Grief Changes us.

Here's an essay I re-crafted for our local paper, The Northeast Georgia. I wrote the original essay back in 2005. I received several letters and phone calls about what this essay meant to folks. Simply trying to acknowledge how grief impacts us meant a lot to people. I'm thankful. Let me know what you think.

Grief impacts all of us – young and old, rich and poor, no one is immune. My Dad died on January 30^th, 2005 – 6 years ago last January. As a professional minister who had studied grief and walked beside friends as they struggled after loss, I thought I understood grief. I knew the patterns; I could quote grief books. I quickly learned understanding grief and surviving grief are completely different. When my dad died grief pounded me in a way I am still trying to understand. In the middle of my grief, I wrote the following letter to myself.

Friday, September 23, 2005 9:40 pm

It’s been eight months and twenty three days. Not like I’m counting or anything. This week I attended a funeral service for a parishioner friend who died of cancer. He was 58 years old. As his friends and colleagues spoke of his fight against the cancer and his good humor through the ordeal, I felt tears roll down my face. They were not for my friend, though. They were for dad. Cognitively, I know grief stays with me. I’ve even had people tell me, “You’ll always miss your dad,” but I thought I’d be over his dying by now. I’m not! Grief hits me at the strangest times and I am brought back like a time traveler to the day Dad died.

We almost missed the last hours of Dad’s life. It was a Sunday afternoon. After preaching in the morning I planned to take a nap. My wife and my two daughters would stop by dad’s house while I rested. I would again take my turn by his bedside that night. Instead, they convinced me to go with them. I’m glad I did.

When we walked into dad’s house everything seemed different. Dad was different. We knew he was dying, but did death look like this? Dad had changed in the 24 hours since I had left. His face was gaunt. His breathing labored like a swimmer gurgling under water. What were we to do? We had prepared ourselves for this … thinking through the different scenarios, but now … I felt helpless. I called the hospice nurse, the only person I who knew who might know what death looks like. She came quickly.

It’s hard to keep track of time in powerful moments in our lives. Time seems to slow down and speed up at the same time. I can’t remember how everything transpired in those last hours. I have memories of faces and feelings that all seem to flow together: My girls saying good bye to Papa John; the straight, painful, hard tears that came as I heard the nurse say, “He’s dying tonight;” my frustrated cursing mingled with my cries and tears as I struggled with letting dad go.

I still remember dad’s last breath. My wife sat across the bed from me, her arms on dad’s chest watching his labored breathing. We prayed and sang. We told him it was okay to go although I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him here. As Dad breathed his last weak breath we felt the air leave his chest. We waited for another one. It didn’t come…. It didn’t come.

It’s been 8 months and 23 days since dad breathed his last breath on that winter evening in Beaufort, SC. It feels like yesterday. I go about my life today looking like life is back to normal. It’s not. I miss him each day. Tears still come. Memories still flow. Grief does not let go. It walks with me … changing me a little at a time.