What is the story of the story you’re in?
Day 29 — #writeingrief
Every single day, I think that everything is normal in my life, that blind, ignorant, business-as-usual normal, and then I’m caught off guard, the wind knocked out of me to realize my Dad is dead. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I know that sounds trite and typical of anyone who has experienced heart-grinding, soul-crushing grief. But I was with him two weeks before the procedure that eviscerated his liver. I flew across the country to be with him, with my family, as we tried to make sense of how something so straightforward could have gone horribly awry.
Then he seemed like he was getting better so I flew back home, only to learn that in the course of treating him, the hospital “accidentally” destroyed his kidneys. It was a “common mistake.” I flew back and became a warrior for my Dad, trying to advocate for him in a maze of incompetent and insensitive medical care. I took shifts to stay with him overnight in a renowned but dirty and backwards hospital with healthcare providers who couldn’t be bothered with a dying man who refused their offer of a double transplant.
This isn’t my story. I am a witness to his story. I feel like I’m failing to tell all of the details to explain how criminal and wrong this death was because it was at the hands of revered and accomplished doctors who couldn’t be bothered to even sit for a moment and truly answer our questions and explain the things we didn’t even know to ask. Only one of dozens of medical personnel in that first hospital sat down when he spoke with us. Only one there held my Dad’s hand as he explained to us about his practice — palliative care.
This isn’t my story. I am a witness to his story. And I’m ashamed to say that we didn’t touch my Dad skin-to-skin after the bad hospital told us early on that he had MRSA, the flesh eating disease. He was treated for it, but I later learned that he didn’t have it and the notation on the big screen behind the nurses’ station that still said MRSA was just the hospital staff not being bothered enough to update it.
They told us to wear gloves from the moment we entered Dad’s room. They put fear into us of touching his hands or his feet. Even when we moved to the good hospital, we were still so terrified and put gloves on every time we entered his room. I now realize why the nurses in the good hospital looked at us curiously, but if we forgot to put them on, my Dad would panic and order us to put them on immediately. I never hugged him or kissed hm again after I saw him two weeks before his procedure. I never again felt my Dad’s skin until he was dead, and I held his cold hand in my hands.
This story is excruciating and lives within me, tearing me apart. I don’t ever know when grief will hit me at any given moment each day. Today, it is right now as I struggle to write this. Yesterday, it was when my Mom sent a video of my Dad’s gravestone to show me that it now had grass around it instead of dirt. The day before, it when I saw a movie and thought — as I always do — “I should call Dad to tell him about it tomorrow,” but there would be no tomorrow ever again to do that.
The day before that, it was when I got a Facebook message from someone I hadn’t been in touch with for a while who said they were so sorry to hear about my loss. The day before that, it was when I spoke with a woman who started off our business call with “I just wanted to say I’m so sorry you lost your Dad,” and I choked back sobs and said, “I can’t talk about it or think about it. I’m not dealing with it very well.” Then tried so hard to zero in on the neutral space of “business-as-usual.”
I lost my Dad. This is just a sliver of his story. It is inside of me, slashing away, trying to get out.
