At the same time my plane was landing in Denver my mom was emailing to say that dad was being taken to the ER. My 2nd longer-than-a-weekend vacation in 9 years began with this message which I read just after unbuckling the seat belt on my crammed Delta flight. I made it to my Air BnB, a surface-only clean bachelor apartment with bed sheets only a bachelor would buy,  then walked to nearby Washington Park where I sat on a park bench and cried with my mom on the other end of my phone telling me not to come back to Virginia but to stay and enjoy my conference;  dad wouldn’t want it any other way. The prognosis was good and she expected him to be home after 3 days, she said, and that was just the beginning of the partial truth I would hear for the remainder of my 4 days in Colorado. What I knew was that my dad had never been to a hospital as a patient and that he’d taken a sharp mental decline the weekend before, so much so that my mom said then also not to visit as it would be confusing for him.

Upon returning to Virginia I lined up meals and sitters for the dogs then went right to Lynchburg where he was still in the palliative care unit. He knew me immediately and raised his IV’d and banded arms for a hug and said my favorite, “Hi Sweetie.” A nurse in the doorway quietly expressed surprise to my mom, “That’s good, he knows her.” A tx team meeting immediately followed and what had been unspoken to me all along came out in a plan of very little action. He would be move to hospice the next day and taken off all meds except those which might keep him comfortable. We didn’t leave my dad’s side from that time on and when transport came to move him to hospice I followed along in my car and wept. All who have lost a parent say that nothing prepares you for the loss, though untrue, there are no right descriptors for the pain of this inevitability or for the loss of a parent. One friend expressed to me later, “No man will ever love you more.”

For me nothing prepared for the gratitude I would feel or the frustrations along the way, like the Dr. who knew him but called him by the wrong name. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “Dr. Hamrick was here last month.” Or that the lifetime of annoyance I had been witness to in my parent’s marriage, would bleed also into the hospice room with the occasional tone of my mom’s behaviors saying, “Why won’t he just let go now?” Or the gratitude I feel but may never verbalize for my siblings who pressed the pump for the pain medicine at ever increasing intervals, eventually so close that I timed them myself, “It’s been 2 minutes,” I’d say, and they’d depress the button again.

My dad’s death was not the peaceful, quiet passing that the palliative care doctor said it would be. And maybe it is like childbirth is to mothers, but it’s not what I want to write about, nor is it what I want to reflect on, except to say, what we all said finally, we treat our animals with more compassion and kindness, medically, than we do people. That was horrifying to witness, and not at all what I want to remember.

My sister and I had shared visions of my dad passing into the afterlife, the signs of which he showed in his hospice bed. We saw him bursting onto the scene greeted by those awaiting him, with colors like vibrant yellow, and enthusiastic wagging tails of Reuben, Sebastian, Elvis, his parents and all who love him there…

My dad is with me now, in an ever present way. Beginning just before his death and then the day of his memorial, flocks of cedar waxwings arrived, and thereafter in times I’m thinking of or talking about him, or on the phone with my sister on Sundays. But it’s the feathers which are my favorite. There is no better way for my dad to have chosen to communicate with me than thru feathers and nearly ever day since May 18th I find them, unexpectedly placing my foot beside the polka-dotted feather of a woodpecker, or pulling in last minute to an overlook along the parkway only to find the feather of a red-tailed hawk waiting for me there.

It’s been 5 months since my Dad died. May 18th. 9:40 pm. Virginia Baptist Hospice, the same hospital where he worked as a radiologist, and the same hospital where I was born. We were with my Dad when he died, my mom, brother, sister, and myself. I sat in a chair by his side with my face pressed into his arm, my siblings holding his hands. And he held our hands for the duration of his time in the hospital, and for the 3 days I was with him there I will be forever thankful.

There’s so much to write of the journey of bereavement, and beautiful parts of my journey have been shared with and inspired by my beloved friend Molly, whom I was with for my final 2 days in Colorado and who shared with me the writings of Jeff Foster, “Grief is only love in a strange disguise and it invites us to come closer.” With her help, my sister and I spoke at my dad’s funeral, each sharing a writing from his work. I always felt it took the utmost of courageousness to speak at a funeral of a loved one, and now I’m so thankful that I did.

Below is a copy of the slightly revised piece that I read. And now that these words have made there way to this page, with little editing or proofing, I thank you for sharing in this with me. And now the sun is up, the dogs want a walk, and there’s likely a feather in the woods waiting to be found.

Grief’s Hidden Secrets

“The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss…”
– Dean Koontz

Loss contains within itself a beautiful yet painful reminder of inseparability, and a hidden call to remember who you really are. Grief can shake you and wake you up and bring you face to face with a fundamental fact of existence.

At the bottom of grief, we find unconditional love, a love that is not even dependent on physical form. Grief contains its own end. And it doesn’t mean that we forget our loved ones. It doesn’t mean that we are not visited by them in memory and feeling. It doesn’t mean that sadness disappears overnight. It doesn’t mean that we don’t feel all kinds of things. But we realize deeply that we have not lost anything fundamental to us, and the world has not stopped, and they are not truly “absent” in the way the mind thought they were. The pain of emptiness can become our joy. We have only been given the experience of knowing our loved one, feeling them, touching them, smelling them, feeding them, holding them, even witnessing their passing. Life cannot take that away – it has only given, and it continues to give, if we have eyes to see it. Perhaps their life and death unfolded in the only way it could have done. Perhaps they lived the path that was right for them, even at the end. At the rock bottom of grief, we find deep connection, and humility, and not knowing, and gratitude, and compassion for all humanity, for all who have loved and lost. We encounter the unfathomable Mystery of it all.

Grief is a tough teacher, to be sure, a relentless and seemingly cruel teacher, but it is compassionate at its core. The device of our torture becomes our salvation.

We all face loss, that is the way, but if we can turn towards our loss, and listen to it, and stare it in the face, then it may reveal hidden gold, and we may end up seeing ourselves and our loved ones reflected more clearly than ever. Grief is only love in a strange disguise, and it constantly invites us to come closer…