Your Dad Is Here

I see my husband in my son in small ways:  the way he rolls up his long sleeved shirts, the set of his jaw when he is annoyed or determined to do something he really wants to accomplish and the way he plays chicken with his car's gas tank and won't fill it up until it is almost empty.

When I see those traits it is bittersweet: they make me laugh and but they also make me feel a little sad and wistful.    "He is still with us," I think to myself.  My husband had a very strong personality so I am not surprised that I see some of him in our son.  It's just when those quirky things appear, they always have a way of taking me by surprise.

 

 

 

My thoughts today are with fathers and the important role they play in their children's lives.  While my son's father died nine years ago, I appreciate the important role he played in our young son's life and how his influence can still be felt today.

 

Please read the timely story below which I found on the insightful website, Hello Grief (www.hellogrief.org).  The author, Abigail Carter, sweetly reminds us of the importance of Dads everywhere; the ones who are with us today and the ones that we forever hold in our hearts.

 

Happy Father's Day!

 

 

 

Every Day is Father’s Day

By Abigail Carter
June 8, 2010 

Father’s Day never held much importance for our family until the death of my husband, Arron, father of our two young children.

 

The day usually began with a childish command for him to stay in bed so he could be the lucky recipient of a sticky tray of burnt pancakes and watery coffee, and be handed a construction paper card with “I lov you dady,” in bright red crayon, or a popsicle stick picture frame with a blurry Polaroid of a proud pre-schooler.

 

Later in the day, as he jiggled the kids around on the heavy metal lumber cart at Home Depot, I refrained from my usual “step away from the power tools,” and allowed him to run amuck, our list of supplies forgotten in his pocket. For dinner I would make one of his favorites – chicken stew, or if the weather was nice, a steak grilled on the BBQ and a glass of wine after the kids were in bed.

 

Our first Father’s Day after his death was spent in the company of several other widows on a deserted New Jersey Shore beach watching our children romp around in the waves or play in the sand, wishing we had the ability to play so freely, wishing we could have our old lives back. The male volunteers who grilled hot dogs for lunch just seemed to add salt to our wounds.

 

The days and weeks afterward were spent in a heightened state of agitation to which we were oblivious – fighting, frustrated, exhausted – until someone pointed out how difficult Father’s Day must have been. Finally able to connect the dots between the day and the aggression that had settled upon my family, the black moods eventually dissipated, at least until the next event that needed to braced for, like one of the kid’s birthdays, or another wedding anniversary. Year two was a repeat of year one, the bracing, the beach, the fatherless kids, the male volunteers, the loneliness, the anger, the exhaustion.

 

Friends and family, while well-meaning often added to the stress, building the potential heart-break of the day by calling to offer sad Happy Father’s Day wishes, or to offer to take the kids away, thinking that what they needed was to spend time with a man, one that was usually someone else’s father.

 

There was another year, the year I picked my son up from Pre-K after his class had been busy making presents for their fathers, and when we got into the car, he threw the present at me, something square wrapped in emerald green tissue paper. “Who am I going to give this to?” He yelled. “All the other kids have dads and I don’t!” In one day, with the realization that he was not like all the other kids, he had gone from a sad child to an angry one – anger that eight years later is only beginning to dissipate.

 

For many widows with children, Father’s Day creeps up and pounces on us. Sometimes we just anticipate it with dread – more glaring evidence of what we have lost. Everyone (not just widows) tries to celebrate the day in some meaningful way, trying to honor that special Dad. Newspapers and television ads are filled with things we are meant to buy, sentiments we are meant to feel. There is so much pressure to ‘honor” our loved one properly, even when they are alive, but no one seems quite sure how to go about doing so.

 

We have tried a variety of different activities on Father’s Day. Things my husband would have enjoyed: bike rides in the park, planting a shrub in the garden, an IMAX movie downtown, a steak on the BBQ. The day has become less sad, held less meaning as the kids grow and have adapted to their life with only one parent. But with each passing year, Father’s Day becomes less and less volatile.

 

The kids have almost passed the period in elementary school where presents are being made in class. And if they are, the kids have adapted. Presents have been awarded to grandfathers or other men of importance in their lives at the time. I considered last year a kind of breakthrough when my son, still in elementary school decided to participate in his class’s annual Father’s Day craft project. When the day arrived, he presented his gift to me saying, “since you are pretty much like our dad as well as our mom, this is for you.” It was the compliment of a lifetime, and reminded me how far we had all come.

 

This year will be our eighth Father’s Day without a father to honor, and again, it will likely be passed with very little fanfare. In other years I have felt guilt for wanting to ignore these events, making up for it by forcing a celebration with trips to the beach, riding bikes, making Mickey Mouse pancakes – pretending that our family was still whole, pretending that my husband could still appreciate these efforts. It was my son who finally reminded me of the pressures I was putting on all of us when he asked, “Why do we always do all this stuff on Father’s Day when we don’t even have a dad?” I thought we had been doing it to remember him, but I realized that really I was doing it because I felt like I had to. My efforts were stressing me out and doing nothing to help us remember Arron, let alone honor him.

 

Instead of pancakes and bike rides and beach trips one day every June, I realized that all it takes to celebrate Father’s Day is for me to recognize one of my husband’s goofy expressions in our daughter, or his familiar glint of mischief in the eye of our son and laugh saying, “you look just like your father when you do that!”

 

That way every day is Father’s Day.
 

* * * *
By guest writer, Abigail Carter. View more of her essays at www.alchemyofloss.com ^[2] and learn more about her at www.abigailcarter.com ^[3].

It's A Girl!

 

 

 

The daughter of a very good friend of mine gave birth early yesterday morning to a baby girl!

I am very excited for the parents of this beautiful new baby and my friend and her husband who now are grandparents. 

 

It's so magical to me that on Wednesday morning she was a mother and a wife (and lots of other great things too!) but by Thursday morning she had become a grandmother and met her first grandchild.

 

You really never know what life has in store for you! 

Becoming a parent is the adventure of a lifetime.  I mean this in the best of all ways.  I have loved every minute of it.  There is a lot of repetition and hard work involved in raising a child, either as a single parent or as part of a couple, but the rewards are priceless.

 

When we are with babies and young children we see the world in a fresh and new way for their reactions to the world are spontaneous and unfiltered.  I also discovered that being with my own son when he was a child, or other people's young children, could be healing in the sense that everything else that has happened to you that day falls away and the time spent with a child highlights what is really important in life.

 

Taking their hands, comforting them, teaching them right from wrong and helping them to learn how to take care of themselves is repeated over and over, the stuff of everyday life.  But it's also the stuff of a super love that you feel for your child and that super love never decreases even as they need you less and less.

 

I think the parents of this new baby girl are going to be great and I look forward to watching them take their journey together as a family.

 

P.S. Don't forget to have fun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

It's Not What You Think

  

 

 

 

To show you how little I knew about loss, I thought that the first year after my husband's death was going to be the hardest time that I would ever have to experience.  My thinking was something along the lines of  "If I can get the first year under my belt, then each year after that will become easier to handle."  Right?

Guess what? Not. Always. True.

Grief is always full of surprises and just when you think you have it under control, you don't.

The first year was so raw with emotion for me and such a blur of just getting through the 365 days of it, that the whole idea of my husband's death, the finality of it, didn't really and truly sink in at all. I thought about it, cried about it, read about it and even went to a support group for it but it still was a concept that danced all over the place and didn't settle in.

But the second year was different.  For me, the second year was harder than the first because it painfully confirmed for me over and over again that he wasn't coming back.  Ever.  That this was it and it's not like he's gone on a very long trip.  And then the second year also forced me to stop playing all those mind games with myself and face up to my new life. 

But what happened to me may not happen to you.

I know it sounds like a cliche, but it's still so true: everyone has their own grief journey to travel and no two journeys are the same.  There is no right way or wrong way to grieve.  There is only your way.

I'm not making this up.  It's really true.  Your reactions and experience with grief may be very different from mine and it's totally okay and normal.  It's normal because our relationships are different, our experiences are different, our emotional DNA is different, our religious beliefs are different and our expectations from life and the person we lost are different.

Unfortunately, no one prepares us for those differences. We may watch someone we know experience grief and we think that person's experience will be ours too.  But that isn't always the case.  I lost a husband.  Someone else may have tragically experienced the death of a child or a wife or a friend or a parent.

As much as we may want one and search for one, life does not provide us with a guide book on how we should grieve.  We all process pain and loss differently. 

We grieve because we love.  It is because we love that we grieve.  We care and we emotionally connect to other people and when that person is taken away, it is a shock that can take a long time to process.  On the surface, you are handling things, you take care of daily responsibilities and you go through life automatically.

 

But underneath, you may be a mess.

By the third and fourth year of grief, you think it's going to be so much better and sometimes it is.  I have two friends, they live in completely different cities, they don't know each other, they are different ages and both have lost spouses.  The woman has children and grandchildren and lost her husband suddenly in a tragic car accident.  The man has no children and nursed his wife through a lengthy illness until she died.

 

Both have told me they are surprised by the fact that they continue to grieve during their fourth year of loss.  They are active, positive people trying to change and rebuild their lives because both of them socialize, take classes and work.  They meet a lot of people but nothing has ever clicked.

So they forge forward, as I and others do, together, trusting that time will heal us as we journey to renewal and new opportunities.

It's what we know and we keep doing it until it gets better. 

 

 

Daddy's Office Time

From a child's point of view, the place where their parents work can be a place they dislike because it pulls the parent away from them.  Parents spend a lot of time at work and children may feel that they are competing with what goes on in the office.  "If you didn't have to work, you could be with me," is sometimes what a child thinks.

But what if your memories of your parent and their relationship with their work and their office is positive and you can't imagine your parent doing anything else but being in their office?  Your parent may love their job and their passion for their work may inspire you to try to find something that you can be equally passionate about.

Work world is where your parent and other adults are busy working on computers, talking on phones, doing things you don't quite understand but you want to be part of it because your parent loves being in this world.

In honor of Father's Day, this New York Times story captures a little girl's precious memories of her father and playing office so she could become just like him:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/for-one-more-day-at-the-office/

Liam Neeson

I am always on the look-out for stories where people open up and reveal how they handle their feelings of grief.  As you know, the subject of grief is not considered to be a mainstream topic of conversation because it is such an emotional minefield.  To do so means revealing deep pain and vulnerability; which is hard for anyone to do; but especially hard if you are a celebrity or a public official.

It can be almost impossible to get men to talk about how they feel about most things -- unless it's a sports team or a political party -- so it was a wonderful surprise this week when actor Liam Neeson was in the news because he talked to Esquire magazine about the death of his wife actress Natasha Richardson in 2009 at the age of 45.  Neeson deserves a lot of credit for talking candidly to a men's magazine about how he survived her death that was caused by a skiing accident in Canada.  Just by the fact that it took him almost two years to talk about this tragic event shows how hard it can be to adjust to the death of a loved one along with the added responsibility of becoming the sole parent of two young sons.

Neeson's comments go a long way in showing that slowly you can begin to heal and that while he is trying to get on with his life he recognizes the benefits of talking about what he and he sons dealt with after Natasha Richardson's death.  He told Esquire magazine that initially you think that you know what grieving will be, but then it turns out to be something entirely different.  Doesn't that sound familiar?

In case you missed it, here are a few excerpts from Neeson's Esquire  magazine interview:

-- "It's easy enough to plan jobs, to plan a lot of works.  That's effective.  But that's the weird thing about grief.  You can't prepare for it.  You think you're gonna cry and get it over with.  You make those plans, but they never work."

--  "I think I survived by running away some.  Running away to work."

--"It hits you in the middle of the night -- well, it hits me in the middle of the night.  I'm out walking.  I'm feeling quite content, and it's like suddenly, boom.  It's like you've just done that in your chest."