Angie Kinghorn

Flashback

It’s not like I expected this week to be the most fun of my life.  
Ugh.
This coming Monday, September 20th, will be the first anniversary of my father’s death.  Throughout the grieving process, people have told me how hard anniversaries of all kinds can be, but the brutality of this one year mark has shocked me.
Memories are supposed to dim with time, but the flashbacks I’ve had over the past month are anything but fuzzy.  My allergies are so bad I can’t smell a thing, but when my mind takes me back to the hospital a year ago, the smells are so sharp that I cringe.  I can feel textures, hear sounds, and even the muted colors are vivid.
And then Wednesday, our family’s beloved 15 year old dog became suddenly ill, stricken with an extraordinarily painful bladder tumor.  So I spent the afternoon with her at the vet’s and held her as he pushed the plunger on a syringe, sending her to a peaceful end.  
There was not enough Kleenex in this world.  All I could think was why, why, Lord, why could it not have been this easy for my father?  Why the twelve years of suffering?  Why the agonizing death?  Why, dammit, why?
And I’ll never know.  But in that little dog’s death, I did receive a strangely beautiful gift.  In that death, I was able to do what I couldn’t for my father.  I was able to hold her, comfort her, and make sure she didn’t hurt.  
God knows I’ve needed to cry, and most of the time I try not to.  It tends to scare the children.  But they weren’t with me in that office, so I sobbed.  As the tears fell, something else did, too.  Something like a wall between my brain and a deep pool of grief.  It was a profound catharsis.  Now I feel drained, and my mind has gone into what I think of as protective grief mode.  When things get to be too much, I go to sleep.  Weird, I know, but apparently it’s my body’s defense mechanism.  It happened for a long time last year, and I wasn’t expecting it to come back, but here we are.
I’m sorry for the lack of posts this week, but it’s hard to be funny when you’re asleep at the keyboard.
While I go take my nap, y’all go over to Pretty All True for the awesome post of the day.  Tip: refrain from eating or drinking while reading.  Kris is funny as hell and I will not be held liable for computers sprayed with Diet Coke.

Firsts

It’s been 9 months since my father died.  As someone whose friends seem to be having babies every other week, 9 months seems significant.  It’s enough time to grow a human being, but is it enough time to get over the loss of one?  

In a word: no.

I had hoped it might be enough time for me to grow a brain that can comprehend this world without him.  Some days it seems ok.  Memories elicit a smile along with the ache.  But time, while healing, is also brutal, and since his death, holidays and special events have hit with the force of a late-summer hurricane.

Dad was there for all my firsts, for all my sister’s firsts, for my children’s firsts: birthdays, Thanksgivings, Christmases, anniversaries, my first Mother’s Day.  It seems wrong for the calendar to keep moving without him.

But it does, and it is a struggle to remember the joy that should accompany these new firsts.  To weep through happy occasions would seem to dishonor my father–he wouldn’t have wanted his memory to cast sorrow on days that should be joyous.  Yet dancing doesn’t exactly seem appropriate, either.  

My first birthday without Dad was two months and one day after he died.  It was not happy.  I burst into tears when my in-laws sang and brought over a lighted cake.  Christmas was different—we were hosting my family, so I held it together using the time-honored tradition of stuffing my feelings down somewhere in the vicinity of my appendix and then attempting to pickle them with large quantities of alcohol.

Then we visited my in-laws after the New Year.  Their tree was still up, but so was ours, so I didn’t pay it any mind.  Until one morning when my mother-in-law announced that it was time for presents.  It was a surprise Christmas part II.  We’d sent our gift to them in advance, and I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of a Christmas-like event.  Sounds of wrapping paper tearing yanked forth sobs, even the ones that were down there by my appendix, soaking in bourbon with leftover fruitcake, and I tried to stuff them down again, but my soul was like a floodplain, soaked and unable to absorb any more.  I tried to at least cry quietly, but my brother-in-law noticed.

“What’s wrong?”  he whispered, trying to be inconspicuous.  I almost laughed.  My brother-in-law may be a psychiatrist, but he’s still a man and from Mars.  

“I just really miss my dad,” I mouthed back.  He still looked a bit confused.  A lot of people do.  It had been a whole three months since his death—shouldn’t I have been fine?

Since then, we’ve had my mother’s birthday, Mother’s Day, what would have been my parent’s 39th anniversary, my sister’s birthday, and Father’s Day.  The last three occasions were stacked up in a period of eight days.  Each one was difficult, and memories I thought were totally parsed have floated back to the surface.  

I don’t know how to prepare for the nebulous, blindingly hot days of this summer, when, a year ago, I was spending almost all my weekends at my parents’ house, watching Dad get weaker and weaker.  I truly dread Labor Day and the first anniversary of Dad’s death.  He collapsed and was hospitalized on Labor Day last year, and died two weeks later.  

As my father would say, I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.  In the meantime, this weekend is the 4th of July.  And I’m going to concentrate really hard on memories of running around our front yard with my sister, waving sparklers at the fireflies while my parents watched and laughed.  I’m going to try to remember that time when our family was whole and young and healthy, and be grateful to God that these memories are mine to treasure. 

The pause before screaming

            Today I forgot my father was dead.
For one glorious second, standing in my bathroom, digging through a cosmetics bag while ruminating about something ridiculous the kids had just done, I thought, “Wow, I can’t wait to tell Dad.  Wonder what he’ll say about that?”
            And then memory hit with a physical pain, and I stared into the mirror and saw a figure clutching her abdomen with one hand and the counter with another.  The abrupt pain of it was such a shock that I actually gasped.
            After a minute or so, the adrenaline drained out of me, along with all my energy, and I felt the familiar, heavy pressure of grief in my belly.  The eyes in the mirror looked old and tired.
            This is not this first time this has happened.  Several times I’ve had the phone in my hand, ready to dial, before I’ve remembered.  I catch myself referring to my father in the present tense or talking about “my parents” instead of simply saying, “my mother.”  Usually in the morning I wake up with the sense that something’s not quite right, but unless I’ve had a nightmare specifically about Dad, it can take me a few minutes to remember why my sheets are tangled from a night of running through buildings trying to find something that isn’t there.
            My father was a sentimental man, though he wasn’t raised to talk about his feelings, preferring instead to stick with small talk about his oral surgery practice, his golf game, or any number of topics that fascinated him throughout his life.   He held his fears close as well, a habit which infuriated me.  I wanted to talk about his cancer.  I wanted him to talk about his cancer.  Because when I’m afraid, that’s what I do: talk.  God made my brain so that it best handles fear by imagining and then speaking about the worst possible scenario, so I can prepare for it.
            My father was wired differently.  He handled fear best through denial.  I wish I’d come to understand this before he died.  Ironically enough, I’ve come to understand the beauty of denial now, as I grieve, experiencing it in those beautiful stolen moments, those unexpected split seconds where my synapses forget to fire and I remember my father as whole, and healthy, and where for just a moment, I can hear him laugh.
            But for me, I’m not sure this denial is worth it.  When the realization hits, it’s like the pause before a baby’s scream, that horrible moment when you know what’s coming, you can hear and see the great intake of breath, yet you can do nothing to stop the onslaught of sound and fury.  That moment finds you cringing, flinching away from an inevitable blow.  Sometimes the anticipation, the pause, is worse than the scream itself.
            In 2000, three years into his cancer battle, I was searching desperately for a present for my father.  Perhaps it was his birthday, or maybe Father’s Day.  I don’t remember.  The usual gifts of cologne, books, magazines, or DVDs didn’t seem appropriate.  I wanted him to have something to hold close, a source of comfort in the dark moments he surely had, even if he didn’t share them.  In short, I wanted him to have the peace of God.
            But how do you put God in a box?
            You can wrap up a Bible, which I did, years later, after he saw me with mine and asked for one.  But without a spiritual Sherpa to guide you over the steep hills and around the treacherous ravines within, the Bible can become an object of frustration rather than comfort.  When I first tried to plow through my beautiful, leather-bound King James version, I started with the first chapter of Genesis and didn’t even make it to Exodus.
            After much thought and research, I bought a silver pendant of Saint Peregrine, the patron saint of cancer.  I made sure it was on a long chain so Dad could wear it under his clothes without it showing, and so it would hang close to his heart.
            Never in my wildest dreams did I think he would wear it.
            But he seemed touched by the gift and put the necklace on that day.  He didn’t take it off again (except for MRIs) until the chain broke.  My mother either had it fixed or got a replacement, I’m not sure which.  It remains the only gift I ever gave him that I’m sure he loved, that he didn’t want to be without.  Perhaps the idea of an intercessor was a comfort, or maybe it was the idea that Peregrine had suffered as he had, and had, through a miracle of Christ, been healed.  I don’t know, because though he wore it constantly, Dad never did talk about it.
            In the emergency room, the doctors and nurses removed his necklace as they worked feverishly over him.  Someone handed it to me in an orange-topped plastic container, and that’s when I started to cry.
            Later, after Dad was stabilized, he asked for his glasses, and to my surprise, his necklace.  The doctors agreed that it was ok for him to wear it, so we fastened it around his neck, and it stayed there for the rest of his life.
            It was there the night we stayed up together watching television and found out that neither of us were smarter than a 5th grader.  It was there when my husband drove to the hospital so he could say goodbye.  It was there, visible on his chest, when his breathing turned agonal, and I can still see it on his pale, waxy skin, heaving up and down with each breath as he fought against leaving.
            After he died, Mom gave me the necklace.  I wore it to his funeral and for several weeks thereafter.  Then it became too painful to wear all the time.  I didn’t need a reminder that he was gone.  Every heartbeat pounded it out.  There was no escaping it.

            Recently I’ve started to wear the necklace again, hoping that the slight weight of it resting above my heart will be a comfort to me as it was to him, a reminder to pray, a reminder to hope.  But I also wear it to help me remember that he’s gone; to protect me from the pause before screaming that follows those exquisitely beautiful moments of forgetting.

Pain

Pain is natural, a byproduct of our human condition.  We sinners are blessed with free will, and with that, license to hurt each other, both physically and mentally.  Our mere existence in this world invites pain.  These frail, human bodies cannot escape the laws of biology and physics, nor their companions, illness and injury. 
If we think about it at all, most of us struggle to place God’s role in our world of pain.  Does he cause us to suffer?  Or does he merely allow it?  If he merely allows it, isn’t that the same thing as causing it, since he has the power to stop it?  Does he punish us with pain?  We watch as bad things happen to good people, and we want to know what God has to do with it.
According to self-help books, people in the psychology business, and what you sometimes hear from the pulpit, pain is God’s way of refining us.  
            Hearing that can flip your world on its head, and if you’re not careful, it can make you angry with God.  It makes more sense that pain would tear us down, and when we turn to the Lord for comfort, we don’t want to think of him as having anything to do with causing our suffering. 
I’m not sure I can form words and sentences sufficient to encompass the experience of losing my father.  The pain was and is multi-faceted, and felt differently by everyone.  The pain of his diagnosis tasted like fear.  Fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of the known in the form of twin specters of my grandfathers, both of whom died of prostate cancer.  My mother’s father died a mere two years prior to my father’s diagnosis. My maternal grandfather fought the disease for sixteen years.  I do not remember a time he wasn’t sick.  I do remember the side effects of his treatment, and how it chilled us all to see my father begin to have those same hot flashes and sudden sweats.
            After my father’s surgery, we found out he didn’t have clean margins, meaning parts of the tumors were left in his body.  That pain tasted like dread.  He began radiation therapy, and we felt the pain of hope, but not for long.  Then came the long-term hormone therapy, the pain of watching him suffer as the cancer spread to his bones.  The memory of my grandfather’s metastatic bone pain echoed around my head every time I saw my father wince, and I wanted to weep.  But Dad didn’t want us to cry, so I held back the tears while I was with him, only to dissolve every time I got to the interstate on my way back home.
            Anger.  Oh, how I was angry.  Looking back, I’m not sure the anger had an object.  It was amorphous, the result of my Type A personality trapped in a situation over which I had no control.  I felt the opposite of refined.  I was ready to throw open the window and yell to God, just as I had countless times before, “I’m refined enough already!  Just stop!  I have plenty of character, you don’t need to build any more!”
But the truth is, way back when I first started yammering at God about not needing any more character, thank-you-very-much, I was too young and stupid to realize exactly how much strength and character I didn’t have.  Whenever pain struck, whether in the form of death, illness, depression, or family strife, I found myself shattered, bruised and battered, unable to comprehend how there could still be weddings and parties and newborn babies.  Didn’t people know the world had ended?  I’ve lost count of how many times the world has ended, and yet here we are.  One Sunday I gave my anger to God on an offering plate, and I have never wanted it back.  Instead of anger, I want to understand.  I want to put a reason to suffering, for it to have counted for something.
In total, we spent twelve years watching my father caught in the grip of cancer, edging ever more rapidly and painfully downhill. During this time I never turned away from God, but it took me years to learn to turn towards him.   Six years into Dad’s illness, I married, and it was then I began to study God.  The thirst to know him has been a constant in my life since I was quite small, but in that journey one needs a guide, and I didn’t know enough to go looking for one.  Now I have the blessing of being married to my spiritual teacher, and through Bible studies together, Sunday school, and our own conversations, I began a relationship with God that wasn’t limited to Sundays.
The end of our time with my father came abruptly, with an early morning collapse, an ambulance to the hospital, near death in the ER, and then two weeks of hospital Hospice.  Those two weeks redefined pain for all of us.  I reached for God while bending over the hospital bed, holding his hand and trying to offer comfort and amateur nursing without crushing the central line.  During the nights I spent in his room, on my knees by the bed, I tried to pray but ran out of words, listening to his breathing grow ragged and rough, sprinting to find a nurse every time the pain pump beeped to advertise its emptiness.  I implored God to fill me with strength, and envisioned the Holy Spirit standing behind me, one hand on my shoulder.  As he lay dying an agonizing, traumatic, uncontrollable death, God strengthened me enough to hold his hand and talk to him.  The nurses told us that even though he was unresponsive, he could likely hear, and so I told him it was ok for him to go.  I told him not to be afraid, that God loved him, that through God’s grace he was saved, that he was going to a place where there was no pain, not to worry, that all of us would be ok.  For hours I talked to him and to God.  His agony was so great that I implored God to take him, to release him from his broken body.  I implored my father to let go.  As the hours wore on and the pain seemed worse, I even told him at one point, “Daddy, if you see a light, please, go towards it.  It’s ok.  Please, it’s ok.  You can go.”    
Do I think God caused my father to suffer?  No, I don’t.  Physical pain and illness are a part of life here.  Do I think God used that suffering to produce something positive?  Absolutely.
All this is not to say the pain has been fun, or that it’s gone or ever will be gone. I’ve learned not to run from it, but to face it.  My goal is not to get past, but to get through.  My therapist calls this part “the work of grief.”  It’s horrible work, and there are days when I want to retreat, to pretend it didn’t happen, to hide in that familiar warm place we call Denial.  But when I turn towards the hurt, confront it over and over, it gets infinitesimally less painful each time.  I don’t like this place of grief, this dark, cold place with its stream of images flashing before my eyes, the cruel pictures vivid no matter how many Xanex I throw at them. I know that God will not leave me here forever, but I also know, after grieving for a mere half a year, my stay is far from over.
This week marks six months since my father’s death, and every time I begin to take a breath and think, “ok, I’m fine, it’s all going to be fine now,” something happens.  It’s usually something small; playing ball with my kids outside on that first crisp spring day, the smell of one of his old shirts, or reaching to dial the phone before remembering that I can’t call him anymore.  I had a crisis of grief upon the death of my electric toothbrush, because I couldn’t call my father (an oral surgeon) to ask him what type of replacement to buy.     
Here I have to give God credit.  He has made this pain a gift.  Peeling off the wrappings of suffering, I have uncovered a personal relationship with the Lord and forged a better relationship with my earthly father.  And then there’s the ultimate gift: the certainty that he’s in a better place.
I bought a new toothbrush.  I try to tell my kids about their grandfather.  And sometimes the smell of those old shirts makes me smile instead of cry.