What to do about Grief?

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My step-father is dying. He who cared for his mother as a boy and had to quit school in Grade 8 to support the two of them is now the invalid. She had MS and his father left without further contact. Left the two of them alone to cope with the world. And she was ill.

He served as a tail gunner for a year and was in London. He hated London. He hated most things. He is good at figuring out what he dislikes which is many things: politicians, camping, strange foods.

Pie. It was pie that we had to stay at the table waiting for as we travelled on holidays across the Southwest, down to California, into Mexico. Coffee and pie finished every meal on the road.

He smoked and hated exercise. He got enough exercise at work unloading beer cases at Lucky Lager. Camping, exercise, strange foods and politicians. He had enough of them.

As my mother fought her death for six years, doing everything she could do to stay on this side, he was puzzled and frustrated. He didn’t understand medicine. She was the nurse all of her professional life. He just had to sit for hours waiting for her treatments to finish, chaufeur her from hospitals to home. Now he hates doctors. Camping, exercise, strange foods, politicians and now mostly doctors.

He fell and broke three of his ribs. “If he had been in better shape,” the two doctors told me at different times. He once said that if he knew he would last this long, he would have listened to ,”your mother. She was always nagging at me to go out for a walk.”
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Life is strange and, well, inexplicable. She who exercised, went to aerobics and was a health care worker died eight years ago. We thought he would give up and die. He bought race horses. More and more race horses. He was engaged, waiting for the next race. Then this year, he sold his horses. They were costing him.

He gave up. When we would phone and ask what he was doing he would say,”Nothing. I am doing nothing like everyday.” But his heart was strong. It is just that he had no heart for life.

Now he is depressed, in pain with every breath, unable to understand what is happening around him and I ask him what happened in his 80 years of life and he said, “Nothing. I didn’t do nothing but go to work.”

He doesn’t remember the pie, he doesn’t remember the mock fights that he and my mother had. My brother and I are deeply in grief because of how he is.

While I was in Portland I heard one young check out clerk call to another in Whole Foods, “How you living, Carl?” “I’m living great,” was the answer. I so want to wrap my arms around this strange, distant man that stood silently in the back of the room while we watched tv, I want to make it better for him. The dying and the life. I grieve for what is happening to him and for what didn’t happen. I can only hold his hand with love now that he will let me.

Note: I had the priviledge to sit vigil with him and to love him out of life. He doesn’t hurt anymore. He doesn’t have to protect himself from feeling anymore.