I wrote this post when Peggy died four years ago. Emotion weighed heavily on my mind, and I was tired of life then. I let true feelings release like a pressure cooker, and the writing shows it. I didn’t post it then because I would have regretted it. Four years later, I am unsure whether it is safe to make my feelings public. Grief is not an easy emotion to deal with. My thoughts and dreams are riddled with instances of both Barb and Peggy. Grief can be overwhelming, sudden, and sad. When it arrives, I feel somewhat Bipolar in that I can change from happy to depressed instantly.
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Written in August, 2019
Families can be wonderful, but they can also become a royal pain in the ass. I have a weird feeling I am about to witness the transition from wonderful to pain in the ass. The trigger mechanism is stuff. Tomorrow, I begin the process of burying my beautiful wife, Peggy. She passed last Saturday morning, and the funeral will be this coming Wednesday. Between her death and the funeral, I am looking for stuff. Peggy and I are a blended family. Both of us were widowed. We found each other, fell in love, and married. She has two kids, and I have three.
The trigger will be finding things a mother promised would become her daughters upon death. My God, the body isn’t cold yet, and we are seriously jumping into the deep end over stuff. It won’t matter that I loved the woman madly for over thirteen years, changed her soiled panties when she became incontinent, or that I have spent the past four years tending to all of her needs without any familial assistance, the most essential thing that matters at this time is stuff. Give me a break! Give me a few days to grieve, for Pete’s sake. The stuff will be found or lost, and it won’t matter a bit in the end. Stuff won’t bring Peggy back. Stuff is just stuff. What matters more is the love between kids and their parents and the memories you made together, which are stored in your brain unless you have Alzheimer’s like Peggy did. In the end, she didn’t remember much of anything. She did remember liking to have her hand held, and I accommodated her as much as possible. I genuinely believe she died because she forgot how to breathe, just like she forgot how to swallow.
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For three years, I have been remembering the good times we had. You know, it is a lot easier to remember the bad times. It seems bad is a stronger emotion than good. I must burn the good times into my memory for something to comfort me. Now that it is twenty years since my wife Barb died, I am having some trouble remembering our best times together, but I can tell you how she suffered in minute detail. Both Barb and Peggy had ugly deaths. The end was a struggle for them. Dying ugly is not easy, but it doesn’t change anything you die.
Once the dying process begins, the dying person cannot control it. They can die in peace or agony, but eventually, they die. When they are gone, it doesn’t matter to them how it happened because they have achieved a norm of life. What is ugly is watching it happen. The loved ones who remain refuse to believe that the process is normal. We only know what we see, and our brains deeply process those thoughts and images. Grief is the manifestation of those images surfacing from within the innermost recesses of our brain lobes. Grief is like an emotional bubble of air ascending from the ocean’s depth, rising ever so slowly until it breaks through the surface and pops into your mind.
Filed under: Aging, Biography, grief, Memories | Tagged: Alzheimer's disease, Cancer, Families, Heart Disease, Stupid is as Stupid Does | 2 Comments »
