Tag: #Grief

  • Still Dealing with It (Unedited)

    (This isn’t a review on The Pitt, though I might do one at a later date. Anyway, I just wanted to state that at the start.)

    When my daughter was born, I discovered that all of my emotions were right at the surface. It didn’t take much to make me cry; my baby girl holding my finger, or falling asleep on me would cause a gush of joyous tears out of me. But I also began to notice that commercials that had to do with parents and kids would make a big softy outta me. I even cried watching a Simpsons when Marge sang a lullaby to Bart. I wouldn’t call this state sensitive, nor thin skinned, but it was a state where I felt that it was very easy to tap into what I was feeling. Maybe everything didn’t make me cry, but I was able to feel everything. I learned to control it, but “control” isn’t the right word – I learned to work with it, might be a better description.

    The only other time I felt that way was when my mother was in the hospital, and the fear of her death made me and my whole family exist without much of an emotional filter. When the doctor confirmed that she was, in fact, going to die and there was nothing that could be done to save her, what littler filter we had dissipated. One moment we would be normal and having a conversation, and then something would snap, and we would just explode in tears – just loud painful sobs. Then it would pass, only soon at any moment we would again break in sobs, tears of grief. After she passed, we all dealt with her death in our own ways; each person’s mourning was their own. We were there for each other, but we all took different paths in dealing with it.

    For me, I just tried to plow ahead. I had a kid to take care of and a family to provide for. I was left feeling sad all the time for about two years. Not so many tears after that first year, but on special days, holidays, birthdays; the sadness would return, but anger started showing up for me as well. I have been trying to work through my anger and sadness. I through myself into art, creative outlets, and putting a few additional pictures of my mother up around the home. It’s been almost seven years, and talking about her doesn’t hurt anymore, which I know is a sign of progress.

    But there are a few areas that I know I have been avoiding, or not processing well. One of the oddest manifestations of my avoidance is that I pretty much won’t watch medical shows. Anything with doctors or hospitals, I will come up with a reason not to watch it. I won’t even watch reruns of M*A*S*H or ER. And I know 100% why, and it’s because I don’t want to relive any of those feelings of watching my mother slowly die in a hospital bed.

    But I am a huge ER fan, and curiosity got the better of me and I started watching The Pitt, and sure as shit there is a story line about an elderly father not wanting to be intubated to stay alive, and his adult children over rule his wishes. The show didn’t shy away from showing the pain and discomfort the father was in, as well as showing the confusion, guilt, shame, and fear of having to make end of life decision for your parents.

    The situation in the show was not exactly like the one me and my family went through with my mother, but it was painfully close enough. And as I watched the story unfold, the vice in my head kept telling me to shut it off, it was late, go to bed, you have an early morning, reliving your pain won’t help… But I pushed though it. I let myself go back there. Feel it again; the fear and pain, and numbness and rawness and confusion – sometimes not knowing how I was going to survive this. How was I going to keep living without my mother? How was I going to live with this loss, this pain, all of this that will never go away?

    I sat on my couch at 1am and just cried for a while. I don’t even know if the show was that good, but I know I let something out that I haven’t been acknowledging existed in the first place. I have been dodging that final week of my mother’s life. That week where she was in a hospice bed with a morphine drip, and it was my mother but it wasn’t. She wasn’t there, and we just listened to her breathing with everything and nothing passing through my head. I sat there watching her dying, and we all spoke to her, but she was never going to respond back to us. I just wanted my mom to touch my hand and tell me that she loved me, but that moment had passed. All I could do was watch and wait, and it was so painful.

    I am still processing, and a dear friend did say to me that we never stop processing losing a parent; it just becomes a part of who we are. I think they’re right, and I love them for their honesty with me. I still have places and emotions I need to work through. Recesses that refuse to come into the light of day. I know where they are, and what they are. Just not always ready to deal with them yet.

    I will.

    In time.

  • Short Story Review: “Keuka Lake” by Joseph O’Neill

    (The short story “Keuka Lake” by Joseph O’Neill appeared in the March 3rd, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Annie Collinge for The New Yorker

    I don’t know if you know this, but grief is a really popular theme for short stories. (That and bad relationships with parents, but that’s a story for another day.) Grief lends itself easily to the dramatic, and is also individualistic, and it can also be shocking as to what emotions and memories it will bring up. Everyone grieves differently, and maybe I was a little flippant at the start of this, because maybe my past grief still makes me uncomfortable.  Parts of “Keuka Lake” tapped on my past grief, but in the end Joseph O’Neill’s story meandered, leaving an unsteady feeling to the work.

    The story starts off with a banger of a first paragraph, letting us know that Nadia, the protagonist, has been involved with someone from a teenager to the day she became a widower at fifty-four. Her husband was killed in a car crash near a town in the Finger Lakes, and Nadia never knew why her husband was driving up there. And then the story just flutters about. We follow Nadia to a visit to her sister on Montreal, and then an early return to the States, where she gets a speeding ticket. She then looks up a former boyfriend, who is a lawyer, to take care of the ticket, and though she never sees the lawyer, Nadia engages his secretary to look into the reasons why her husband was in the Finger Lakes.

    I say that the story “meanders” and “flutters” because the story never feels like it takes anyone seriously. The tone that is taken towards everyone that isn’t Nadia is condescending and rather dismissive. I understand that Nadia is lost without her husband, and she isn’t sure how to react or behave normally, as everything has a level of annoyance to her. But at the end of the story, I can’t say conclusively that Nadia learned anything. There is no catharsis, or release, or even a realization of anything. I believe the last section of the story was to provide that, but it felt too random and disjointed, though I understood that Keuka Lake is near the town where Nadia’s husband was killed, and I guess we are all the fish in our grief.

  • Personal Review: “Offside Constantly” by Camille Bordas

    (The short story “Offside Constantly” by Camille Bordas, was featured in the June 28th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    I have had a soft spot for stories that deal with grief, because I am still dealing with the grief of my mother’s passing. This affection explains why I was such an avid supporter of “WandaVision,” and still list it as one of the best TV shows of 2021, as it was a story about how even the best people can fall victim to, be consumed by, and ultimately, deny that they are in mourning. That once you start down that path, it is very difficult to get out of it. “Offside Constantly” is another story of a protagonist dealing with the effects of grief, and how to deal with those emotions.

    From the start, teenager Johanna is talking about death, or how people die. Her brother has recently passed, and she is dealing with a probable case of narcolepsy, but it cannot be confirmed because her mother won’t allow a spinal tap. We learn about Johanna’s obsession of getting her brother’s obituary listed in a magazine, and her attempts at helping another girl at school deal with her mental issues. Her mother comes across as caring, and her father is distant, but both seems to be handling their grief away from Johanna’s observations. When the climax of the story arrives, Johanna’s actions have changed though she explains that she hasn’t changed her mind.

    What I read was smartly written, but I would also categorize it as a “something-yet-nothing happens” story. Yes, clearly things happen; a plot was set forth, a climax occurred, and there was a resolution, but it felt like nothing happened. I think this was caused by the narration of Johanna, who never seemed too concerned for anything, other than a moment when her parents showed some affection towards each other, which upsets her, as she sees it as they are returning to “normal.” I understand that teenagers can be angsty and attempt to portray themselves as disinterred in everything, but this teenager talked like she was over 30, which left me feeling that the character lack authenticity. Grief can manifest in numerous different ways for each person. There isn’t one way to mourn, and we should allow people the breath of space to discover, or learn, what their new normal life will be as loss now accompanying them. I apricate that “Offside Constantly” took the time to look at the loss of a sibling, but I never could understand why Johanna wanted to share this with me, as I don’t think the story decided if her situation was dire, and needed to be corrected.

  • Personal Review: WandaVision (Spoilers!)

    (You are warned! SPOILERS AHEAD! And this is a long one.)

    So, I finished WandaVision last night, and nothing was ruined for me; No internet troll, no idiot fanboy friend, and no spoiler reveiling headline. I was able to watch, and enjoy what unfolded. Just like our ancestors of old.

    The first thing is that I am really surprised at how much I enjoyed WandaVision, as it made me look forward to Friday night. The group of people who put this together did a great job of keeping the story well paced, revealing this mystery piece by piece. I wasn’t sure at first, to be honest. The first two episodes moved slowly, but as the show progressed, it did feel like a runaway train, building speed, and you knew it was headed for a crash of a climax. I keep thinking that at some point I will get tired of superhero shows/movies, because Martin Scorsese is right; you know the good guy always wins, so there is nothing really at stake or in peril. Yeah…

    …But what I enjoyed most was that this was a superhero story about grief and mourning. I think when it comes to “big ‘splosion movies” like Hollywood makes, not a whole lot of time is given to the emotional toll that these trials and losses have on the characters. (I remember when Carrie Fisher said that Princess Leia was the strongest character in Star Wars because Leia was captured, tortured, watched her home planet get destroyed which killed her parents and family and friends, got in a shoot-out, still had time to empathize with Luke’s loss of Ben, and then went on to help lead the attack on the Death Star which caused her to, yet again, face imminent death. And through all of that, she never broke down. That’s an emotionally strong character.) When you think about Wanda, that character has been through too much grief; parents, brother, and her partner in Vision. How would a character with unlimited power deal with all of that death? As she went through the stages of grief, why wouldn’t she use her powers?

    Grief doesn’t make sense. As I watched this show, it made me think about how I have grieved for my mother. Clearly, if I could bring her back I would do it, but I know that will never happen. But I do sometimes find myself having the fleeting thought that I might still get a phone call or text from her. It’s a thought that enters my mind, only to be quickly dismissed by logic, but it lasts long enough for there to be a catch in my throat, and that sad sinking feeling in my stomach. My grief doesn’t stop me from functioning, because my kid makes me keep going, but my grief is always below the surface. It’s a sadness that always seems to be in the back of the room, just out of the corner of my eye. It holds me back from being very excited about anything, or opening myself up to any deeper emotions, or even the joy of looking forward to something.

    And that is the thing that WandaVision did for me. When I figured out this was a show about Wanda’s grief and how it had manifested itself, I didn’t run from it. Watching this show was admitting that it was going to bring up things in me that are still raw. Two and a half years after my mother’s death, I can talk about it, but I’m still not ready to feel that pain again. Watching Wanda and Vision say goodbye to their boys, that hurt. Watching Wanda and Vision say goodbye to each other, oh that hurt as well. But what hurt most was watching that red energy field contracting; the inevitable visual end, the looming death, that was moving toward them. That image for me was how my mother’s death felt. As she lay almost comatose in hospice, we all knew death was coming. We couldn’t stop it, and as every minute ticked by, we knew it was getting closer. I would have done anything to stop it. But I couldn’t. That hurts still.

    WandaVision ended up being something more than I thought it could be. What I thought would be a one note joke of being trapped in old TV shows, or a vehicle to set up “Phase 4” or “Phase 5,” actually was one of the better shows that I have seen a in long time. There was something at stake, and there was peril. Sure, that bad guy was defeated, but the grief survived. Grief can be a gift, as it does show us who and how deeply we truly loved, but if grief is not confronted, it can destroy us.

  • My Mother’s Birthday

    Today would have been my mother’s 74th birthday. This is the third of her birthdays that has arrived without her presence. The first was the worse, and last year wasn’t much better. And this year is 2020, so it’s just as awful as it could be.

    My mother’s death is wrapped around me, not tightly, but it is all over me. It is a blanket of sadness. There are moments when I get choked up, and I still cry occasionally about her death, button the whole, I can speak about it open, and honestly. I speak most often with my daughter about it. This was her first experience of death, and she does miss her grandmother. Talking does help, and talking about memories I have of my mother to my daughter, does make thing easier.

    But it is a sadness. A feeling that I could be happier, but that I just won’t ever be that happy again. I find joy and happiness with my family, and friends, and then at the end of the night, as I drift off, or hope to drift off to sleep, there is that little honest moment that I am reminded that I can’t talk to her.

    I also know that her death has put me in a depression, one that is with me, and will be with me for some time to come. I know it because the things that I used to enjoy before her death, just don’t bring me that joy anymore. I know the signs of depression. I have dealt with it many times before, and I have always come out on the other side, and better for it. I know that this will happen again, because I want to be in a good place again, and I also have great people in my life that I can lean on.

    Still, I do miss my mom.