haunting, part 1/3

birchbark, layered and peeling, north sask. river valley, edmonton, end of november 2011

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From Barthes ‘Mourning Diary’: “Mourning: not diminished, not subject to erosion, to time. Chaotic, erratic: moments (of distress, of love of life) as fresh now as on the first day…” – Nov. 29^th.

It’s been six and a half months since my father passed away, and I still haven’t written a letter to his main treatment physician to tell him that I think he is an incompetent asshole and that his treatment (or lack thereof) of his patients makes him a terrible human being.

But I am working on it; there is just a lot to still truly comprehend, in its most literal sense, to grasp, seize, take into the mind. There will likely be many letters to write; numerous versions exist already in my journals, my head, but many of them are too slanderous to send out into the world. It might be nearly seven months along but in many ways I am still not coherent enough to express some of my anger and anguish with regard to how things happened. They are particularly potent because they go beyond this one separate incident and speak to the ways illness is viewed in our society, western medicine’s mechanicalization of the body and its functions, and health care as a business (even if it’s not privatized, yet!) They speak to a lack of compassion that I frankly find terrifying. And so some of these things are yet to find their expression in words; I can’t yet do justice to what I want to say about them.

Time is not the healer of wounds. All time does is allow you to figure out how you are going to live with things, to let you accept and incorporate yourself into a new reality. At this point I feel less like I am living in an alternate universe, yes, time has helped with that. But that doesn’t mean I still don’t feel pain at his death just as acutely as after it happened.

Barthes: It is said (…) that Time soothes mourning. No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass”. --March 20^th.

I still hurt from my grandmother’s death over 6 years ago. I will always miss her fiercely. However, I feel less pain from her passing. It’s not because of distance in our relationship; we were incredibly close; but I was able to understand and accept her death much more swiftly and easily. She was nearly 91 years old; just over a month before she passed away (before she was hospitalized for a haemorrhage deep inside her brain) she stated to us that she wasn’t going to live another winter. She commented that this cheered her, because she was missing her mother (who died nearly 50 years prior) and she looked forward to seeing her again. She was tired, she was done. And there was grace in that. But my father wasn’t near finished. And I ache not only for the fact I don’t have him around anymore—

(though I constantly remind myself I am lucky, his own father died when he was 21, my mother’s father when she was just 10)

but because there was so much more he wanted in life. Yes, he was 63, but he was not ready to be finished with this just yet. And that will always break my heart.

I don’t believe loss, and mourning a loss, is something to ‘get over’. It is something that has changed you. Like having cancer, it is something you do not fight to be free of, it’s something you must simply learn to live with.

& I get frustrated sometimes by the subtle disbelief and frustration people show if I mention I am still grieving. I don’t even know if they realize they do it, but I can feel it sometimes flickering in, a swift dismissal, a lack of engagement. I try to be understanding, knowing that losing a parent (regardless of your relationship with them in life) is not something that’s easy to imagine outside of experience. But I think because people who are not well acquainted with grief and mourning are also terrified of it, and therefore they would like the bereaved to hurry up and go through it, you know – gnash and wail for a bit but get on with it. They don’t want to know that it haunts.