Insight from a Psychotherapist: On the loss of my father
I wasn’t sure how to write this as a psychotherapist. My training and experience abandoned me the moment I came back to my parent’s home as a caregiver. I forgot what self-care meant and how to ‘put on my air mask’ within moments of recognizing just how sick my dad was.
I sit in Grief Counseling now and am reminded that I did my best but my brain can’t stop alighting on every moment I wasn’t. Whenever I was unpleasant at a request or didn’t sit and watch TV with him, or meet his needs in myriad ways. The time I naively thought we had to figure out his care and coordinate with doctors, time I thought we’d have to say meaningful goodbyes. It was irrevocable. Rapid cycling between chaos and denial. He died and it was awful.
The death of my father has left me frozen in my personal life. Working, seeing patients, has slowly begun to awaken my professional life. I feel competent in that capacity; in the ability to compartmentalize for a few hours a day and focus on my patients. But once I take the few steps out of my home office and enter the world he once inhabited, I only feel the void of his absence.
How can he be gone? How was he here and now he isn’t? His clothes are no longer in his closet yet his smell pervades the space. His voice is saved on my phone but I can’t call him and feel the comfort of his words. I came here to look after him and then he died before I could figure out how. Now I’m not sure how to look after myself.
There are a lot of well intentioned people who are quick with advice when I share my guilt, regrets, and sorrows. Death is unpleasant so best to be positive. I have to stay busy. I’ve just got to let it go. I should remember all the good times. Telling a therapist how to grieve is a bit like telling an Accountant how to balance a checkbook. We struggle despite our knowledge.
How is anyone supposed to successfully grieve someone so adored, revered, and complex in ways I will spend the rest of my life trying to reconcile? Therapy gives us a space to talk, time gives us distance to disengage, but loss is profound and will never stop impacting all of those affected.
There are so many articles and books on the subject of grief I doubt I’m adding to the canon. I am finding the support of bereavement counseling helpful but I also humbly recognize that life is often painful. There is no consolation for that fact. No technique or strategy will ever soothe the ache. Life gives and it takes in ways that are glorious and cruel. We grieve, ultimately, because we loved. Only the poets readily accept that paradox.
