I’ve come to realize that the older you get, the more you have grief in your life. It is inevitable that you will lose parents or siblings, your spouse, friends or relatives or a pet. Even that most painful of losses, a child or grandchild, can force its way into your life. Your friends will have grief and you will hurt for them.
Nothing “fixes” grief.
Grief is a hard, painful, stressful thing. You’re numb at times, in disbelief, on auto pilot. You have no idea how you will get through the next hour, never mind the next day or week.
My dad died, quite young. He was only 68. A heart attack while he was shovelling snow. His dad, my grandad died young of a heart attack too. And yes, my dad did know that he had high cholesterol and he was at high risk of a heart attack. His doctor was stern about making changes to his diet immediately. My mother quit making the crispy pork rinds and cooked chicken more often than not. My dad still wandered into the kitchen at lunch time and made himself hash browns and fried liver in the cast iron frying pan. “I’d rather be dead than have to eat chicken breast and rice every day” he’d say. Well dad, guess what.
I took his death hard, really hard. The fact that I took it so hard surprised me on some level. After all, I did know he had a bad heart and I knew he would die some day. But I was not ready when he dropped dead in the driveway. And lets not even go there on regrets. Things I wished I had done.
My dad was a writer (among other things). He wrote a lot of poems and a few short stories. There were scribbles on any scrap of paper within his reach. At some point my mother gathered all the odd scribbles and bit of paper and got some of them typed up. (I have the box of scribbles and stories and notes. My mother never threw out a thing in her life).
When we were planning his funeral service we thought one of his poems would be fitting for his service. As I read through some of the poems it hit me like a sledge hammer, how little I really knew about my dads feelings on a lot of things. In his poems, he let us see his innermost self – something he did not do in his actual face to face interactions. I cried when I read his poem “Faith”. I cried again when I read “The Old Folks”. How did I not know how deeply he loved his daughters? How did I not know how sentimental he was? He died 27 years ago and I still cry when I read “Faith.”
Faith
by Donald Y. Bamford
In the highland of North Scotland
Grows a flower of rarest kind,
And scientists have long since labored
A specimen to find.
After years their search was rewarded
The flower located at last
Growing in a sunlit corner
At the foot of a deep crevasse.
How can it be they wondered?
It’s pricelesss, and perhaps our last hope
To obtain this remarkable species –
So let’s lower a man on a rope.
But none of the men would go down there
In that yawning chasm so deep.
As it happend, nearby a shepherd
An his son were tending sheep.
The scientist offered much money
To the lad, or his father if one
Would descend that precipitous canyon,
And do what the scientist wished done.
The shepherd thought of his family
How the money might greatly be used,
And the laddie thought of his mother
And his sisters without any shoes.
The lad looked own in the chasm
And at the fearful, dizzying slope
And he said “I’ll do as you wish sir,
If my Daddy holds onto the rope.”
I’ve suffered more recent grief. Too recent to even talk about it now. I’ve parked it away in a corner of my heart and head to be examined later. Later is mostly in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. I’ve read there are stages of grief and I don’t know where I am with that. I only know I carry it with me always. I always will. My daughter will too.
You know on some level that you will have grief in your life. It’s impossible to avoid. You can only hope that it doesn’t visit you too often or too unexpectedly. I don’t have answers on how to cope. You just find a way to get through the hours and days. Somehow, you find a way.
I’ll leave you with this poem and the hope that when grief does arrive on your doorstep, it is gentle.
The Old Folks
Donald Y. Bamford
A trunk was in the attic of my old and vacant home,
It held treasures of my childhood, and when I chose to roam.
I’d forgotten it completely, in the clamor of my life,
Until it was discovered, accidentally by my wife.
Today I looked through it, and nearly burst to tears
To see some of the old things, tarnished by the years.
Soiled and faced scrapbooks, examination tests;
And I wonder if in the years I’ve lived
That those were not the best.
An old and ragged Bible, its cover lost and gone;
The tattered remnants of a toy, of which I was so fond;
The bedraggled scribblings of a lad in a notebook yellowed now;
An ancient snapshot of my Dad, as he walked behind a plow.
Old Christmas cards and greetings, from folks I scarcely knew,
With messages of sincerity, of friendship straight and true
Written to my parents when I was still a boy,
Humble, simple words of love, valued and enjoyed.
How peacefully they lived their lives, those kind and gentle folk
How fondly I remember them, and what memories they provoke.
Good and honest people, they lived their share of days,
O, that I could thank them, in a hundred thousand ways.
They have the earth departed, gone to their peaceful rest,
And somehow they’d learned life’s meaning, the things that are foremost and besst.
They accepted life’s sadness and sorrow, with grief but not despair,
And all the things that were good in their lives, with others they loved to share.
Now when my own life’s years are numbered, and my work on earth is through
Will my children remember me in the way I want them to?
When they have grown to manhood, and they life’s burdens bear,
Will they be strengthened in the knowledge that their Old Folks really cared.
