Loss 1

It is said that time heals all wounds, but I don’t think so. Grief of loss can percolate back up from it’s unconscious crypt at any time. And when it does, no bandage, scab or scar can contain it.

I was doing some dusting in my disgracefully disorganized office space when it happened this time. The picture above shows two of the thirty-two chessmen I hand-crafted for my father almost fifty years ago. The set was never played with. Before we could, Dad died on today’s date, November 8. And knowing that, as I dusted, it all came rushing back. The trauma. The confusion. The loss.

He died in the very same Veteran’s Hospital where I had made this set during my own stay there some three months before. He died as the result of his two-pack-a-day Camels habit coupled with the abrasive environment of his career as a journeyman firebrick layer. I only mention that last part because all but one of his friends/coworkers died of cancer too. Oh, and all but one smoked their particular brands of cigarettes as well.

It wasn’t quick, of course. Dad’s cancer had taken his right lung two years before it took his brain. He was only 53 and I was only 21.

That was long time ago. But as I dusted the chessmen, an old and indelible regret bubbled back up. And that is the loss I have thought about the most over the decades because is a loss that cannot be filled by any means whatsoever.

I never got to know my father on a peer-to-peer, man-to-man basis. Frozen in time, I will always be his child and he my parent. He will never know me as a mature man. And as a mature man, I will never know him either. There is no way to bridge this gulf.

But this is the sort of thing nobody or nothing can mitigate for you. In loss through death, there will always remain such voids. Maybe things that now cannot be said. Or maybe things that now cannot be retracted. Maybe meanings that cannot now be aligned. Maybe sharings that now will never happen. And on and on.

There are, however, an awful lot of things that can be helped by others. Back up at the outset of this post, as well as the loss death brings, I spoke also of the trauma and the confusion. And with these, others can help.

Just three years before Dad died, modern hospice came into being. St Christopher’s in England was the first hospice, and it was founded in 1967. In Pittsburgh, where Dad died in 1969, hospice was still decades away. In their loss, family and friends were on their own. Traumatized. Confused.

But today hospice is available throughout much of our nation. And hospice can especially help not only the dying, but their family and loved ones as well. Nobody an erase the pain of loss through death, but hospice can beat back the trauma and the confusion. And it can give some perspective on loss as well. I am absolutely certain that had my family and I had the kind of support that hospice gives today, things would have been a lot different–much, much, better–for all of us. And maybe especially for me. I will not go into the things that were a consequence of my father’s death here. And as evidenced by the fact that I am sitting here writing this, it should be obvious that none of them were insurmountable. But things for us all would have been lot better and recovery would have been a lot faster.

There are some resources on grief elsewhere in this web site. And you can find out more about hospice as well, including how to locate ones nearby.

For my family, I know that hospice would have helped us all. Hospice is as much about those left behind as it is about the departed.

Hospice can give those left behind help with trauma and confusion. And it can give some insight into the nature of personal loss as well. But no one and nothing can completely eradicate your loss.

Not even time.