Today marks one year since my dad died, just two weeks short of his 97th birthday. He spent nearly two years in a Honolulu nursing home in a long, slow decline marked by Alzheimer’s, dementia, and “failure to thrive,” which I think was simply the weight of all those years.
During the year, his sister and his brother Tom’s widow both passed away. They were the last of their generation, as my sister noted.
It rained this morning while I was writing. My Hawaiian side sees it as a sign, a blessing of sorts. Perhaps.
It is only in retrospect that I realize how difficult it was to blog through my dad’s final two years, a task that required attending to details and feelings. During those two long years, I also spent a lot of time going through his collection of papers and photographs, trying to lift out details of his life that I could ask him about, hoping to trigger bits of his remaining memory that might seed conversation.
Since he died, I let all of that go. Gone is gone. He hasn’t appeared in my dreams, which I think is a product of my firmly closing that door in my mind, for now at least. I realize that I haven’t touched any of those boxes of his stuff since he’s been gone. That entire task was suspended, pending…pending what? I don’t know.
Perhaps now I’m ready to look back at the positive remnants. In addition to those as-yet still not sorted mementos, I’ve got a few moments of video, some voice recordings done with my iPhone while visiting at the nursing home, and my written observations along the way. Hopefully, with the passage of time, I’ll be able to keep those segregated from my own vivid memory of his agonizing last days.
We’ll see.
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And on the 22nd of next month-the day Kennedy was shot-will be one year since my mother died in the crimson hills of a New Hampshire autumn. I understand your sentiments quite well. And will long be grateful for the grace in your gentle blog of your father’s last days that help guide me through my mother’s final hours. Mahalo
Last Tuesday my sister sent a small box of my mother’s things as she just passed June 9, all per my dad’s wishes, including her much prized Roosevelt class of 1945 HS class ring. I’ve been off since that package arrived. Your blog and this annual remembrance on your father helped me too.
If my experience is any indication (my Mom passed in 2005), you will find that resolution, for lack of a better term, of your feelings regarding your Dad’s life and death will come in waves, cycles, phases, etc., like layers of an onion (sometimes peeled off, sometimes added on). Your memories may fade but your feelings and understanding will become clearer, more fixed, and that’s what you will carry forward.
It may be, as Thomas Mann once wrote, that happiness and success often signal decline because they need time to reach us, “like the light of an overhanging star, which, when it shines most brightly, may well have already gone out.l”
Whether or not that is true, I have come to trust that sorrow and despair often signal the beginning of a great ascent. And that is because they leave us in the valley beneath a great mountain. And it’s in the climbing that we learn to see again—as for the first time—everything it is that we love about living.
I found this quote a few months ago and saved it. I saw it today and thought of your journey