bradmax

Mood: Frank Sinatra, “My Way”

Acceptance and Letting Go

Maybe the hardest thing about the final loss that is the death of a loved one, family or otherwise, are those two things: acceptance and letting go.

What the hell do they mean, though? Sounds pretty self-explanatory, right? The concepts sure are easy to understand, sure, but actually going about putting them into action? Fuck….

It seems to have been different yet difficult for my parents, certainly having to deal the the loss of a son. They were both 79 at the time of Doug’s passing. He was 55. At any age, you’d always expect the parents to be the ones to go before the children do, and to have a son for 55 years… So, how was it ‘different’ as I typed earlier? I know it hit Mom harder for a few reasons. First, and for all of us, when we visited Doug in the hospital the week before he passed, we talked at length with his primary doctor and though Doug was out of it for the most part and slightly yellow of pallor as his liver was under attack, what the doctor was cautiously optimistic about still had a ring of Positivity to it. So, when we were on the drive back to our homes, we got the information that the cancer was Stage 4.

That hit us all hard, of course, and the first thing that Dad said was “We’re going to lose him.”

I mentioned in an earlier Part that Doug had Hodgkin’s Disease in his teens that forced Mom and him to relocated for a time to California where he could get better medical attention than there was in Alaska at that time in the 80s. As you might expect, that forged a deeper bond between them. So, not only to have cancer finally take him away, but further to have his passing happen days before Mother’s Day, you can imagine the impact (and I truly hope you can only imagine it!).

For Dad, he’s pretty old school and maintained his composure, at least as far as I saw, anyway (Mom called me at work with the news of Doug’ passing and they were living in Tennessee so I didn’t see his immediate reaction). Doug’s choice was to be cremated, and it was during the funeral ceremony when his ashes were brought up the aisle of the church he was interred when Dad absolutely broke down as the casket passed him. It kills me a little today as I type and took me a while to type that last sentence. Still, that is a pert of the acceptance, and for all of us the funeral itself was a large part of letting go.

I think for all of us in the nuclear family, it was his then 6-year old daughter that truly helped us all to accept his passing and, in as far as possible, let go and form a bastion of love and support around both her and her mother/Doug’s wife.

I had learned that hard lesson with the passing of my uncle that put me in a years’ enforced depression and separation from other family and friends to not shut myself away; with others that needed support, as much as in turn I Needed theirs, this was a more nuanced acceptance for me, personally. A hard-learned lesson that I could not let happen again. So, I didn’t.

I came across this poem that seems to illustrate well, in part, some of my feelings.

Changed Man by Steve Clark

I'm not the man that you once knew.
The traits remind are but a few.
Don't look to my past, I no longer live there.
The future is ours to build and share
Mistakes have been made and lessons learnt
Through pain and anger our love got burnt
Clouded and hazed our views have become
Until we are left, both broken and numb
Hurt and confusion we accept as our way
The a path we once walked we stared to stray
Now I see light where once there was dark
To rekindle the magic, the joy and the spark
Of a love once lost through misunderstanding and fear
To share with each other the joy and the cheer
But most of all to hold you so tight
To be there for you on a cold winter night
Whisper I love you when things get to loud
And find your smile that is lost in a crowd
Because love is enough, as it is life's goal
Our reason for living, the food for our soul
So at the end and I say this anew
My darling, my soul I will always love you.

Not the greatest poem, no, but much of it sings to my points in this Part.

Acceptance may be the ‘easiest’ part of these two necessary aftermaths of a death. Someone is gone and even though it seems impossible for a time that you can’t just call them up and talk anymore, it is now a fact and though the memories will stay so very clear for a time, there can be no more face-to-face or ear-to-ear chats. As much as they will be wished and ached for, they are gone, and it is the one thing ‘easiest’ to understand and accept, even if that acceptance takes time.

Letting go. Wow.

On the one hand, I am not sure I have totally achieved this today; on the other hand, I have let go more than I had with my uncle’s passing. This kind of emotion is not the easiest to, I want to say ‘comprehend’. I think that word makes the most sense for me. Even for years out, the grief lives, it comes in waves, though less and less frequent. Just yesterday, I read something that my sister through Doug’s marriage sent to her sister, Doug’s wife, that deeply spoke to me on this exact thing (hence me ‘stealing’ the waves analogy); here it is in full:

“Alright, here goes. I'm old. What that means is that I've survived (so far) and a lot of people I've known and loved did not. I've lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here's my two cents - I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can't see.

As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

Whereas I do not look forward to the next losses, I know they will come. I do not know who wrote this, I believe it was originally a Reddit post or some such, but it speaks of great wisdom and puts it more eloquently than I could.

For the last month or so, the Sea of Emotions has gotten a bit stormier and the the tears and sadness have been more present. It may be because Doug’s daughter just celebrated her 10th birthday, along with the anniversary of his passing. I cannot place a specific reason for it being a rougher time of it this anniversary. I ‘simply’ accept it.

Movies, songs, books, coffee mugs, Disney World park maps; things just keep popping up with memories that admittedly now seem to retain more sweet than bitter, but tend to leave me weeping rather than shedding a tear or two and smiling. I wouldn’t give up those memories for anything, of course, but how does that jibe with ‘letting go’?

Those of us that remain do exactly that: remain. We are still ‘here’, in this reality and that reality is that our loved one is gone. However, as deep as our love remains for that one who will never return, it is the grief that we need to let go of. It will and must take a while, but even a year on from Doug’s loss, the grief was less, even if it did come in waves. That those waves were farther apart meant the grief was less, was not all encompassing as in the days after his loss.

Now, let me be VERY clear: by ‘letting go’ I do not mean ‘moving on’. The loved one we lost will always be present, always be a part of us, are a part of who we are today, so how can we move on from that? To my mind, it is impossible!

I had to go search it out, but something I found or was shown to me shortly following Doug’s death was a TED Talk wherein a woman spoke of precisely those things regarding ‘moving on’. I found it on YouTube and will post it, here in the hopes that it helps others who may be dealing with the same:

https://youtu.be/khkJkR-ipfw

As I say, as those quotes and wisdom form the ‘old man’, the waves will always be there. Sometimes it will be a gentle lap and others a tempest. But more and more, they become gentler, get closer to that gentle lap. That is how we, eventually, let go of the grief.

Things STILL Happen For A Reason. Counting Your Blessings

I may have been clear on this in the previous Parts, but as it is so important, I think, I will enter that territory once more.

Firstly, it may take a very long time and a lot of reflection to understand why an event to train of events happened. One thing leading on to another and so on, and so on and so forth. Decades ago when my father, a dentist asked me if I’d like to ‘run’ a dental lab in his practice, I was intrigued. Mostly because it involved a trip to Florida and Disney World! Even knowing nothing about what a dental lab does, it became reality. From there and after 13 years working with him, he retired and I was fortunate enough to be included with the sale of the practice, along with the assistants and front desk people and such. One year later and with the use of the lab falling off as the new owners didn’t know what to do with it, I was let go.

A general dental lab makes crowns and bridges from cast metals and piling porcelain that is then baked. I never got that far, ‘just’ doing bite studies, wax-ups and everything that needed to be done with pouring and pinning models to ship them off to other labs who would make the teeth. My self-doubt at getting hired on by a full service lad at that time had my guts in a bind as I Needed to find a job. Out of three possibilities, I wound up at my last choice, which was disappointing, of course. Three months later, I was let go, no notice, here’s your check, goodbye (business was slow, not anything I did). That very day, I was hired by one of the other labs I had interviewed with before; they needed a new model person and they used the pinning system I had just learned at the other place!

To make a long series of events short, the owner of the new lab had built his retirement home in western North Carolina and when I informed him that I was going to move out of Alaska, he put me in touch with a lab in the vicinity of his retirement home, I was hired there, on the drive down from Alaska to North Carolina I spent one last perfect day with Doug while he was at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival and on until I am sitting her typing this out in a house I share with my elderly parents, helping them get shopping done and with whatever else I can, working a great job with great, wonderful people and am within easy driving distance of Doug’s family and can visit them regularly.

One thing lead on from one to another and I think even with my ham-handed effort, you can see why those events of the last 20 years or so happened and for what reason(s).

I could go on for a while on things happening for a reason and just how completely Blessed my family is with finding this house not a mile from where I work and the conveniences of stores and doctors and such, but I may have been running off at the fingers here enough already. If you’ve read this far, thank you. I hope some of my ramblings help you in even a small way.

I will leave this last Part with a final thought and then quote a song that perfectly illustrates my brother, Doug.

Doug was a life-long actor. A stage actor, as he never ‘made it’ into anything else, other than one documentary. But he had a long and varied Career that took him all over the US and even to Viet Nam. We never know how many people we affect in our lives, and after Doug passed and notifications were posted on Facebook, there was this amazing and wonderful outpouring. Certainly of support, but mostly of people posting on how Doug had affected them, how they saw him as an incredible actor, comic genius director, acting coach and so on. At the time of his passing these outpourings of remembrances were a balm to our bruised souls! We knew Doug and knew he was the kind of person they all were recounting, so in that way we were of a ‘Well…duh!” mindset on the one hand, but utterly dumbstruck at how many people he had influenced and for the better!

Okay, I lied a bit. Remembering how Doug influenced people, I recalled how he, while still in college, wrote a sonnet off the top of his head for a friend he was in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with who had been killed in a motorcycle accident during the run of the show. It stuck in the memory of one of our close friends (the kind who are basically a brother from another mother) and he did his best to write one for me to recite at Doug’s service. I will post it here, and then post the song lyrics that speak volumes about Doug.

The sky is just as blue as in our youth

And Phoebus car progresses just as bright,
But in my heart I hold a lonely truth,
Our suffering world has lost a brilliant light.
He was a king, a cad, a cop, a clown,

A fighter, fiend, a fop, a fool a friend
But now his final curtain has come down,
Our lives shall never see his like again.
And yet my soul consoles my grieving heart

To say “He is not gone but just away,
To walk a different stage, and take an epic part
In some eternal, cosmic, classic play.”

Today I grieve but know somewhere he smiles,
To know we part for but a little while.

Still very poignant today.

Doug was the kind of guy who took his loves and hobbies very seriously. He loved Frank Sinatra. So much so that he could tell you who orchestrated what song and what label each version of the same song was from. He was that passionate of a guy. in final tribute to him in this blog, please read and feel the lyrics to “My Way”