By the time I was 13 I had been to more funerals than my friends have been to in their entire lives. Coming from a large Irish Catholic family it was normal, and shielding your children from the realities of a funeral was not an option; you went and you were there for your family. Granted, when I was little I didn’t understand much and all I knew was I had to dress up and behave, then I could go play with all of my cousins. My family got together fairly frequently so it was nothing out of the ordinary to see everyone.
I still remember the first time I ever saw my dad cry was at a funeral. His brother in law had died unexpectedly from a heart attack. My dad had been best friends with him for years before they became brothers-in-law, and I still remember seeing him hug my mom at the funeral home with tears running down his face. That was also the funeral that started my love-hate relationship with bagpipes. To this day I cannot hear a bagpipe without tears coming to my eyes, but it also feels like something is missing when they aren’t at a funeral.
From elementary to middle school I had gone to a handful of funerals, and while all were sad I can’t remember them affecting my everyday life. It was always odd when certain family members were never at parties anymore, and seeing the sadness from my parents was tough. It never got to me on a very personal level. In highschool I lost my grandpa, my mom’s step father who was the only grandpa I ever met. He was 103, and had lived an incredible life. There were more people at his funeral than at any function I have been to since. It was full of love and remembrance, grief but acceptance. Also in high school, my dad’s brother passed away unexpectedly, and I remember that loss hitting me harder than any of the previous ones I had felt. Uncle Jim was a staple, he was always there and missed nothing. He was my dad’s best friend. I remember sitting in church during his funeral mass, grasping my cousin’s hand, just crying.
In what felt like the hardest blow of my life at the time, my grandma passed away a few days before my 22nd birthday. My mom’s mom, she was my closest confidant. She helped raise my brother and I, and we often spent summers at her house. She had been there for me through everything, and was always the person I would go to when I didn’t know which way to turn. She was 93, and was so happy with her life. It was a blow to the heart that I still feel. I still will say a certain phrase and think of her, will hear a song and think how much she loved it. How I wish I could call her and get her no nonsense advice. Her ghost is a familiar and loving haunt. Painful at first, but bittersweet as time moves on.
In the summer of 2023, my family had a fourth of July party, and we saw my dad’s only sister for the first time in months. She was skin and bones, her cancer had come back, and she wanted to talk to absolutely no one about it. A few weeks later my cousin called me and said we needed to take Aunt Bug to the emergency room, she can barely function and is refusing to seek help. That led to a two months long battle of attempting to get her help, being in and out of the hospital with her swearing me up and down, and a tentative treatment plan. But at the beginning of September that year, she passed away. I was in almost constant contact with my cousin at that point, and when I woke up to a text that just said “Jess…” I knew what happened. I had to go downstairs and tell my mom, and then my dad, that she had died. It came as no shock, my dad and I both had a feeling in the pit of our stomach that she wasn’t going to make it. It was a feeling we had both had plenty of times before, and one we always knew to listen to.
Her funeral was that same week, and it also marked the beginning of the end for my dad. He made it to part of the viewing on the first day, but his health was in such decline he couldn’t make it to the actual funeral. I heartbreakingly had to tell him again a week later his sister had died, since he didn’t remember that happening.
The day after Bug’s funeral, I woke up and went on the porch where my dad always sat in his lift chair. I took one look at him and knew, just knew on the deepest level, that if he did not go to the hospital today that my family would be attending another funeral very soon. So I told my mom, then went and told my dad we were taking him. He didn’t put up much of a fight, he was not very coherent at this point. We got to the hospital and long story short, his oxygen was so low he was lucky to be alive and he was in respiratory failure. He was admitted into the ICU that night, where he stayed for the next five months. His oxygen, and all of his other dozens of health conditions, never become stable enough to move him out of the ICU.
I had been living with the knowledge for years that my dad was very sick, and at any moment could die. Despite knowing that, he seemed invincible to me. On the outside he looked sick and frail, a shell of a man with not much to him. On the inside though was a man who had been through hell and back, and his mindset and outlook showed it. He had gone through multiple spinal surgeries, heart attacks, had a pain pump surgically put into his stomach that sent a continuous dose of morphine to his spinal cord. Had been through every hardship in life, losing more people he loved than I can comprehend, more pain and sickness than someone can conceive in their mind, and still thought his life turned out pretty damn great. In my mind, my dad was the toughest, grittiest, and strongest person I knew. This stint in the ICU wouldn’t actually be what took him from this world. I was living in denial of what was right in front of me.
After five arduous months in the ICU his organs were shutting down, he couldn’t breathe on his own, he had been tube fed for months, and the week before he died the doctor told me he was going into kidney failure and would not survive dialysis. He ultimately made the decision to pull the plug. It was his last act of strength. He shielded my mom and I from having to make that impossible decision for him. I knew it was coming, and nothing felt right. I couldn’t give up on him, but how much longer could I let him suffer? It was an impossible decision, and I will forever be heartbroken and grateful he was able to make that one last decision for himself.
I sat by his side all day as they slowly weaned him off the oxygen mask, and then the tube feed. As they gave him more medicine so he wouldn’t feel when it became too hard to breathe. As the nurse came in, and told him that it was happening, his heart was stopping. I sat by his side and told him I loved him one more time as he took his last breath. My uncle, his brother, was there with me sitting on his other side. My mom had left earlier in the day since it had become too much for her, and knew as soon as she walked down the hall of the hospital and all the nurses were standing outside his room that this was it. She made it just before he passed. My little brother was stuck on a train, trying to make it home in time to say goodbye. Under an hour later we had packed all of the stuff up that was in his hospital room, said goodbye to the nurses who had tears in their eyes, and left the hospital for the last time.
We threw one hell of a funeral for him. I gave a eulogy that left everyone crying, and we celebrated the man that he was. Then, everything went back to normal and I no longer knew how to function without the weight of having a sick dad.
My entire life that weight had been on my chest, and I proudly beared it since it meant that my dad was still alive. Now he wasn’t, and my chest felt empty. I didn’t cry much, and didn’t know how to process anything. The images of his last moments haunting me, the thoughts of what I could have done more of, the nagging what ifs that wouldn’t stop. It all haunted me and slowly broke me down to a shell of myself. That is where I broke. The foundation of my life has been so dramatically changed in such a short period of time that I didn’t know how to function. While there were a lot of outside factors also playing a role in this, I felt the absence of everyone I lost more than I ever had. My grandma, my aunt, my dad, the half dozen people that had died in my life before them. The foundation on which my life was built, the people that I knew were there for me unconditionally, gone. For weeks I cried. I fell asleep to images and moments of my life where they were all there, and instead of being happy it made me feel more broken.
I thought I was prepared for grief. I thought I had been exposed to the hardships of the world, had experienced enough loss, that this wouldn’t break me like it did. I was arrogant and naive. To say I am over it would be a lie. To say I still don’t cry about it a year later would be a lie. The grief haunts me like a ghost, and I never know if it is here to remind me that the love I felt was real, or that the pain of the loss is still real. I don’t believe we get to choose what moments define our lives. Maybe it is destiny, fate, or the laws of the universe. Maybe it is God. I am still unsure, because I still am unsure of how to come to terms with the grief I feel.
What I hold onto is the fact that I knew I was loved. I was loved so unconditionally, and was always made to feel important. I was my daddy’s babe-a-loo, and my grandma’s sugarbabe. I can see everyone in my mind’s eye having a picnic, hooting and hollering, like it was when I was little.
Despite the pain I still hold, I also hold a tremendous amount of love.
I know this still might hurt for a long time to come, but I believe that love will ultimately win.
