166 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan
To get a better sense of what happened, let’s roll back the clocks to the
late 1960s. My parents were high-school sweethearts in Kansas and their love
for one another helped them overcome significant class difference and geo-
graphic distance. After high school, they went to different colleges in the state,
but by the end of her first year, my mom left her college to become a nurse
and support my father while he slowly finished-up his undergraduate degree
and law school. They had a nice life mapped-out in their heads: He would get
the best education possible and she would support them financially until he
landed a prominent, well-paying job that would enable her to focus on raising
the large family she wished for. Unfortunately, things did not work out as she
had hoped.
Their story of love is what brought me into the world, but the story of
my father’s downfall and ultimate suicide has cast a heavy shadow. It is just
now, some 33 years later, that I am working to explore my own feelings of
father-loss and trying to learn how my father’s suicide impacts how I choose
to live and enhance the life I have been afforded. It is a nontrivial endeavor,
but it is one that I wish I had the fortitude to embrace earlier in my life.
I was raised in a Kansan college town by a loving and unconditionally
supportive mom. By all accounts, I had a great childhood and was provided
a breadth of opportunities to better myself and explore my interests. Over the
years, I have been able to more fully recognize the privilege I was born into
and appreciate the opportunities I have been afforded. Though my dad died
by suicide, I am not a victim and never thought of myself as one. However,
that does not mean his death did not throw my life drastically out of whack.
Because my father died before I was verbal, I have come to realize that
I cannot really put words—or adequate words—to my emotions and feelings
about his death. This has become increasingly obvious to me after I met my
therapist, who just asked me how my body felt as I talked about my father and
his death. I was stunned by the question. No one had asked me that, and I had
spent the better part of three decades avoiding “feeling.” Instead, I had honed
my own quick story about my father and his death for folks who inquired.
I had finite language for it and had practiced it over the years, so much so
that when I would talk of my father’s death I would almost put on a show or
a façade. I used language and my storytelling skills to tell the story, not feel
how my loss affected me. Language and storytelling became a buffer for me
in helping me avoid feeling how I felt. I am still working on actually feeling
how I feel when I think of my father and the lack of having him in my life.
I have inadequate language to express it, and I have come to think that is a
good thing. Maybe some feelings are not meant for description.
Anyhow, after my father died, his family blamed my mother, shamed
her at his funeral, disowned her from their family, and sued her for all she
was worth—as well as for custody of me. Months after his death, my mom
was alone with virtually no family support and in debt to the tune of $375,000
in today’s dollars. She was advised not to declare bankruptcy, but rather pull
herself up by her bootstraps and work harder to make a life for us. She did
that and then some. She worked three jobs and did all she could to give me the
opportunities she did not have. She’s a Saint and her success story and resil-
ience is a testament to the power of the human spirit.