Gail Helen Bremner

Losing a Dad

Posted on December 20th, 2006 by gail helen.
Categories: Relationships, Personal, Blogs.

A man, a brillant writer that I respect, lost his father last weekend, and wrote an extremely moving post about it, “In My Father’s House“. I think anybody who’s ever lost someone will recognize what he must have went through in those long, long hours. To be honest, when I read it, I ended up in a soggy little ball, thinking about when I lost my dad a little while ago. Of course the experience was quite different, but death’s footfalls always echo the same in any corridor. It was an aneurism related to metastatic prostate cancer, not exactly an unexpected departure but the flight was definetly early. I had spent the night before drowsing on the couch in his room, waking every so often to roll paper towel for him to use in blocking the slow flow of blood that had been trickling from his nose since the early evening. It didn’t seem like such a big deal to me, my dad always having been cursed with overactive sinuses, a lovely genetic link we share. When the sun and everyone else came up, I went home to see my boyfriend, sleep a little, and take a desperately needed shower. The call came while I was sleeping and again while I was washing my hair. He’d lost consciousness a couple of hours after I left and nobody knew how much longer it would be, just that this was my father’s last day. There was nothing for me to do but sit and watch. My sisters at least, always far more easy with their physical affection, lay on the bed with him and held his hands. I wish I had done that. I still find the image of them laying on either side of him oddly comforting. It was protective, almost, which is a position we rarely take with our parents. I know he left this world surrounded by love, which is the best way to both enter and exit. I am skipping over a great amount of details that caused me unlimited resentment as everything from the point of his passing forward was handled extremely badly. Probably the one of the worst parts for my family was when the morticians got ready to take my dad, the body, away. The novice actually zipped up the bag in front of my sister, which sent her in to near hysterics, and then they had to dunt, dunt, dunt the guerney all the way down the stairs. I still can’t believe how fresh the whole nightmare still is, even after more than four years. But I try not to dwell on the bad. The whole experience is still a big, black hole that I try not to stare at for too long. It took me years to begin to think and function as a regular human being without having to force every action and emotion into a semblance of normalacy. I made people very uncomfortable everytime I forgot myself, and still do on occassion. Someday, when I have a handle on it, I will eventually write it all out, but that is enough for now.

Share:

0 comments.