during a crisis or medical procedure. I was flattered that he placed such faith in me by asking me to do so, but because I was not sure if I was the son closest to him at the time, I had to ask him why he chose me. His reasoning, he said, was that because he trusted my perspective on life—my views on religion and the afterlife—I would most likely make a decision he thought would mirror his wishes if it ever came to that.

At that time, we only had a brief discussion about what his wishes would be, and I asked him to either have his wishes documented, or have his lawyer draft a power or attorney to have on hand. Dad had told me, in the best way he could from the terminology of his days, he did not ever want to live “like a vegetable.” I knew roughly what he meant by that, even though I knew it was not specific enough for any doctor, or hospital administrator, or lawyer to understand if it were ever to involve them. And at the time we first discussed this, there were plenty of cases in the courts and in the news that made those specifics that much more important.

But I didn’t ask dad for more specifics because it was a difficult conversation to have. The details seemed both too morbid and too uncomfortable to voice openly, and he never volunteered anything either. I suppose neither one of us really wanted to deal with it in anything more than the abstract, the future, or possibly something that would never have to be. About the only time it seemed to come up was when he was having a health issue, and I wasn’t sure if that was the best time to talk about it. When each health problem was over, I didn’t want to seem like I was unnecessarily worried, or create that same worry for him. Where your parents are concerned, does the timing for that conversation ever seem right?

I’ve had some time to think about it this morning though, and sort through those thoughts well enough to commit them to paper, and to this medium. I told myself I had to, even if I couldn’t worry him with that kind of a conversation right now. I also knew I really had to be well prepared for that kind of a moment in case it ever does come, because I will need a clarity and a resolve in that moment that will be very hard to summon up, and which will produce a decision that will also be acceptable and clear to everyone concerned.

The best I’ve been able to come up with in our five hours plus of waiting—what I would ask of myself and of the medical staff—is this:

1. What is the raw end result? Would the medical condition or problem or illness be over when we are done with this specific choice with which we are immediately faced?
2. What would be the potential life extension my father receives as a benefit?
3. What will be the quality of life for my father after the fact, as compared to what he defines as a quality life? I know my father well enough to know he would not enjoy life if he could not communicate or interact with those he loves, even if they could communicate with him. I also know that if he were able to communicate, but were not ambulatory, he would carry on. In the case of the latter, he would also want me to revisit Question One and Question Two again.
4. What strain, or effort, or pain would he have to live with after the fact? I know this seems redundant of Question Three, but I am convinced that pain and suffering have to be considered separately from issues of mobility and consciousness. Still, in addressing this I have to go back and revisit almost all of my other questions.
5. What, if anything, would Dad be left to deal with after the fact that would be outside the normal process of aging?

I know this seems somewhat like circular reasoning, and maybe it is. It isn’t an easy decision that can be arrived at through a checklist or with black and white definitions. There is a great deal of gray area. But it is clear to me what my father would want if he knew the answers to those questions, and that is exactly how I would decide.

And in the end, I, as the decision maker, and we, as a family, cannot be a part of the equation. It can’t be about how much more of our father we would want, or how much more of his time with us we would want. Likewise, it can’t be about the effects it might have on our lives, decided either way, because you cannot understand some of those things beforehand, without living them. Like a friend of mine just recently said, you never know how strong you can be, until you have to be.

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.