Dear Therapist Writes to Herself in Her Grief

My father died, there’s a pandemic, and I’m overcome by my feeling of loss.

illustration

Dear Therapist,

I know that everyone is going through loss during the coronavirus pandemic, but in the midst of all this, my beloved father died two weeks ago, and I’m reeling.

He was 85 years old and in great pain from complications due to congestive heart failure. After years of invasive procedures and frequent hospitalizations, he decided to go into home hospice to live out the rest of his life surrounded by family. We didn’t know whether it would be weeks or months, but we expected his death, and had prepared for it in the time leading up to it. We had the conversations we wanted to have, and the day he died, I was there to kiss his cheeks and massage his forehead, to hold his hand and say goodbye. I was at his bedside when he took his last breath.

And yet, nothing prepared me for this loss. Can you help me understand my grief?

Lori Los Angeles, Calif.

Dear Readers,

This week, I decided to submit my own “Dear Therapist” letter following my father’s death. As a therapist, I’m no stranger to grief, and I’ve written about its varied manifestations in this column many times .

Even so, I wanted to write about the grief I’m now experiencing personally, because I know this is something that affects everyone. You can’t get through life without experiencing loss. The question is, how do we live with loss?

In the months before my father died, I asked him a version of that question: How will I live without you? If this sounds strange—asking a person you love to give you tips on how to grieve his death—let me offer some context.

My dad was a phenomenal father, grandfather, husband, and loyal friend to many. He had a dry sense of humor, a hearty laugh, boundless compassion, an uncanny ability to fix anything around the house, and a deep knowledge of the world (he was my Siri before there was a Siri). Mostly, though, he was known for his emotional generosity. He cared deeply about others; when we returned to my mom’s house after his burial, we were greeted by a gigantic box of paper towels on her doorstep, ordered by my father the day before he died so that she wouldn’t have to worry about going out during the pandemic.

His greatest act of emotional generosity, though, was talking me through my grief. He said many comforting things in recent months—how I’ll carry him inside me, how my memories of him will live forever, how he believes in my resilience. A few years earlier, he had taken me aside after one of my son’s basketball games and said that he’d just been to a friend’s funeral, told the friend’s adult daughter how proud her father had been of her, and was heartbroken when she said her father had never said that to her.

“So,” my father said outside the gym, “I want to make sure that I’ve told you how proud of you I am. I want to make sure you know.” It was the first time we’d had a conversation like that, and the subtext was clear: I’m going to die sooner rather than later. We stood there, the two of us, hugging and crying as people passing by tried not to stare, because we both knew that this was the beginning of my father’s goodbye.

But of all the ways my father tried to prepare me for his loss, what has stayed with me most was when he talked about what he learned from grieving his own parents’ deaths: that grief was unavoidable, and that I would grieve this loss forever.

“I can’t make this less painful for you,” he said one night when I started crying over the idea—still so theoretical to me—of his death. “But when you feel the pain, remember that it comes from a place of having loved and been loved deeply.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Beyond that—you’re the therapist. Think about how you’ve helped other people with their grief.”

So I have. Five days before he died, I developed a cough that would wake me from sleep. I didn’t have the other symptoms of COVID-19—fever, fatigue—but still, I thought: I’d better not go near Dad . I spoke with him every day, as usual, except for Saturday, when time got away from me. I called the next day—the day when suddenly he could barely talk and all we could say was “I love you” to each other before he lost consciousness. He never said another word; our family sat vigil until he died the next afternoon.

Afterward, I was racked with guilt. While I’d told myself that I hadn’t seen him in his last days because of my cough, and that I hadn’t called Saturday because of the upheaval of getting supplies for the lockdown, maybe I wasn’t there and didn’t call because I was in denial—I couldn’t tolerate the idea of him dying, so I found a way to avoid confronting it.

Soon this became all I thought about—how I wished I’d gone over with my cough and a mask; how I wished I’d called on Saturday when he was still cogent—until I remembered something I wrote in this column to a woman who felt guilty about the way she had treated her dying husband in his last week. “One way to deal with intense grief is to focus the pain elsewhere,” I had written then. “It might be easier to distract yourself from the pain of missing your husband by turning the pain inward and beating yourself up over what you did or didn’t do for him.”

Like my father, her husband had suffered for a long time, and like her, I felt I had failed him in his final days.

I wrote to her:

Grief doesn’t begin the day a person dies. We experience the loss while the person is alive, and because our energy is focused on doctor appointments and tests and treatments—and because the person is still here—we might not be aware that we’ve already begun grieving the loss of someone we love … So what happens to their feelings of helplessness, sadness, fear, or rage? It’s not uncommon for people with a terminally ill partner to push their partner away in order to protect themselves from the pain of the loss they’re already experiencing and the bigger one they’re about to endure. They might pick fights with their partner … They might avoid their partner, and busy themselves with other interests or people. They might not be as helpful as they had imagined they would be, not only because of the exhaustion that sets in during these situations, but also because of the resentment: How dare you show me so much love, even in your suffering, and then leave me .

Another “Dear Therapist” letter came to mind this week, this one from a man grieving the loss of his wife of 47 years . He wanted to know how long this would go on. I replied:

Many people don’t know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-known stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—were conceived in the context of terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own deaths … It’s one thing to “accept” the end of your own life. But for those who keep on living, the idea that they should reach “acceptance” might make them feel worse (“I should be past this by now”; “I don’t know why I still cry at random times, all these years later”) … The grief psychologist William Worden looks at grieving in this light, replacing “stages” with “tasks” of mourning. In the fourth of his tasks, the goal is to integrate the loss into our lives and create an ongoing connection with the person who died—while also finding a way to continue living.

Just like my father suggested, these columns helped. And so did my own therapist, the person I called Wendell in my recent book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone . He sat with me (from a coronavirus-safe distance, of course) as I tried to minimize my grief— look at all of these relatively young people dying from the coronavirus when my father got to live to 85 ; look at the all the people who weren’t lucky enough to have a father like mine —and he reminded me that I always tell others that there’s no hierarchy of pain, that pain is pain and not a contest.

And so I stopped apologizing for my pain and shared it with Wendell. I told him how, after my father died and we were waiting for his body to be taken to the mortuary, I kissed my father’s cheek, knowing that it would be the last time I would ever kiss him, and I noticed how soft and warm his cheek still was, and I tried to remember what he felt like, because I knew I would never feel my father’s skin again. I told Wendell how I stared at my father’s face and tried to memorize every detail, knowing it would be the last time I’d ever see the face I’d looked at my entire life. I told him how gutted I was by the physical markers that jolted me out of denial and made this goodbye so horribly real—seeing my father’s lifeless body being wrapped in a sheet and placed in a van ( Wait, where are you taking my dad? I silently screamed), carrying the casket to the hearse, shoveling dirt into his grave, watching the shiva candle melt for seven days until the flame was jarringly gone. Mostly, though, I cried, deep and guttural, the way my patients do when they’re in the throes of grief.

Since leaving Wendell’s office, I have cried and also laughed. I’ve felt pain and joy; I’ve felt numb and alive. I’ve lost track of the days, and found purpose in helping people through our global pandemic. I’ve hugged my son, also reeling from the loss of his grandfather, tighter than usual, and let him share his pain with me. I’ve spent some days FaceTiming with friends and family, and other days choosing not to engage.

But the thing that has helped me the most is what my father did for me and also what Wendell did for me. They couldn’t take away my pain, but they sat with me in my loss in a way that said: I see you, I hear you, I’m with you. This is exactly what we need in grief, and what we can do for one another—now more than ever.

Related Podcast

Listen to Lori Gottlieb share her advice on dealing with grief and answer listener questions on Social Distance , The Atlantic ’s new podcast about living through a pandemic:

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

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The Death of My Father, Essay Example

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Two years ago, just a few weeks before Christmas, my roommate, who was clearly upset, sat me down on the couch in our living room and broke the news to me that my father had died earlier that afternoon.

My father had been ill for a long time.  He had a long history of cardiac disease which was exacerbated by the fact that he was a chronic smoker, was overweight, and did not much care either or exercise or for healthy food (something which, I am sorry to say, I seem to have inherited from him!).  I knew he was in the hospital in New York, where his second wife was taking care of him as he prepared to have cardiac surgery to try to repair the damage that a lifetime’s worth of misuse had done to his heart.  He never made it through the surgery, dying right there on the operating table in spite of the surgical team’s attempts to save his life.

When my roommate first told me the news, I remember almost having difficulty putting the words together in that simple sentence to give it meaning. “Your father is dead” is not a difficult sentence to say, but it takes a while to wrap your head around it. And then the sharpest pain hit me as the words drove home and I remember bursting into tears and crying on my into a pillow for a long time.  I remember being offered a glass of wine to calm my nerves down – it was a blood-red Cabernet Sauvignon – and it tasted bitter and sweet and lovely all at once.  I remember calling my brother – he was half-way across the country, going to graduate school in Michigan, and I hadn’t seen him for a while since we had both been so busy with school – and I remember him saying “This sucks”, which summed up the situation pretty nicely.  I remember we cried together, and I drank more wine, and a sick and sour sort of feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.  I also remember I went to bed and slept really heavily that night.

It was financially impossible for me to get to the funeral on such short notice, and my father had decided to be cremated and to forego any kind of memorial service, so there wouldn’t have been anything to attend even if I had been able to go.  But I took the next couple of days off and I remember, those first few days, feeling very tender, as though I had been sunburned and the skin had just peeled off.  I slept a lot those first few days, and ate very little, and took several walks out in the woods on my own.

My father and I had been estranged for a long time. He had been abusive and I was glad when he and my mother divorced and he was finally out of my life. I did not have any contact with him for a long time after the marriage broke up.  But in the last few years of his life, we had started emailing back and forth and even had had a few phone calls. He was planning to visit me next fall for  vacation, only he died before we got to see each other again.

That has been two years ago now.  I do not feel raw like I did when I first got the news, but it is not something I like to think about, either.  I do, though, have all the emails from the last few years that we sent back and forth to each other and I have a box of photographs that my mother sent me of the two of us when I was just a kid, before things went sour. Eventually, I will be brave enough to read through those emails and look through those pictures. But it is something that I know I am not ready for yet. In a way, though, I think part of me is almost looking forward to it, as I feel like it will cauterize a wound that has never quite closed up for me.  And I know that his death has given me a lot more sympathy for other people who are grieving, since I know now that it can take so many forms – some pretty conventional, some wildly inappropriate – and that even though you feel you have “gotten over it” with the passage of time, you know that it is always somewhere just below the surface of your skin.

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The Person I Became After My Father’s Death

my father died essay

A fter my father dies, I become, for a time, someone I do not recognize. Entire weeks are all but lost to me, scooped out of my once airtight memory. Our rental term ends two months after the funeral, and when we move into another house, I hardly remember packing or unpacking.

I don’t know how to ask for leave from my job. I tell myself that I can’t afford to take unpaid time off anyway. The truth is that I have always been able to work, and now I learn that grief is no hindrance to my productivity. I bank on this, even feel a kind of twisted pride in it. It doesn’t matter to me whether I take care of myself, because I do not deserve the care. All my parents wanted was to spend more time with us, to see us more than once a year or every other year, and I never found a way to make it happen, and now my father is dead. When other people—my husband, my friends—try to tell me that I am not at fault, I barely hear them. Punishing myself, keeping myself in as much pain as possible, seems like something a good daughter should do if it is too late for her to do anything else.

There is a flurry of activity in the run-up to the publication of my first book . My publisher sends me to conferences, schedules readings and interviews. I am grateful, and frankly surprised, to be getting any attention at all, and so of course I tell everyone that I am more than ready to do my part, to help the book succeed. I know how important it is to my career, and I feel enormous pressure not to let down any of the people who are working so hard on it. I want it to have a fighting chance, too, because it is a book in which my father still lives.

More from TIME

Read More: How a Pandemic Puppy Saved My Grieving Family

When I stop working, it’s not to rest but to head to a soccer game or swimming lesson, or plan a Girl Scout meeting, or chaperone a school field trip. I treat myself like a machine, which makes it easy for the people I work and volunteer with to see and treat me that way too. “It’s been hard,” I say with a shrug, when asked how I’m doing, “but I’m hanging in there.” One day, my older child calls me out on my usual choice of words.

“How come you always tell people that you’re ‘hanging in there’?” she asks.

Well, I think, a bit defensively, because I am. Am I not still doing what needs to be done: getting up every morning and going to work, taking care of my family, saying yes to anything anyone asks me to do? I haven’t dropped a single ball at work. My publishing team has thanked me for my promptness in replying to their emails, for being so great to work with. I am an expert at grieving under capitalism. Watch and learn.

All the while, I keep daydreaming about walking into traffic.

From the moment the thought pushes its way into my grief-muddled brain, I know that I could never act on it. It’s not that I want to hurt myself—it’s that I cannot seem to work up any remorse when I think about no longer being alive. Nor does the thought frighten me, as it always did before. What if you didn’t have to feel this way anymore? my mind proposes, in moments that are deceptively calm, moments when I am not sobbing in the shower or screaming in my car because I cannot scream at home. What if the pain could just end?

As a child, I knew that I was not permitted to indulge in the hyperbolic or sarcastic statements other kids made about wanting to die, because my father would erupt. Toward the end of sixth grade, my teacher had everyone in my class write a fake will; my most charitable reading is that the exercise might have been intended to help us identify the things that were most important to us as we moved from elementary into middle school, symbolically leaving our childhoods behind. Most of my classmates made light of the task— I hereby bequeath my Game Boy to my little brother, because he always steals it anyway —but I remember little of what I wrote in my will, only my father’s fury over the assignment. “You’re 12 years old!” he yelled. He threatened to call my teacher. And then all the fight went out of him, his voice numb as he told me about being 21 years old and witnessing the death of his favorite cousin. The two of them had shared an apartment in a Cleveland high-rise, and one night my father came home to find him about to jump from their window. He pleaded with him, tried to stop him, but his cousin leaped before he could reach him. Dad had always blamed himself.

Read More: Grief Is Universal. That Doesn’t Make It Less Isolating

It takes me months, after his death, to realize that I am not fine, or hanging in there. I go to see my doctor for a long-overdue physical and break down in the exam room, sobbing as she hands me one flimsy tissue after another. I leave with a referral to a counseling practice, but manage to find one closer to my house, close enough to walk, because I know I’ll come up with a million reasons to reschedule or cancel otherwise.

During one early session, my therapist, the first Asian American therapist I’ve ever worked with, asks me if I know what has kept me from harming myself as I flounder in grief. I don’t even have to think about the answer. “My family,” I say. My children, who have no idea how dark my thoughts have become. My husband, who keeps our household afloat on days when I cannot manage anything beyond the workday. My sister, who faithfully checks on me every week. My mother, whom I text and call so often it probably annoys her. “The people I love still need me.”

“And you still need them,” she says. “You don’t want to leave them.”

I feel the truth of these words in my bones, try to keep them close.

Slowly, I find my footing again. When I catch myself faltering, fumbling in the dark for a thread to follow back to the person I was before, the thing that often keeps me from despair is talking with my mother. Sometimes I wish that she would voice some concrete need, ask me to do something for her, but she seems to be taking care of herself—it occurs to me that this might be easier than taking care of both herself and Dad, as much as she misses him. I can sense her sorrow and restlessness, always, but there is a driving, don’t-quit vitality about her, even in mourning.

One day, she tells me she has decided to get rid of Dad’s lift chair, and one of their old end tables. I never liked that table, Dad did. I am learning that I can make decisions based on what I want—that if I don’t like something, I can just make a change. Another day, we discuss whether she might get a dog; it has been a long time since she had one in the house. She sheepishly tells me she used some of the money I gave her to buy new miniblinds. “That’s perfect!” I say. I don’t care how she spends it, as long as it’s useful.

Read More: How I Found My Desire to Live After My Wife Died

It’s hard for either of us to imagine her remarrying. But as she begins to plan the next stage of her life without my father, I realize that I can picture her living out her own days in peace—and, more important, it seems she can as well. My heart lifts when she tells me that she is planning a trip to Greece with two of her friends from church, intending to use what’s left of my father’s life-insurance payout to make her first-ever trip outside the country. They will visit monasteries and holy sites, see the sights, and swim in the sea; the trip is to be part pilgrimage, part escape.

After that adventure, I think, I will help her consider what she wants her new life to look like. I can be her sounding board, if nothing else. I know her ties to Oregon are strong after four decades there, but maybe someday she’ll decide that she wants to move closer to us on the East Coast. Or maybe we will relocate to the Northwest and provide more support to her once our kids are done with school. There’s no need to figure everything out now, I tell myself. Dad has been gone only a matter of months. We have time. Mom has time.

I feel certain she has never doubted, for a second, that living is worth it.

Chung is a TIME contributor and the author of A Living Remedy , from which this essay was adapted

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I Was Relieved When My Father Finally Passed Away

Death was the only way his suffering would end and I was at peace with that.

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When my father died, the feeling that coursed through my body in physical waves was not grief. It was relief.

The morning of his death found me sitting with my sister in a hospital cafeteria, each of us staring blankly at a stack of pancakes. We were exhausted after two weeks of sitting vigil with our dying father, of sprinting to find a nurse when the beeping of the pain pump told us it was empty. My neck and back ached from spending the last night folded awkwardly into a chair at his bedside. We had watched him suffer for years already, but the last two weeks brought a different kind of pain, a pain that transcended unconsciousness, making his breathing ragged and rough and our hearts collectively weary and raw.

Before I could touch my pancakes, a young nurse walked to our table. I knew her face from the oncology floor, and I could tell what she would say before she spoke.

"Oh my God. He just died, didn't he?" I asked.

She nodded. "I'm so sorry," she said.

"Thank you, God, oh, thank you."

What kind of monster feels relief when her father dies? The human and compassionate kind. A loving daughter who watched her father's cancer turn terminal over the course of 12 years, bucking every treatment available and spitting in the face of palliative care. Obviously I wanted my father to live, but not like he was, not in absolute agony, unable to take a comfortable breath or to rise from his hospital bed.

Dad spent two weeks in hospital hospice, which meant that we all spent plenty of time in the hospital. There was a chapel down the hall from his room, and I spent quite a bit of time there on my knees, wrestling over what to say to God. My own desires seemed selfish. To ask for my father to live – well, what kind of living was this? But who can ask for a loved one to die? That didn't seem right, either. In the end, I ended up asking that "your will be done," clinging to the phrase and repeating it over and over when no other prayer would spring to my lips.

Your will be done, your will be done, your will be done.

There was a notebook on the altar in the hospital chapel. It was filled with letters to God from people whose loved ones were critical or dying down the hall, and their desperate pleas and thoughts — pain palpable in the ink — were not that different from mine. The pages contained pages of thanks from parents who were grateful to have had their children in their lives. There were desperate prayers to save sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives.

And there were other entries as well, entries full of pain and loss and yet also filled with relief. These people thanked God profusely for the merciful release of death. I was not the first person in that hospital to lean over a bed and pray for the loved one in it to die, to be released from the prison of a broken body. I was not the first person to feel any of these things (or even all of them together) and in that, there was comfort.

When I looked up to the ceiling and uttered my relief on my father's death, I didn't feel shame or guilt, largely because I knew others had stood in those very halls and been filled with the same sense of relief. I'm so grateful for that book and for those people who had gone before me, leaving their words to illuminate a path of loss and grief. When life is pain and we hold on to religious beliefs of a better world to come, feeling relief at the end of a parent's suffering is not only natural, but inevitable.

Death in the midst of pain is merciful. If we let it, that kind of death may even, in a strange way, connect us to the merciful heart of God.

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When My Father Died

When my father died I felt apart of me die with him, because I knew I would never see him again. Ever since that day my life has never been the same. November 9,2001 was the end, but also a new beginning. BOOM BOOM BOOM! was the sound from the guns that I heard. Suddenly my eyes were opened, I awoke from a deep sleep. I vividly remember counting seven shots, and my first thought was “Who just got killed?”. I was so terrified, because they sounded so close. I knew the shooting was very near my house, because I saw the lights from the guns reflect through my window onto my wall. I laid still in my bed and full of paranoia. As my heart pounded extremely fast, I heard a car drive off fast, the tires screeching loudly. Then I slowly looked out the window, even though I was full of fear. There he was flat on his back with his arms and legs spread away from his body. I had to catch my breath, because I felt like half of my soul left my body. I became overcome with denial “No, not my dad, he wouldn’t leave me!”. Both good and bad memories flashed in my mind. Simultaneously I heard my mother screaming downstairs “I don’t know how to tell her, how and I going to tell my baby?!”. It was amazing how thin the walls were that day. A few minutes later I heard feet walking up the steps toward my room. My godmother came into my room and sat down next to me on my bed. She was hesitant, but she eventually parted her lips to say “Your father is dead”. When she told me that my father was dead I felt extreme heartache fill me. I kept thinking “My daddy was dead”. My face was wet from my tears, my throat sore from my crying, and my head throbbed from my headache. She held me and told me it would be ok but I felt otherwise. During my dads funeral I was literally in shock. All I heard were screams and cries of sorrow. At one point in time I looked around the church, and realized that there were over two hundred people who had similar feelings. I closed my eyes and opened them back up slowly because I wanted someone to tell me that this was all a bad dream, but it was reality. I probably seemed fine externally, but internally I felt like I was dieing. My pastors wife read the poem I had written about my dad to the mourners, and when my pastor preached I was open enough to listen. That’s when the casket closed, I cried so hard I thought I was going to vomit. At that point I knew he was gone forever. My body was going through a major breakdown, and I was slipping into depression. Once everyone got to the burial site, I watched to casket go into the ground. When the dirt started to be put on top of the casket my grandmother burst into tears. She had lost one of her sons and I lost my father. I had lost my father, but I had not lost hope. Being that he was abruptly taken away from me when I was only ten years old, I realized I had to develop strength instead of developing weakness. I had to gather myself and I come out of my depression. Everything around me was changing rapidly. I was no longer daddy’s baby girl, I began to see things in a different light. I had to turn something negative into something positive. What my father wanted for me in life is what I strive for now. His death has motivated me to strive for greatness. His death helped me become the person I am today. I don’t’ have any children, I’m pretty independent, and I want enjoy the better things in life. I’m proud to be his daughter.

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my father died essay

The New York Times

Opinionator | finding joy in my father’s death.

my father died essay

Finding Joy in My Father’s Death

The End

The End is a series about end-of-life issues.

It was just after New Year’s in 2012 when I ran into my friend Felice at Costco. She asked me how I was doing, and I told her.

“My dad is dying,” I said. My sister and I, along with our husbands, had just spent Christmas in California with my father and stepmother, and it was clear that Dad’s Parkinson’s, diagnosed two years before, had reached a new and critical phase. My sister, stepmother and I kept slipping off to cry together, so shaken were we by the fact that he was really dying now.

In Costco, I told Felice that I would do everything I could to help my father, but that I had resolved not to feel sad.

“He’s still alive,” I said, thinking he might last a few months. “I’ve decided to wait and feel terrible once he’s dead.”

“Or not,” she said brightly, and gave me a hug.

Or not. Those two words followed me around for the next three years while my sister and I made our separate trips to California every other month, as I took on all the extra work I could find in order to pay the crushing costs of in-home care, as I made those sad, daily phone calls. When my father could no longer hold the phone, my stepmother put him on the speakerphone, and when he could barely speak, I carried on the conversation without him.

Along the way, his neurologists had decided he didn’t have Parkinson’s after all. He had a similar disease that’s often mistaken for Parkinson’s called progressive supranuclear palsy. Then they decided he probably had both Parkinson’s and P.S.P. Not that it mattered. Either way he was frozen solid, his muscles boiling beneath the surface of his skin. He liked to hold hands in the last months of his life, and holding his hand was like holding a linen sack full of bumblebees.

My father’s medical care did not contain a single heroic measure — no feeding tube, no respirator. Some of the pills he took calmed his condition for a few hours at a time, but none of them improved or slowed the progression of his degenerative neurological disease. What my father’s care lacked in heroics it made up for in bravery, especially on the part of my stepmother, who cared for him at home with unflagging love and good cheer. We had arranged for round-the-clock help, because my stepmother could no longer lift him by herself in and out of bed, on and off the toilet, in and out of the shower.

But even with help he was her full-time job, and I knew that without her he would have been my full-time job, or my sister’s. My father, strapped into his wheelchair, never stopped demanding in his vanishing whisper that he wanted to go: to the opera, to the movies, to his weekly Rotary meeting. She brushed his hair and teeth, stretched his bent limbs, kept him clean. She cut his food into smaller and smaller bites and fed it to him slowly, a perilous task as he was prone to choking.

I had been wrong when I had told Felice that I would wait until after he died to feel sad. I felt sad about my father all the time. When I closed my eyes at night I saw him lashed to a raft in a storm-tossed sea: dark rain, dark waves, my father crashing down again and again as he waited to drown.

Frank Patchett had been an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for 33 years. He was part of the group of men who brought Charles Manson in from the desert. He was the guy who took in Sirhan Sirhan the night Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. After his retirement he often spent three hours a day working out. When he first got his diagnosis of Parkinson’s in his late 70s, he could still do 100 chin-ups.

My father died last month at 83 when my sister and I were on the plane, coming out to say goodbye for what felt like the 57th time. There was a message on my phone from my husband when we landed. What I felt when I heard the news was joy.

I had told Felice that I would feel bad when my father died. “Or not,” she had said.

My father’s body was still at the house when we got there. My stepmother, crying in a roomful of friends, said she wanted him to be there for us. My sister and I went into the bedroom together, and there he was, his head tilted back on the pillow, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open. We kissed his lovely face and cried and held each other, then we looked at him again. There was something funny going on. “He looks like he’s about to tell a joke,” I said, peering closely. My sister, who is a more tender person than I am, quicker to cry, leaned forward. “Dad,” she said quietly. “Say something funny.”

WHEN we went to sit among the crying people in the other room, I was stunned by the explosion of happiness spreading through my chest. Of course I was glad for my father, the end of his suffering, his ticket off the raft, but it was more than that. I was glad for my stepmother even as she sat beside me in her fiery grief because she was still healthy and young. In time she would go out with her friends again, take a trip, read a book, waste an afternoon looking at shoes. I felt glad for my sister and for myself, that any bit of extra time and money we had would no longer be offered up in the name of filial devotion.

This wasn’t about whether or not I loved my father. I did love him. He was brave and funny and smart. He could also be difficult even in the full bloom of health, and he often drove me witless. I was happy for all of us that this hideous struggle, which had extended past the most unreasonable expectations, was finally over. I was trying my best not to glow.

I stayed on in California for a while to be with my stepmother. I confided my happiness to a few friends and for the most part they were quick to assure me that I would be grief-stricken soon enough. They meant it kindly. By using the words “death” and “joy” in the same sentence, I had gone far beyond the limits of the standard “He’s in a better place.” They wanted me to know that later I would have the chance to redeem myself through suffering.

“What if you’ve thrown a dinner party,” I said. “And at 11 o’clock your guests got up to leave. The dishes were still on the table, the pans were in the sink, you had to go to work in the morning, but the guests just kept standing in the open door saying good night. They tell you another story, praise your cooking, go back to look for their gloves. They do this for three years.”

I’ve often wondered why the people who seem most certain about the existence of God are the ones who want to keep the respirator plugged in. If you were sure that God was waiting for your father, wouldn’t you want him to go? Wouldn’t you want him to go even if you didn’t believe in God, because death is the completion of our purpose here? He’s finished his job and now is free to send his atoms back into the earth and stars. Isn’t that really kind of great?

Like most everyone else, I’ve had my share of grief. When my sister’s husband died unexpectedly last year at the age of 59, I fell down the open manhole cover with my sister and the rest of the people who loved him. But my father? He’d been gone for such a long time. He had told us how much he loved us, and we told him how much we loved him, again and again and again, until there was nothing left to say.

Except for this: Dad, there is joy in the place that you left.

Ann Patchett is the author, most recently, of the essay collection “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.”

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How to Start the Essay About My Father’s Death

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By Cynthia Kaplan

1. Here’s a piece of advice. While spending the afternoon with your dying father, don’t ask Alexa to play the songs of Judy Collins which, once upon a time, he loved, because the first song out of the gate might be this:

Across the morning sky

All the birds are leaving

Ah, how can they know it’s time for them to go?

Before the winter fire

We’ll still be dreaming

I do not count the time

Who knows where the time goes?

2. If you’re wondering how to get a very ill man in his late 80s to the Sloan Kettering emergency room without taking an ambulance, because they don’t accept patients who arrive in ambulances, because dying of cancer is not an emergency, per se , I’ll tell you: bundle him up (it’s early November), secure him upright by tying him to the wheelchair with the arms of a sweater—not the one he’s wearing, he’s not insane—and wheel him through the street. Do this because the Sloan Kettering emergency room is the Lamborghini of emergency rooms. It is the place where they have your father on a gurney within two minutes of arrival and evaluated by a team of doctors within 10 minutes. It is the place where a doctor finally tells us to our faces that he is dying.

3. One summer day, my husband and I were playing tennis with our teenage kids when our friends Paul and Rachel came to meet us. While David and I left the court to greet them, my father, who had been watching the game, walked onto the court without his cane and asked the kids if he could take a swing or two. Paul, hugging me hello, looked over my shoulder and asked, “Is it possible that there is an old man lying on the tennis court?”

4. Once, I said to my mother, “If you die before Dad, I will kill you.”

5. My father’s night table was a wonder of bedside efficiency, while at the same time a textbook example of what an electrician would call a fire hazard. The double outlet behind it somehow managed to power no fewer than eight electrical appliances. They were as follows: a lamp, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple watch, a laptop computer, a Mophie charger, a smaller lamp for reading after lights out, and a rechargeable battery charger. There is a metaphor, somewhere here, in which my father, who has been at or near death’s door several times in the past six years, not to mention that time back in 2003 when he drove himself to the hospital while having a heart attack, is, himself, rechargeable.

When he returned home from Sloan Kettering for what we knew would be the last time, my brother dutifully laid a powerstrip beneath the hospital bed, plugging it in behind the couch and taping it down with gaffer’s tape to the rug, as though we were all on a film set. In addition, a little folding table was placed next to the bed for thermoses, cups of rechargeable batteries labeled “charged” and “to charge”, and a pulse oximeter, which actually belongs to me because I have a congenital lung thing. My father consulted it twice hourly, and it may have been the most suitable and well enjoyed gift I have ever given him.

6. After my father died, I found four quarter-sized items that looked like blobs of white clay sitting in a box in his desk drawer. Each had a small indent on the top and a disc of waxy paper, the kind that protects a sticky surface, on the bottom. I brought them home, pulled the paper off, and stuck one each onto the side of my night table, David’s night table, and our children’s night tables, just below the surface. I picked our phone cords up off the floor and pressed them into the indents. My father was a genius.

7. On one of the final days of my father’s life, while confined to a hospital bed in the center of my parents’ Upper East Side living room, he set his Apple watch to time the life span of two ordinary, single-use AAA batteries so he could compare them to rechargeable AAA batteries. I said, “Dad, that could take hours.” “That’s okay,” he said.

8. Here is how I found myself, one night in the summer of 2019, alone in the emergency room of New York Presbyterian Hospital with each of my parents unconscious on a gurney. Late that afternoon, my mother, then upright, called and asked me to come over. “Your father doesn’t look right, and I’m going to call an ambulance.”        

When the EMS people arrived, my father awoke and, despite the fact that he was very ill, asked them how their night was going so far and thanked them very much for coming. He made them each guess his pulse oxygen level, and he made jokes at his own expense throughout the ambulance ride. This was his way. It was both his nature and a contrivance. The gratitude, the charm, they were genuine, but they also got him whatever he wanted. The hospital he preferred, the nurses he liked. When he asked for more ice water or blankets from the blanket warmer, he got them.

After an hour-long wait in a hallway, we were taken into a curtained bay, and my father, now feverish and incoherent, was hooked up to an IV and a heart monitor. He awoke briefly to insist my mother change his ileostomy bag. He prided himself on the care he took with it, and even in his delirium he knew it should be checked. I stepped outside the curtain and texted my brother an update.

When my mother was through she was done in. It was now around 9 p.m. and I suspected she hadn’t eaten since noon. I offered her the Clif Bar I had in my backpack, but she pulled a granola bar from her purse and said, “For emergencies.” “Me, too,” I said. We ate in silence. Then she looked at me and said, “You know, I’m feeling a little off.” Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped down in the chair.

I yelled toward the nurses station. “My mother has fainted!”

Doctors and nurses rushed over, swooped her onto a gurney, and rolled her next to my father.

When my brother arrived, I held up my phone to take a picture of him sitting on a chair between our supine parents, casually reading the paper. Just as I pointed my phone, my father bolted upright, eyes wide, looking straight ahead at nothing, like an extra in a zombie movie. I texted the picture to my best friend.

9. If I write the essay about my father’s death, it will mean he has died.

10. My brother, my mother, my husband, and I sat outside a curtained area at Sloan Kettering’s emergency room and, while my father was being examined, we discussed our most pressing issue: how to bring an unconscious man to consciousness long enough to find out his iPhone password.

When the doctors left, we hovered over our father, waiting for any sign of consciousness. I was tempted to press my fingertips into his sternum, rubbing back and forth, something I’d seen TV doctors do to rouse patients. I could imagine my father himself suggesting this, as he was an avid observer of his own care. He demanded bloodwork and any other diagnostic information be emailed to him from each of his doctors, so he, a man with no medical training whatsoever, could interpret it.

Dad. Dad. Jack. Pop, wake up. Dad. We stood on either side of him and took turns throwing pennies down the well, hoping to hear one go kerplunk. His eyelids fluttered.

Steve held up the phone. “Dad, what’s the password?” Dad moved his mouth a bit but no sound came out. He closed his eyes and then opened them again. “Dad, can you tell us the password for your phone?”

He held up his right hand, typing the air. Steve put the phone in his left hand and helped him hold it. He punched the code. 189585. “189585, is it 189585, Dad?” I asked. “What is that?” “Grandpa’s birthday.” His father’s birthday, year first, then month, then day. Even if we’d guessed the date, we would never have guessed the sequence. Genius.

11. When someone in your home is in hospice care and you think the patient is in need of medical assistance, you call the hospice hotline. You do not touch the box of drugs in the fridge, the one they gave you at the start of hospice care, because you were told not to touch it without a nurse’s express instructions. I imagine my mother in navy slacks and an old beige cashmere turtleneck, standing in a blast of cold air, eyeing the box with consternation. Why don’t they tell her the thing they don’t tell her until it is too late, that when the end is near she should just throw everything in the box at her husband to make his suffering stop. Because, what is she going to do? Kill him?

12. It is late November, and Marc Maron’s cat, LaFonda, is unwell. I know this because I have been listening to his twice-weekly podcast as I walk through Central Park to my parents’ apartment. LaFonda is old and, like my father, she is not taking her infirmity well. She is weak and listless and has all but stopped eating. The vet says you never know, she could have a year. He doesn’t suggest heroic measures, so Marc gives her fluids and meds and tries to soothe her. He is told that LaFonda will let him know when it is time.

A week after my father dies, LaFonda tells Marc. She has some crazy energy, flying around, howling and agitated, trying first, as Marc reports in his typically trenchant way, to climb onto the toilet before finally shitting in the shower. He and his girlfriend take her to the vet, comforting her and each other. They know they will leave without her. Marc tells LaFonda it’s OK, and she dies in his arms.

If you were to ask me to describe the end of my father’s life, I would tell you to listen to Marc Maron’s account of his last days with La Fonda. They were just the same, except for the shitting in the shower. 

13. At 6:30 a.m., my mother woke me with a phone call. I got dressed in the dark and took a taxi across town.

13a. On the last morning of my father’s life, he was awake and wrestling with the air. His covers were thrown aside. He was clutching at the bars of the hospital bed, pulling himself up, trying with all his might to stay alive. He asked for help from his father, who hovered near the bookshelves.

My mother had called the hospice hotline about an hour earlier, and they’d instructed her to give him a dose of Ativan. He continued to rage, so we called again and were told the nurse would come. When she finally did, she gave him more Ativan and an antipsychotic and then another dose of Ativan. As she packed up her bag and prepared to leave, she said, “His heart sounds strong, so it could be a few days. Or it could be five minutes. Who knows?”

13b. No one tells you that when a person stops breathing and you think it’s over, 30 seconds later they might take another breath. If I could crystalize in one image my father’s gargantuan life force, his unequivocal desire to not die, his uncanny ability to come back from the edge, from the edge of the edge, from a heart attack, from a stroke, from cancer, from sepsis, to go from wheelchair to walker to cane over and over, it would be this second breath.

13c. The summer before my father died, my parents bought cemetery plots in a lovely cemetery in Connecticut, near where we’d lived when I was growing up. Go ahead and be shocked that a couple of old Jews didn’t have their place of rest lined up until the very last second, but my father could not envision his death, not ever, not even as he died. With his last words he begged my mother to call for an ambulance.

13d. Five minutes after the departure of the hospice nurse, my father took his last breaths. I called out, “Mom, he stopped breathing!” They say that the hearing is the last thing to go, and now I am haunted by the idea that my father heard me announce his death and was frightened.

13e. My father stopped breathing while I stood stroking his head, telling him everything would be alright. He would be alright. I said to my mother, “I think that’s it, Mom,” and she said to me, “Are you sure? What if he’s not dead?” And I said, “Go get a mirror, like in the movies,” and she did, and she came back and put it under his nose and there was nothing, no steam. We started to laugh. Then she said, “What if we killed him with all those drugs?” We laughed some more.

14. Who knows where the time goes?

15. When I was a little girl, we had a small motor boat called The Sparerib. My parents had a leather and wool satchel with matching thermoses, and my mother would pack it with sandwiches, ice water, and a single can of Tab for her, and we would motor out onto the Long Island Sound for the day. We would drop our anchor and jump in and swim around. Then my brother and I would eat our lunch on the prow, letting our suits dry on us in the sun. On the way home, we would take turns standing in the circle of our father’s arms helping him steer the boat.

I can see my parents now, in my mind’s eye. My mother sits on a square canvas boat cushion in the stern in her checked Bermuda shorts and white button-down shirt, her dark hair tied back with a scarf, like Jackie Kennedy. My father, with his sideburns and his Ray-Bans, is wearing khaki shorts and his cream-colored knit shirt with a navy binding at the edges of the neck and sleeves. He stands smiling, gazing out over the windshield, one hand on the wheel, the other on my brother’s shoulder. The late afternoon sun is in our faces as we head into the harbor.

Cynthia Kaplan C’85 is the author of two books of essays, some films, and a bit of TV. You can find her at  www.cynthiakaplan.com . Her father was Jack B. Kaplan W’53.

5 Responses

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So beautiful and funny and moving and heartbreaking Like life. You have captured the fullness of it. Thank you

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Beautiful. Thank you.

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Brilliantly done, and so very moving. Thank you

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Oh, my, lord, this is simply wonderful. What parent wouldn’t want to be loved like this?

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Thank you for sharing this beautiful and moving “list.” Those of us who’ve been through similar experiences with dying loved ones can definitely empathize. Clearly you’re a devoted daughter who provided lots of loving care. I hope the memories of better times can give you some comfort.

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Home Essay Samples Health Death

A Father's Legacy: Reflecting on the Narrative of Losing My Dad

Table of contents, introduction, a guiding light and endless love, the unfathomable farewell, navigating the rapids of grief, a continuation of love.

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Grieving a Parent’s Death at a Young Age: A Loss That Lingers

Readers discuss how losing a parent changed their lives and continues to affect them.

my father died essay

To the Editor:

Re “ No Quick Fix for Childhood Grief ” (Op-Ed, Aug. 26):

I read Hope Edelman’s article on losing a parent at a young age with the clarity of recognition. I lost my father to suicide when I was 14. During and after that tumultuous time in my life, there was no place for me to grieve. On the day of his funeral only one person asked, “How are you?”

There was always silence around his death. I watched my mother fall apart and often be blamed for his suicide. I felt that I needed to take care of her and not the other way around. It was only this past June that I learned of incomplete mourning while reading William Styron’s “Darkness Visible.” No therapist ever asked me about grief and mourning.

My life’s narrative was indeed derailed and, as Anderson Cooper is quoted as saying of his father’s death, “ changed the trajectory of my life. I am a different person than I feel like I was meant to be.”

I lost my father in 1956. Sixty-three years later, I still dwell on the consequences of that loss.

Sandra Allik Cambridge, Mass.

My dad died 40 years ago this coming December, and while I was not a teenager at his death (I was 27 at the time), I still feel his loss daily.

The arc of my business life changed dramatically (my nearly lifelong dream of practicing law with my dad over almost as soon as it began), and I mourn that he never got the opportunity to be a grandfather to my children, for them to feel his warmth and his strength. But most of all I miss his companionship.

I understand that I did not suffer my loss when I was still trying to sort out the basics of who I was, or trying to grapple with the fundamentals of the complex workings of the universe. But grief remains a part of my being, my soul, even as I near 70.

So while I understand that there are quantum differences between losing a parent in one’s formative years as opposed to when one is supposedly able to more easily stand on one’s feet, I still occasionally wobble four decades removed from the guiding hand of my dad. The pain of loss has no age limits.

Robert S. Nussbaum Fort Lee, N.J.

I lost my father during my teenage years, and Hope Edelman’s phrase, “the long arc of childhood grief,” resonated deeply with me. The death of a loved one during childhood and adolescence can indeed have long-lasting effects, and must be recognized and treated sensitively.

We also need to clarify the distinctions between grief — which is a normal, adaptive reaction to loss — and two clinically significant conditions: complicated grief and major depression.

Bereavement usually occasions grief, which doesn’t require professional intervention. But if grief is not eventually integrated into the larger fabric of the person’s life, it can emerge as “complicated grief,” which can be extremely debilitating.

Bereavement is also a frequent trigger for major depression, in which distress and suffering are marked, and normal function is significantly impaired. These distinctions are often subtle, and a professional evaluation is sometimes needed.

Ronald W. Pies Cazenovia, N.Y. The writer is a psychiatrist on the faculties of Tufts University School of Medicine and SUNY Upstate Medical University.

The profound grief that Hope Edelman writes so eloquently about is not just relevant to the death of a parent, but also to the lingering absence of one who is still alive. My parents went through a very long, contentious separation (finally ending in divorce), during which my father left the family, returned because he had nowhere else to go, left again, returned, left, returned and so on.

It was a nightmare for my brother. I was 18 and about to head off to college. He was 12. I remember him saying only recently: “It’s hard to describe the pain you feel when the two people you love most in the world are constantly ripping each other apart.”

My father’s continuing reappearance and disappearance kept the wound open. I often find myself wondering if healing in these situations is ever really possible.

Robbie Shell Wynnewood, Pa.

There ’s no quick fix for childhood grief. Seventy-one years ago this month my father died at home. I was with him when he sat up in his hospital bed, stared straight at me as if he were taking my picture and went into a coma. He died 13 hours later.

After the Mass and burial, my mother, older brother and sister and I came back to a house stripped of his having lived and died there: the hospital bed, his cane, the medicines. It was as if he never existed. My siblings and I never spoke of our grief to one another or to our mother. We never cried. This was just the way it was.

Years later, I asked my sister the reason for this. She said, “We didn’t cry or talk about Daddy because it would have upset Mother.”

His death changed my life. Migraines, therapy, divorce. I have finally managed to turn my life around, but there are images from that time that still haunt me and always will. I will go to my grave with this grief.

Jane Fennell Los Angeles

Hope Edelman’s article raises awareness of the long arc of child bereavement. Fortunately, we now have scientific evidence of our ability to promote the resilience of these children. Supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, our team at Arizona State University developed a family-based program that taught practical tools for the parenting of bereaved children and for effective child coping.

A randomized trial of the program found long-term benefits for both the bereaved children and their parents. Children in the program, as compared with a randomized control group, had fewer mental health problems, had less distressing grief, and were less likely to report suicidal ideas and behaviors six years following the program and were less likely to be receiving mental health services and using psychiatric medication 15 years later.

Their parents reported lower depression and were less likely to experience prolonged complicated grief six years later.

The key to the program’s success was providing the bereaved parents with practical tools to support their children following the death. Now, with support of the New York Life Foundation, we have begun collaborations with bereavement agencies to translate these research findings into the Resilient Parenting for Bereaved Families Program, which can be readily delivered to bereaved families across the country.

Irwin Sandler Tempe, Ariz. The writer is a research professor at Arizona State University.

Hope Edelman is right: There is “No Quick Fix for Childhood Grief.” Most children suffering an early loss never achieve “resolution” or “closure.” Such loss simply becomes part of who you are, shaping your character and your expectations of life.

My own father died in World War II when I was three weeks old. This is obviously a different experience of loss than for children who are older. But my father’s death led to important changes in our lives — a move from London to Toronto and from comfortable middle class to very poor and foster homes.

Some people have assumed that because I never knew my father, I have no issues of loss. But I am 76 and I still think of him almost daily, and about how his death completely changed my life. This does not evoke sadness so much as wonder at how wise I was at so young an age about how hard life could be. It was a wisdom gained far too early and at too great a price.

Elayne Archer Brooklyn The writer is co-author, with her mother, of a forthcoming book, “The Memoir of an English War Widow.”

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When My Father Died, I Discovered the Unmentionable Stage of Mourning: Relief

I was troubled by this feeling. but it’s more common than you think..

In my dreams, my dad is alive. He appears beside me in the grocery store clutching a list of items he wants me to purchase for him. They’re always things that suit his esoteric taste but are difficult to find in Missouri, like teff flour or broccoli rabe. Or he calls me with complaints about the loud neighbors at his independent-living facility. But when I try to dial the manager to sort things out, the numbers on my phone start melting.

My dad died this past March, when my sister and I made the decision to withdraw life support after an unsuccessful cardiac procedure. I scattered his ashes beside the Pacific Ocean this spring.

In some Buddhist traditions, bardo, the liminal state between one incarnation and the next, is said to last up to 49 days. But it’s been six months, and my dreams still involve explaining to my dad that he’s dead. He’s incredulous. Once my sister was in the dream too, and I called on her for backup: “Zoe, Dad’s dead, right?” He always did accept truths from her that he wouldn’t from me.

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Waking up from these dreams I feel something familiar: relief. It’s like swimming upward to a place where I can breathe again. I think Dad keeps returning to me in dreams because I feel guilty that my life is easier now that he’s gone.

“The dreaded freedom.” That’s what my friend Catey Terry called it when I told her my dad had died. Most friends had guessed, even if I hadn’t told them, that my dad had challenges. He had suffered from mental illness for most of his life and had moved to be closer to me five years prior as his overall health deteriorated. I was grateful for Catey’s phrase because it was my first indication that it was okay to feel anything other than sadness about his death. Catey had cared for her mother through a brutal decline into dementia, so she knew that death can mean many things, not all of them bad.

“ Grief and Relief: Is it wrong to feel relieved when someone dies? ” is the title of an online video by psychotherapist Joe Walz that caught my attention during a late-night Googling session. While speaking to Walz for this piece, I learned research indicates that relief is an extremely common reaction caregivers have to the death of a loved one who had dementia. But he noted that similar feelings may appear in those whose parents experienced other struggles particular to aging. “It’s very natural to think, ‘Hey, I don’t have to change my parent’s diaper anymore; I don’t have to do all these painful, time-consuming, tiring things,’ ” Walz told me.

Why hadn’t I heard this before? All I knew about grief was what had filtered into the popular imagination based on the work of psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross — that it has five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Litsa Williams, a clinical social worker, told me that the first thing I need to know about the “stages of grief” is that “they’re not real.” Kübler-Ross observed the stages in people diagnosed with terminal illnesses in relation to their own deaths, not in those dealing with others’ deaths. “I think people like the stages,” Williams said, “because it takes something incredibly complex and overwhelming and difficult, and makes it neat and tidy, like, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be these little five stages, and it ends in acceptance.’ ” The popular understanding of these stages, she said, may lead people to feel that they are “grieving wrong.”

Williams, who started the website What’s Your Grief with a colleague, calls relief “ the unspoken grief emotion .” She explained that relief is a common part of grieving, especially for those who have been involved in caregiving for the person who died. If someone had mental health problems, like my father did, their death can allow survivors to “exhale from that hypervigilance, worrying the worst is always coming.” She said people may think, “God, what does it say about me that I’ve wanted this person to die?” But in fact, “when we peel it back … if they could have waved a wand and fixed the relationship, the mental illness, the addiction, that’s what they would have wanted.”

“I’m sorry” is the most common response when people hear that a parent has died, and some variation on “Thank you, it’s really sad” is a frequent reply. But “sad” does not begin to cover the complexity of what many adult children feel when parents die. I was sorry my dad died, and I was not sorry. Yet I had few models for these feelings.

By the time I came along, my father had already had a difficult life. He grew up in a working-class family in Bridgeport, Conn. He was an intellectual and a poet in a neighborhood where men were judged on how well they could throw a punch. He struggled to be accepted by his alcoholic father. As a teenager, my dad fell into a depression that would chase him his whole life. The health-care system being what it was in the 1950s, he was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a mental institution, where he received electroconvulsive therapy that erased much of his memory of his childhood.

Whether it was a result of this trauma or related to his late-in-life diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, my dad oscillated during my lifetime between what the Institute for Challenging Disorganization would classify as Level 1 and Level 3 hoarding. In my childhood home, I wended my way between piles of newspapers that narrowed the hallways. There was a room full of empty bottles that we called the Plain of Jars. Over 20 years, he carefully saved a garbage bag full of plastic forks and spoons — for a picnic with a thousand of his friends, we joked.

He couldn’t save his marriage to my mom, but he could save the Sonny Rollins record she bought him for his birthday in 1983, still wrapped, for 30 years. He couldn’t prevent me and my sister from leaving home, but he could save the plastic barrettes that had fallen from our hair into the green shag carpet, in a jar with marbles, rusty paper clips and orphaned keys.

My dad was a brilliant, funny, gentle person. His heroes were Malcolm X and Charles Darwin, and he read everything from poet Sharon Olds to the Federalist Papers, which was the book he brought to the hospital with him the day he died. When I was a teenager, we’d take the train into New York together; we saw Edward Hopper at the Whitney Museum and Shakespeare in the Park. His expectations for me were high: For my 14th birthday, he gave me German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” I would need to know, he said, how to confront what he called “the ultimate question” — how to relate to death.

If the stereotypical father is stern and withholding, my dad was vulnerable to a fault. When I was growing up, I didn’t know it was unusual that he confided in me about his loneliness. In fact, I felt special. He told me we were different from other people, honest beyond social conventions. But I wondered later whether I had needed to know, as a teenager, that his antidepressants lowered his libido. Was it okay for him to ask me, as a college student, to open a credit card account that he could transfer his debts to? Was it normal that I spent summers in my 20s secretly taking loads of garbage from his house to the dumpster behind CVS?

As I entered adulthood, I kept in close touch with Dad. I wrote him postcards from Chiang Mai and Berlin, and I felt his pride that I’d done the things he’d always wanted to — travel, get a PhD, build a stable family. He sent me multiple one-line emails every day, each with a foreboding subject line: Capitalism. My Mortality. Licorice Panna Cotta.

But once my husband, Sean, and I had settled down in a Midwestern college town and had kids, my worries about Dad increased. He’d had a heart attack in his 50s and triple bypass surgery in his 60s, and his mother and brother had both had dementia. By then in his mid-70s, he complained of loneliness every time I spoke with him. He was still living in the house he and my mother had bought when I was a baby, surrounded by 40 years of accumulated detritus. I couldn’t bear for him to die there, surrounded by dirty dishes and stacks of AOL.com free-trial discs, his body undiscovered for days. After years of resisting my pleas, Dad left Connecticut, his lifelong home, in the summer of 2017. We found him an apartment around the corner from us and helped him move in his boxfuls of newspapers dating back to the ’80s and his collection of sample-size tubes of toothpaste in various stages of use.

Thus began the hardest years of my life. Until then, Dad had been unfailingly gentle with me, albeit persistently melancholy. The person who arrived in Missouri was desperately unhappy, fragile and belligerent. I couldn’t tell if these changes reflected cognitive decline, resulted from underlying health problems, or stemmed from the unsettling move. Whatever the cause, I felt like I had a gained a third child, in addition to the 3- and 5-year-old we already had. Dad told me I had ruined his life. He delayed buying a car due to financial worries, expecting that Sean and I would share our one vehicle with him. He’d sometimes knock on our door at 10 p.m., saying he felt anxious, and insist on sleeping over. He always wanted to move in with us, but I didn’t think my solid-but-strained-by-circumstances marriage could withstand Dad’s constant presence. My sister did the best she could to help from afar, but I was overwhelmed. I had just started a new job, and my life felt like an exhausting jigsaw of demands punctuated by repetitive arguments.

The only time Dad was happy and relaxed was when he was with his grandkids. He found library books to read to them that matched their interests, spelling out difficult words just as he’d done for me and my sister. He let my son beat him at soccer, 1 million to 6. He found educational videos about the science of farts and the fastest animals on Earth. I got to glimpse the parent he’d been to me further back than I could remember, and my heart broke with tenderness.

Then his health problems escalated, and in the summer of 2020 he had a stroke that affected his mobility and made driving dangerous. I followed his doctors’ advice to secure him a place in an independent-living facility, which he despised. Although he was offended when I suggested there had been cognitive changes as well, he constantly lost track of his wallet, phone, keys and medications; he forgot how a gas burner worked. He got angry when I tried to help, and he got angry when I didn’t help enough. I gritted my teeth and did my best. I picked him up for dinner, a concert or a kid’s sporting event twice a week. With a few horrible exceptions, I spoke to him patiently. When I woke up in the night, my thoughts inevitably turned to him. When was the last time he had taken a shower? How could I persuade him to agree to a cognitive evaluation? How long was all this going to last? Was it wrong to even think about that?

In the last years of my dad’s life, I sometimes felt alone with the difficulties of caring for him. But my experience wasn’t unique. As soon as I started mentioning “relief” and “parent’s death” in the same sentence, friends’ stories came pouring out. Catey Terry, 60, described her mother in her younger years as “a lovely person” who was “dedicated to being a mom.” “She shopped at Talbots,” Catey explained, conveying the put-togetherness of a generation of women born in the first half of the 20th century. But dementia rendered Catey’s mom nearly unrecognizable. Nursing home staff would call Catey with the news that her mother was throwing planters over the fence or pulling pictures off the walls. “She was dangerous to herself and others,” Catey recalled. “I could deal with it, but I just knew how much she would have hated it. … You don’t wish anybody dead, but I wished peace for her, and peace was not the way she was living.”

When Catey’s mother died in 2018, she, her sisters and her husband were “just relieved.” But this didn’t make the loss any less devastating. “I still say good night to her every night and tell her I love her,” said Catey, tearing up.

The trauma Catey experienced was based partly on the sharp contrast between her happy, stable upbringing and her mother’s distressing transformation. People who have been taking care of their parents for a lifetime have a different journey. I talked with a college friend, Oriana Walker, who had lost both of her parents by the time she was 35. She described her parents as “pretty hardcore hippie seekers” who disavowed traditional medicine. When she was a baby, her father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and her mother insisted on caring for him at home even as he lost mobility. From a young age, Oriana was dressing her father and brushing his teeth, and eventually feeding him. By the time he died when Oriana was in her early 30s, he could only move his head. “The whole trajectory [of his illness] was incredibly exhausting,” she said. “That’s where the guilt starts. … You don’t want to feel how exhausting it is. You want [the situation] to be workable.”

His death was the only way out of the excruciating dynamics that had warped our relationship.

But Oriana’s caregiving duties did not end. Her mother, who had devoted decades to caring for Oriana’s father, had left her own metastatic breast cancer untreated. Just as Oriana was trying to finish her PhD — not coincidentally, in medical anthropology — she had to move back home. She described the months before her mother’s death as “a 24/7, crushing labor of caregiving.” Oriana questioned at the time how she would survive the experience. “It was like a life-and-death struggle we were in, and it was going to be me or her. She would either eat me alive, or I wouldn’t allow it and she would die. … We were like three dominoes in a line. First my dad feeds off my mom, and then my mom feeds off me.”

Oriana survived. After her mother’s death in 2016, once the physical exhaustion wore off, “it was an amazing feeling … one of the biggest gifts I’ve received ... like somebody pushed the reset button on my life.” It took years of therapy for her to accept these feelings and come to terms with her guilt about wanting a life independent of her parents’ illnesses.

Besides leaning on friends in similar situations, the most helpful thing I did in the year before my dad’s death was go to counseling with him. Our therapist, the skilled James Hunter of the Employee Assistance Program at the University of Missouri, listened to my dad’s complaints — that I had imprisoned him in the independent-living facility, that I didn’t buy him the right kind of butter (unsalted!) — and then said something that shocked both of us: I needed to be doing less for my dad, not more.

Enmeshment, Hunter explained, was a relationship lacking boundaries that can emerge when parent and child roles are blurred or reversed, often due to mental illness or trauma. This had begun when I was a teenager and intensified in the past several years. To heal, we had to differentiate. I had to step back. Dad had to get on Instacart and order his own butter.

Emboldened, I told my dad in a counseling session that I wasn’t responsible for his happiness. “What are you responsible for, then?” he demanded. His question made me wonder why I had willingly taken on that responsibility for so long. When I asked my dad why he thought we spent so much time in counseling talking about his feelings and so little talking about mine, his jaw dropped as if the answer were obvious: “Because I’m the vulnerable one!” Although I was his child, he couldn’t see that I was vulnerable, too.

When I asked Joe Walz about enmeshment and how it affects reactions to a parent’s death, he told me how fortunate I was to have started unraveling this dynamic before my dad died: “When people have started recognizing the problematic nature of the relationship and started doing their own work with friends, family members or their own therapist … they’re probably in a better position. Even though it’d be very painful when that death happens, they will find that relief,” because they “finally have that room, that opportunity and that necessity to become [their] own person more fully.”

And for those who didn’t have the precious chance to get a neutral observer’s view of their relationship with a parent, Walz noted that it’s never too late. “Don’t feel guilty,” he said. “Be open to talking to a therapist.” And in analyzing your own actions, “just be really gentle and forgiving.”

Die at the right time,” Nietzsche wrote in the book Dad had given me when I was a teenager. But Dad never wanted to die. He feared death more than anyone I knew; the loss of control reminded him of electroshock therapy. He was a hypochondriac who also happened to have a lot of health problems, and so his death had been a frequent topic of conversation. “You brought me to Missouri to die,” he’d tell me accusingly, as if he’d have been immortal had he stayed in Connecticut. But in a way he was right. I hadn’t wanted him to die alone, thousands of miles from me, food rotting in his fridge. And my plan worked: When the hospital called one Wednesday afternoon in March, I was only 10 minutes away.

“Low.” That was how the cardiologist answered my question about Dad’s chances of survival. He’d gone into the hospital that morning for a planned cardiac ablation, but his blood pressure had dropped during the procedure. At 81, his body turned out to be too fragile for such an intervention. His brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long to be able to return to its previous functionality.

“You can ask yourself what your father would have wanted,” the doctor said. “Would he be ready to let go?” Despite the gravity of the moment, I almost laughed. I thought of the newspapers, the toothpaste tubes, the plastic forks. No, he was not “ready to let go.” But was I? I called my sister, Zoe. As a nurse, she had seen these situations before, and she was clear: “Just make him comfortable and let him go.”

The doctors were happy to, as they put it, “change the goals of care.” I stood at Dad’s bedside while they removed his ventilation tube and administered morphine. I noticed the soft fuzz of hair on his scalp; he’d asked me to take him for a haircut and I hadn’t had the chance. I wanted to reach out and pet his head, but the doctors were busy with their work. Suddenly I remembered being carried by him as a child, laying my head on his shoulder and holding on to his earlobe for comfort as we walked up the steps to the library. Now his skin looked waxy and gray. His body was swelled with excess fluids, and his ears were mashed against his head with tubing and tape. He did not look like himself.

I started to cry. “Dad, we love you. It’s okay to let go,” I whispered. “I’m right here with you.” It took longer than I thought it would. I worried that he was going to wake up and be mad at me for killing him. Then his heart beat one more time, and stopped.

“A good death,” as Atul Gawande calls it in “ Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End ,” is elusive. And the question is, good for whom? How to balance the needs of the elderly with those of their caretakers? There are no clear answers. Expectations around caring for aging parents vary according to culture and economic circumstances. Gawande’s book is one of the few that lays out the complex medical and social dynamics that surround aging and death, and one I’d recommend reading before your parents reach a medical crisis, when it’s easier to have a frank conversation.

But there are some things no book could have prepared me for. In the last years of my dad’s life, I felt like he was wearing a disturbing Halloween costume that he couldn’t take off. He was trapped, and I was trapped with him. His death was the only way out of the excruciating dynamics that had warped our relationship, the only way I could connect with the parent he was to me when he was still able.

I asked Litsa Williams about the dreams where my dad is still alive. When a relationship was more straightforward, she explained, such dreams can be accompanied by a pleasant sense of communion with the deceased. However, with more complicated relationships, the dreams often have an undertone of what Williams calls “Did I do enough?” “The brain hasn’t quite closed that loop,” she told me, and returns to difficult moments. We can “cut ourselves some slack,” she said, and realize that the wish for a parent’s death, or relief about it, “comes from a place of either compassion or self-compassion,” from “wanting the suffering to end,” both for you and your parent.

After my dad died, Zoe, Sean and I waded into the apartment full of his hoarded possessions. We recycled thousands of recipes he had carefully clipped from the New York Times. We donated a closetful of new apparel with tags still on, which he’d been saving for some unknown future in which he felt worthy of them, and we threw away the small collection of raggedy clothes he’d actually worn. I saved whatever I could, but it wasn’t much.

When I turned the key for the last time on that empty apartment, I thought I was finished. Now I know it will take much longer to sort through everything my dad left behind. But I’m moving forward, slowly. While I was writing this article, I had a new dream about my dad. He was his old self, sweet and gentle. When I woke up, I missed him.

Rosalie Metro is a writer and academic who lives in Missouri. She is working on a novel about her father’s life.

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my father died essay

Personal Narrative: The Death Of My Father Essay

Thave to say the death of my dad had a great impact on who | am now. My dad’s name was Elmo Lee he was about 35 when he died. He left behind 5 children my brothers Elmo,and Emerion and my sisters, Tiffany,Teja,and myself. I was never told what killed him or how he got it. It was over 3 years when he first started to get sick and become hospitalized, but i was not informed until it got worse. I was always a quiet child always stayed to myself. Just the vibe of being near people made me nervous I was even this way with my own family.

I feel my dad tried to get me to come out my shell and get me to open up to people by bringing me to his house in Flint,taking to his job, and take me to stay and meet my step mother, Tiffany Lee. It helped for a while, but then I started my first year of school and i went right back into my old ways. I was held back in the first grade by my grandma ,which I believe my dad had no knowledge of. It was tough dealing with the kids there. There were always talking about people’s appearances,which I never know why when they dress the same as them.

I was told to ignore them harder there was one girl that wouldn’t let me be the quiet girl. So one day she decided to push my buttons and pick on me. My dad told when someone hit you hit the back harder. So when she pushed me, I hit him as ard as a could, she was crying after seeing we were only 8 and 9, then she left me alone. Three years later came to harper woods. I hated it there, it was all the unwanted attention. Consent Group work or working with a partner,that wasn’t my thing.

I was always thinking of my dad,I still do today, he always made his way into my mind when I was was down or on a verge of a breakdown. In 5th grade I was put in speech class I didn’t know why, maybe they thought cause I don’t talk | have a speech problem. Once again, my dad came up my mind. At this time I have seen him lately and itt was not normal for him not to come see me. One morning out of the blue he came over I was sleep him and my grandma talk, then all of a sudden he was crying.

I had never seen him cry, he was a strong person,l never was told why he was crying, but just to give him a hug and tell him “it’s ok”. Then I was in the 8th that day still stuck with me seeing not everyone is strong and brave. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be the shy, quiet girl and more! was going to be a new person something no one has seen. It was a hard process, but itt was worth it. In 8th with a 3. 2 GPAI was becoming the smart girl,yeah most people didn’t know was even there but some did. That was another step in making my dad proud, not that he wasn’t.

I ran into along the way hang with the bad kids, but I still got my work done. l became a favorite favorite student in all my classes,I didn’t like that much. couldn’t wait to get to high school. To bad I hated it the moment I walked over to that side of the school. 9th grade was the worst year of my life the year my dad first started to get sick,I didn’t find out till 2012, and I meet the mean girls. That may have slowed me down, but once they found out I was smart and not falling into their trap they changed the way they acted toward me.

They actually started to be nice to me and we became friends, i often feel I changed them for the better. My grades just got better and better sadly my dad got sicker and sicker from what I was told he died 3 times and was brought back. When | finally got to the 10 grade, he passed away while I was visiting him and my brothers and sisters it was the scariest things ever i didn’t know what to do, but at that moment my shell was completely shattered my youngest sibling need me and I have to be brave for them.

Today I’m am in the 11th grade and am at the top of my game, my grades are great, and I loved by many friends. If you have seen me from when I was little and me now you would not believe the difference and I hate that he’s not here today to see how much of a difference he made in my life. If it was for him for him I wouldn’t even consider college let alone go to one. I know he is proud of me and the accomplishment | have made. I plan on continuing down the right path.

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How My Father’s Stroke Changed My Life

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Published: Jan 28, 2021

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Stephanie with a photo of her dad. her

On Memorial Day, my father passed away in the hospital, 10 days after having a surgery to remove part of his colon with a tumor. He was 80 years old, but until the last few months of his life, he had been physically active, working small jobs and helping his siblings clean and sell their family home. He had more life to live.

My father came from a large, loving and very Catholic family of 13 children. He was the youngest boy, with three younger sisters. Although their house in West Mifflin was small, their family had enough land for a barn with horses and chickens. My dad told us stories of regularly waking up early to feed and care for the animals before going to school and once getting thrown off a horse as it ran out of the barn.

Stephanie sitting outside her home in Carrick.

My father loved music. He played the piano, guitar, accordion and sang in his church choir until he had to quit due to hand tremors. He especially loved Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor, which he never stopped trying to master. I remember him teaching me the dramatic intro, which helped inspire my lifelong love of the piano. He played “hippy” music on the guitar, including Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. Despite his short hair, I’ve always considered my dad to be somewhat of a hippy, going his own way, doing his own thing and always questioning authority figures — including, for better or worse, doctors. He seemed to lose some trust in them after my older brother, Paul, passed away from leukemia at 17 in 1986.

Although he highly valued education and was urged by a high school physics teacher to study physics in college, my dad started his own construction company. He ran the company with his brother and employed dozens of relatives. Toward the end of my father’s funeral service, my brother asked everyone who my dad had done work for to raise their hands. Nearly everyone there did. A few days earlier, even though he was in very poor health, my dad had recognized his surgeon as someone whose house he had built decades ago. While he was in the hospital, he pointed outside to a hill with a cul-de-sac and mentioned he had built some of those houses. Of course, he had also done tons of work on my Carrick home, paying for the materials and charging me nothing.

My dad was an honest, decent, good guy. He put others first, making sure that his workers were always paid in full, even when money was short because his clients failed to pay. He never complained about hardships, work-related or otherwise. These included health-related problems from decades of construction work — including hearing loss, hand tremors and various injuries. In retrospect, I believe that his constant baseline state of discomfort may have contributed to his difficulties noticing and acknowledging more serious problems to come, including the cancerous tumor that had been growing in his colon, which eventually weakened his body and left him unable to eat.

Stephanie Siler holds a high school graduation photo of her father.

In memory of my dad, I also wanted to share some advice related to the lessons I learned in the past few weeks that I wish I had known much sooner:

  • Make sure to keep in touch with and see your parents or loved ones on a regular basis. During the pandemic, we didn’t see our parents for a year or so, though we kept in touch over the phone. Stopping by — even very briefly — to visit your loved ones when possible is important because it’s harder for someone who is living with a possibly ill person to notice physical changes when they see them every day (and also may be in denial).
  • Don’t assume your parents or loved ones have a complete and accurate medical history — even if you talked about things and assume they know and have this on record. Although my grandmother and aunt had had colon cancer, my dad’s doctor did not have it listed under his family medical history. His doctor likely would have pressed him more about getting colon cancer screenings had this been listed.
  • Research and make sure your loved ones are aware of medical advances for treating diseases — especially those diseases with family histories. Unfortunately, my dad did not know how treatable and survivable colon cancer is today if it is caught early. The five-year survival rate is 90% for people with localized stage colorectal cancer. Unfortunately, only about 38% of patients are diagnosed at this early stage.
  • Make sure your loved ones get regular checkups and early screenings, especially for illnesses for which there are family histories. I had gotten a colonoscopy last fall and discussed that with my mom. I had the wrong impression that my dad had recently had a colonoscopy but later found out (much too late) that he never did. My mom said that at one point my dad had called to schedule one but couldn’t get an appointment in the near future. Unfortunately, he never called back. I wish I had discussed the importance of early screening with my parents much, much earlier.
  • Find out about the hospital before taking your loved one there. We looked up his surgeon, who actually had good reviews in a database from U.S. News and World Report but had not researched the hospital. Ideally, talk with people in the medical profession (doctors and nurses) to find out about the hospital. At the funeral home, a nurse relative said she was concerned when she learned my dad was in the hospital he was in, but it was too late at that point to move him.
  • Don’t assume the surgeon treating your loved one is competent based on reviews. Our surgeon had “good bedside manner,” but he became defensive and even rude when questioned. It’s easy to be nice when people are being nice to you or things are going as expected or when people accept everything you say. Seeing how your loved one’s surgeon acts under pressure could help you understand how they might react if things go sideways during or after the surgery.
  • Make sure you’re included as someone who is legally able to discuss your loved one’s medical condition under HIPAA. I had called the surgeon to discuss my dad’s surgery after my mother told us he said we should feel free to call and talk to him; however, the woman who answered the phone at the surgeon’s office told me he couldn’t speak to me because I wasn’t listed in their records. It’s also important to ask the surgeon and other doctors for the best way to contact them.
  • Make sure to be there when the surgeon talks to your loved ones about their surgery. Make sure to ask about risk factors, the potential for complications and especially whether anything can be done before the surgery to mitigate risks. Research the risk factors yourself (Google Scholar is wonderful for this). My dad was malnourished and had low albumin levels, which I later researched to find was a strong predictor of post-surgical morbidity and mortality. I’ll always wonder whether building up his protein levels before surgery would have led to better outcomes (e.g. more controlled edema). I also wish we had gotten a second opinion about the timing of the surgery, in particular, whether it should be delayed for several days to bring up my dad’s protein levels.
  • Ask for paperwork to read and consider prior to surgery. As a researcher, I am required by federal regulations to provide study participants with written consent forms that outline potential risks and benefits associated with study participation and to give them hard copies of the consent forms after answering all of their questions. I was amazed when I learned that my parents were never given any such written information to re-read and think about before his operation. Given the high stakes of surgeries, giving patients hard copies of information about the risks, known risk factors and possible benefits of having a particular surgery should be a federal law. The surgeon told us surgery would extend my father’s life for months, but he died only 10 days after his surgery. I understand that there are things beyond the control of the surgeon and other doctors, but potential risks needed to be discussed more to give us more realistic expectations and truly informed consent to his treatment.
  • Take detailed notes of problems you encounter at the hospital. Make these problems known to the public to the extent possible with the aim of helping those after you.

This whole experience has made me realize that for-profit hospitals may be just as bad as for-profit health insurance. Hospitals have financial incentive to stop supportive care for people on Medicare (like my father) because Medicare pays a flat rate to the hospital for a patient’s stay (I’m grossly simplifying here, but this is a problem). Human life should take precedence over profits for shareholders.

I was grateful that my brother, sister and I were able to express that to my dad many times every day he was in the hospital, but I wish I had told him that sooner. I believe that the more loved people feel, the more likely they are to take care of themselves so they and their loved ones can enjoy life to the fullest extent.

Stephanie Siler is one of Pat Siler’s four children (along with Doug, Dana and the late Paul Siler). She is a researcher in educational psychology and studies science learning in particular. If you have a message for Stephanie, send an email to [email protected] .

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my father died essay

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I reunited with my long-lost family after a DNA test — and found the sister I'd always wanted

My dad, Tim Sullivan, died of AIDS in 1986 — a shock to my entire family, and one that unspooled a series of secrets none of us saw coming. 

I was 4 when he was diagnosed, and 6 when he passed away. No one in my family knows for sure how he contracted the virus, but I've been told he was very "sexually free." Monogamy wasn't his thing, according to my mom, Marian, to whom he was married for 14 years until he passed away.

But he was a wonderful father. I was the first person my dad wanted to see when he came home from work. He would open the door and call out, "Where's my little girl?" and I'd run into his arms.

My parents, Tim and Marian, tied the knot in 1972. I love that my dad was smoking a joint.

My brother, Mike, and I were both gutted by our father's death, but we grieved very differently. Mike didn't want to talk about it and completely shut down. One time he hid in a closet to avoid us and my mom thought he was missing for an entire day. I longed for a big sister to hold my hand.

My brother and I were gutted by our father's death, but we grieved differently. ... I longed for a big sister to hold my hand.

I am now 43, and I have grieved the loss of my father, two marriages and a pregnancy. But I have also experienced tremendous gains.

In 2021, the same year I was told by a doctor that I couldn’t have children, I was delivered the big sister I always wanted.

My brother and me with our dad in 1986 — shortly before he died.

Her name is Carol Simpson, and she discovered me after taking an at-home DNA test. She waited to contact me though, after learning through social media what I was going through.

At the end of 2019, I was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer after finding a lump during a self-exam , and I documented my journey on Instagram. Unbeknownst to me, my long-lost sister was following my progress and cheering me on.

In an email, Carol, a 58-year-old United States Army Veteran, explained that she held off on reaching out to me until my treatments were done.

“I felt you had enough on your plate and needed to focus your energy elsewhere,” she wrote in a lengthy email.

Carol was conceived before my parents got together. My mom had no idea she existed — so neither did I.

My mom and me.

“My mother and your father knew each other in 1964. They were young and you know where that can lead,” she wrote. “I know this must be as much of a shock to you as it was to me.”

I ended up doing my own DNA tests to verify and make sure everything was accurate. It was.

I was excited. I was curious. But I didn’t didn’t have an emotional response until I met Carol and her son, DJ.

DJ is half Black and a darker version of my Dad. The first time I met him, I burst into tears. I felt like I was hugging my father.

I can't get over how much my sister's son looks like my dad.

Carol and I like to laugh about how different we are. She’s retired military personnel living in rural Missouri, and I’m a health advocate and entertainment reporter in New York City. Her social media is filled with pictures of her grandchildren; on mine, you’ll find me posing with celebrities on a red carpet.  

But our dad lives in both of us.  

I get my love of nightlife and adventure from him. He is probably also the reason I've been attracted to bad boys. Carol inherited his warmth. She has this ability to make everyone around her feel comfortable. And she’s also very wise, one of those people you'd describe as an old soul. When I’m struggling with a decision, she’s one of the first people I call. Carol aways picks up on the first ring.

She remembers my doctors' appointments. I was at the hospital in February for some scans and she checked in to see how I was doing. She always calls before I have a mammogram.

Carol and my mother have also become close. We did a girls' trip in Florida, and my mom shared stories about our dad. He raced cars, boats and horses — basically anything that moved. He partied at the Playboy Mansion when it was in downtown Chicago. It meant so much to Carol to learn about her biological father.

To this day, my brother, whom I adore, won't talk too much about our dad and how he died. And that's OK. I have Carol for that.

Do you have a personal essay to share with TODAY? Please send your ideas to  [email protected] .

Marisa Sullivan is a writer and health advocate in New York City. The three-year breast cancer survivor supports Women Who Rock, a charity benefiting Magee-Womens Research Institute & Foundation, and Hard Rock Heals. Rachel Paula Abrahamson is a lifestyle reporter for TODAY. 

  • Coping With The Loss Of A Mother

How to Write a Letter to a Deceased Parent + Examples

Updated 08/28/2023

Published 08/21/2022

Dr. Alejandra Vasquez, JD, CT

Dr. Alejandra Vasquez, JD, CT

Certified Grief Counselor

Learn how to write a letter to a deceased parent with information on the benefits of letter writing and processing your grief and example letters to inspire you.

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

One aspect of the grieving process after the death of a parent involves coming to terms with their loss. Regardless of your relationship with them, losing a parent can be one of the most traumatic events in life. You can expect to grieve intensely when a parent dies, partly because of the loss you’ve suffered but for many other reasons. 

Jump ahead to these sections:

Why write a letter to a deceased parent, steps for writing a letter to a deceased parent, example letters to deceased parent.

Some adult children will mourn a parent’s death because the event represents a chapter in their lives permanently closing, where they no longer have someone to go to for advice and support. 

Another reason this type of grief can be more profound is that the child now steps into the role the parent left behind. Adulting now falls squarely on them, at times without proper preparation to take on that responsibility, regardless of their age, when their parents die. 

Bereavement is the physical, mental, and emotional reaction to a significant and often life-altering loss. Many individuals who experience the death of a close loved one will struggle with coming to terms with the absence of their family member and the changing family dynamic.

When a parent dies, a person’s grief can compound due to the many subsequent losses they’ll experience as the child steps into their new role within the family. They’ll need added support and encouragement to help them adjust to their new reality.

Writing a letter to a deceased parent is a way to help the grieving process along in a healthy way, especially when the parent dies suddenly or unexpectedly. Missing out on the chance to say goodbye to a parent can traumatize a surviving child. Often, people take for granted that their loved one will be there and fail to recognize how fleeting life can be.

The experience can devastate the surviving family if a parent dies without warning. All sudden death can have negative consequences for the survivors creating complexities in the grieving process. 

Grief and loss activities like letter writing are one way to help find closure after a parent’s death, even when not faced with the crisis of sudden death. Relationships between a parent and child can become estranged, adult children graduate and move away, or the family is not very open and communicative. All of these reasons, and more, create unexpected feelings in individuals who’ve experienced parental loss. 

The grief process is highly individual. Grief therapy offers an opportunity for the bereaved to express their pain and sorrow in constructive ways that get them thinking about their relationship with the deceased and how their death affects them in different aspects of their life.

With letter writing to their deceased parent, they learn coping mechanisms that move them along the grieving process, like how to describe their grief and express their emotions. Below are some tips to help get you started on your healing journey with letter writing.  

Writing a letter to someone who’s passed can seem intimidating initially, and you’ll likely feel a bit strange pouring your heart out to someone who’s no longer here. But, the grief process is more complicated than sitting down with pen and paper, hoping that everything will suddenly seem better.

The essential function of letter writing get’s you thinking about how your loss has affected you and ways that you can start growing around your grief . Keep reading for some helpful how-tos.

Schedule time for your grief

You might think that scheduling time for sadness and despair is quite strange. After all, no one wants to make time for the things they're trying to avoid. Sitting alone with your grief allows you to stop and think about how your loss has affected you and fully process its effects.

Your scheduled time with your grief is yours alone, free from distractions and responsibilities to others. When carving out some alone time, you create an environment that honors and supports the grief process so that you can work on your healing. 

Gather your supplies

Ensure that before you write, you have everything you need to make your writing session a success without the distractions of needing to get something you forgot. Make a list of everything that makes your experience whole, from gathering pen and paper, stickers and highlighters, soft music, or even a soothing candle.

These tools prepare your mind for letter writing and digging deeper into your sorrow to fully express what's on your mind and in your heart. Grief is a reaction to your loss, and what follows is a process of releasing your anguish healthily and constructively.

Think about what you want to say

Now that you’ve settled in to write to your loved one, think about what you want to say. This session can be the first of many where you make time to open up the dialogue to help you express your thoughts and feelings.

Think about how you feel and what’s most important to get off your chest. Are you angry at your parent for some reason? Did they leave you without having an opportunity to say goodbye? Or, do you want to tell them how much you love and miss them? Writing this letter is your chance to find closure and say the things you didn’t get to say in the past. 

Don’t censor your writing

To make this exercise work for you, write down everything on your mind. Don’t worry about whether your letter is grammatically correct or if you’ve used the proper sentence structure. This is your private moment to help you process your thoughts and emotions. Focus on getting it all out on paper.

Write swiftly, or slowly, at whatever pace it takes to keep up with your ideas. Do you need to take a break? Did you remember the tissue? The goal is to write an honest letter to your parent that describes your grief experience. You can’t rush the process or compress it to a few short minutes. 

Write it and forget it

One of your letter-writing goals is to set it and forget. Set it down in writing, read it aloud if you want, and then move on from it. Your grief will constantly evolve in the weeks and months to follow. You don’t need to commit to memory everything you’ve written down.

You can help move forward from your grief by focusing on the present and not reaching into the past. Your healing doesn’t happen all at once, and it’s a process that occurs over time. The feelings and emotions you’re experiencing today won’t be the same as tomorrow. Your perception of your grief will shift along with every new experience.

Your letter writing is a highly personal experience between you and your thoughts. What you say in a letter to your deceased parent should convey your honest emotions and expressions of grief without worrying about what anyone will think or say. This private moment is yours to determine what your parent’s life meant to you and how their death affected you. 

Example for a father

I’m having a hard time dealing with you not being here. You were always my rock and my greatest support. Lately, I want to call and ask you for advice on my career, and then I remember that you’re no longer here with me. What am I supposed to do now that you’re gone? I feel so lost and alone even though I know I have many people who love and support me. It’s just not the same. I really miss you, and I feel like crying all the time. I don’t mean to burden you with my sorrow. I just needed to get it all out so I could pretend to hold it together for my family. Thanks for listening. Until next time. 

Your Little Buddy

Example for a father-in-law 

You’ll always be my dad, even though you didn’t give birth to me. Haha! That’s a funny thought! That would mean that I married my brother, and, well, that’s a whole different story for the gossip mills. I just had the thought of old aunt Edna admonishing me for it, wagging her finger at me as she did to you all the time. I really miss having you around. I never thought that you’d be taken from us so suddenly. I have to admit that your son is struggling without you here, and I don’t know how to help him. I wish you could tell me what to do. You know, give me some of your solid advice like before. I’m keeping my ears open, hoping to hear from you. I love and miss you.

Your Daughter-in-law

Example for a mother

How’s it going for you up in Heaven? I know how badly you wanted to make it there. I feel bad for all the times I made you act out of character that got you worried that God wouldn’t want you up there with Him. He knows you are a good mom and a wonderful person despite your kids! You probably earned extra brownie points for everything you had to put up with raising us. So, I’m going to take partial credit for getting you there. Lol. I think about you all the time. And even though I miss you terribly, I know you’re up there with dad living your best life. I hope the Kingdom of Heaven is everything you imagined and more. 

Your Favorite Son

Example for a mother-in-law

I don’t know where to begin telling you how sorry I am that we didn’t have the greatest relationship when you were alive. Now that you’re gone, I see things very differently and understand a little better where you were coming from every time you suggested how I could be a better wife or mom. At first, I would get so angry. I would take it out on my husband because you were his mother, and I didn’t understand why he was always siding with you. I know I drove a wedge in your relationship with him. I never meant for him to have to choose sides. Well, a lot has happened since you died. He finally left me for someone else. I can’t say I blame him. I really miss him, and I wonder if you can work something out from above to help me get him back. Besides, I don’t think you’d like his new girlfriend.

Let me know,

Your loving pebble in your shoe

Letter Writing as Grief Therapy

Losing a loved one doesn’t have to signal the end of your relationship. You can continue the special bond you shared by sharing with them what’s going on in your life whenever you want to have them near. Letter writing helps you do just that. Your letters will evolve from telling them how bad you feel about their death to celebrating life’s new experiences with them.

Categories:

  • Loss Of Mother
  • Remembering A Mother Who Died
  • Helping A Loved One Deal With The Loss Of A Mother
  • Coping With The Loss Of A Father
  • Helping A Loved One Deal With The Loss Of A Father
  • Loss Of Father
  • Remembering A Father Who Died
  • Coping With Grief

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