Mourning Shamefully

Do you know what is difficult to do?  Mourn shamefully.  I've been trying this entire week to figure out a way to mourn the loss of my father that would allow me to move on - because the last thing I want is to spend anymore time crying over this man.  Imagine you are the child of someone like Gary Ridgeway or Charles Manson, and your father, afore mentioned bad guy, was actually pretty great as far as the parenting thing went, but also had this ugly side.  How do you mourn that?  People around you are thinking, "Yes! The human race just improved with that death!" and you agree with them, but are so, so sad on the inside.  What do you do with that?  Mourn the father, hate the man?  Not so easy to pull them apart.

My brother was saddled with the late life and after life care of my father.  He flew into Seattle to handle all the death related business.  Unfortunately, my father's ashes were not done in time for my brother to pick them up and spread them.  This task was left to me, for which my brother apologized.  Today I went and picked up the ashes of both my grandmother and my father and spread them into a river that will carry them to the ocean.  It was his wish to be put into the water with his mother who had died 12 years ago.  He'd been saving her ashes since.  

I wasn't at all prepared to carry a box of ashes that used to be my father on my lap as we drove through town.  I'd seen all this before when Jason's father passed four years ago but today it was somehow different.  For me to be the one that spread, dumped, disposed of him was a little strange too.  Mostly, it was sad.  It was sad to me that any man or woman that spends 70 years on this earth has no one but a few angry children left behind to send them off.  In all his time here, all the chances he had to do right, he was really just alone.  Now, I know why he was alone, but that doesn't make it any less sad to me.  Also, how awful for him that I was the one, the only one, there to send him off.  Me, whom he could not bring himself to do right by.  Me, angry and sad, I poured his remains in the river.  There was no fanfare, no words spoken or memories shared.  No flowers tossed in the water.  Nothing.  So depressing.  When a mother holds her son and looks into his face, wishing for a wonderful life for him, she never envisions this.  

So, today was really hard.  Tonight is really hard.  I am upset, and then I get angry that I am upset.  I wonder if losing a man like this is easier than losing someone wonderful?  Because if it is, I can't imagine the loss of a truly loved one.  I will work through this, as we all do.  The truth is, I just want to be done with it.  I just want to press a button or swallow a pill and be done. Mourning is hard enough, but feeling shame for doing it makes it even harder.  Bless everyone that has done this before me and everyone that will follow.  It is easy feat.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Surgery

I started my period when I was 11 years old.  I remember going to the nurses office at school that day because my lower back hurt so badly.  It felt like nothing I had ever felt before, but was a feeling I would become quite familiar with.  Imagine there being a bowling ball inside your body, resting on your tail bone.  It causes pressure just sitting there.  That was a good day.  The bad days were when that bowling ball was being ground into my back - from the inside trying to find a way out.  Later, when laboring with Lily, that same feeling was there.  Lily was upside down and her head was resting on my tailbone.  The contractions that drove it deeper into the bone were killers.  So all those years of imagining my inner bowling ball were not that far off! In those first few years of cycling I would often seek out the hardest surface I could find and just lay on it, trying to flatten my back into it.  Our living room floor usual...
Read more

$$Tokyo$$

If you google the most expensive cities to live in worldwide you'll find Tokyo somewhere in the top 10.  I looked at a few last night and Tokyo was actually in the top 3 on 5 of the lists.  Now, one list claimed that you'd have to shell out $5,000 to get a 2 bedroom apartment in Tokyo.  I'm sure there are plenty of such apartments, but there are also less expensive ones so you can't believe everything you read. But, it is true.  Living here is very expensive.  We rent an 860 ft2 apartment for approximately $1100 a month.  If we want to rent a parking space that is another $115 a month.  Our utilities, including internet but with no cable, are over $400 a month.  All that for utilities and our apartment does not even have central air or heat!  Groceries, gas, train tickets, they all add up too of course.  Groceries vary in price from store to store and season to season, but it is not uncommon to see 4 apples for $6 or a quart of milk fo...
Read more

Parenting is not for the Timid - This is my Biggest and Worst

Parenting brings obstacles and challenges like none that we've ever dealt with before.  My first was when my son was born.  He was the most difficult baby I'd ever come across, and I got to be with him all the time .  I remember how defeated and discouraged I was, and how I thought to myself, "I can't do this.  I can't parent this child, make him happy, stay sane.  I don't even want to".  I didn't know how I was going to get through his infancy and this obstacle felt like the greatest obstacle of my life. We got through it, I got through it.  Time passed and allowed me to forget the depth of the struggle so that when the next challenge arose, that one felt like a new biggest and worst.  The new challenge was now the thing that was going to end all civilized thought in my head.  Again, we got through.  Time and again, challenges, the biggest and worst, have arisen.  Each time I have thought, "How? What am I supposed to do with this...
Read more