Parents – Our Tethers

We all know that one day we will have to live through the death of our parents.  This is not something we can avoid because that is the circle of life.  Even though we know this is something that is unavoidable, nothing can really prepare us for when that day comes, especially when we lose our first parent.  As kids, we see our parents as our steadfast, always there, the people we can count on no matter what, and the one we expect to be there when life hits us with the low points.  Our parents, as much as we may not want to admit it when we are young, are the rock, the anchor that keeps us certain that the sun will come up the next day.  As we get older and we see that our parents are also getting older, we begin to realize that the day we all dread will come sooner than we may want it to come.

I lost my first parent, my dad, 2 years ago when I was 42 years old.  To many of you, that may seem really young but my dad was 78 years old.  For the last 11 months of my dad’s life I had to be the “parent”, if you will, because he had developed dementia that increasingly grew worse as the year went on after suffering another stroke.  My dad was not the picture of health.  Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes (I could go on) ran in my dad’s family and he had dealt with health issues beginning in his 40’s.  On top of this, my dad started smoking after he had stopped for 20+ yrs and refused to stop.  As my dad aged, he named me as his power of attorney to handle things when he could no longer do it.   The latest stroke my dad had, in the beginning of that last year, left him with short term memory loss and he had to go into in patient rehab to regain his strength before he could go home.  A few weeks before he was to move into assisted living, he had a major set back and the dad I knew was no longer the man I was now responsible for.  The dementia got worse as the weeks went on and dad was living in his own world that did not always make sense.  There were those rare moments where my dad would emerge through the fog the dementia caused in his head and he would tell me this was no way to live and he was sorry he was a burden on me.  I hated to visit my dad because I never knew what I would encounter but each day, I would visit him so he knew he was not alone.

Thanksgiving was when I knew Dad would not be with us much longer. It was the last time my kids saw him and he was able to talk to them and say he loved them.  Our blessing was he always knew us even if he would sometimes forget as the visit went on.  Being the planner I am, I dealt with the prospect of his passing by preparing for it.  I made funeral arrangements, I began to think of what the service would be like based on our many conversations.  I was trying to prepare for something I had no idea how to handle, my dad no longer here.  A few weeks later, Pearl Harbor Day, I was going to visit Dad on my way to work ,after I got my nails done, but that day changed when I got the call that I needed to get to the nursing home.  You see, I promised my dad he would not die alone.  That day was the hardest day of my life.  It was harder than I ever thought it would be.  I had sat with my grandparents as they had passed from this world so I knew this would not be easy.  I knew my dad was not well, that he was not going to get better, and that he did not want anything done to keep him alive.  It did not matter in the end because loosing my dad knocked me off balance.  I spent Dad’s last day with him praying for a peaceful passing, reading him his favorite Bible verse and sitting by his bedside.  I stayed by his side, as I promised I would.  There were other family there but my main focus was to keep my promise and to make sure that things went the way Dad wanted it.  My dad went peacefully surrounded by this family.  This was the man I could always count on to be there when I needed him and now he was gone.  How could I just leave the shell of my dad to the care of others?  Didn’t I need to stay with him, by his side, as I promised?  As prepared as I thought I was I realized I had no idea what to do next.

I was not prepared for how shaken I was by his death, by the fact that my dad was no longer here on this earth.  How do you go on when one of the two constant people in your life is no longer there?  I felt a hole in me, like a piece of me was gone forever and I did not know how to be myself with this hole.  I felt like a lost little girl who had lost her way.  Why was his death so difficult?  I knew he was going to die and that was a fact that I had lived with for the better part of a year.  The best way to describe how I felt is to think of it this way.  Think of a hot air ballon that is tethered to the earth so it will not fly away.  It may be swayed by the wind but it is steading, anchored to the earth even with the strongest gust of wind.  Now imagine that ballon with one of those tethers gone and the ballon is unsteady and moving around without any direction.  That is how I felt.  So how was I going to get through this and live the rest of my life with that tether gone?

I realized that I was going to have to find a new way to tether myself because Dad may not be here physically but he would always be with me and he had prepared me for this moment my whole life.  He would have wanted me to continue to live my life, to be happy, and to continue to be a good mom to my children and a good daughter to my remaining parent, my mom.  When I felt unsteady, I thought about what my dad would say to me if he was still here.  I thought about the good times I had had with him, the talks before he took a turn for the worse and those rare gems of a few moments where my dad found his way through the dementia fog to let me know he was still there.  My dad always believed in me, even when he was tough on me, but that was what I had to hold on to and that was how he had prepared me to stay the course of my life with his physical presence gone.  I found a way to honor his memory each year at our local fair, where he had volunteered as a 4-H advisor for many years.  Each year on the day of his death, Pearl Harbor Day, I made the hardest trip of my year, back through the doors I walked through the night my dad died, to deliver cookies to the nurses and staff that had grown to love my dad and who took such good care of him.  Yes, the tears would fall as I made my way back through the door I walked through after my dad left this world.  It is the hardest thing I do each year but I know my dad would want me to remember the “sisters” as he called them.  Am I more anchored now with new tethers?  Yes, I realize that I am probably halfway through my own life, and that I have three amazing children who see me the same way I saw my dad.  I still have my mom but I knew that those years are numbered and I do not have nearly as many of them left as I wish I had.  Just remember that we do not know how many days, weeks, months, years we have left with our parents.  As we age, they age and we can not turn back the hands of time so make the most of the time you have with them.  Let them know how much they mean to you because once they are gone you can never get those moments back and you will need those precious moments to get you through the years without them there, tethering you so the wind will not take you away.  Our parents are how we are here, they are the reason we are who we are, and, in many ways, they are still here, living life through us because we are reflections of them and what keeps them alive in our hearts, our minds, and in the world they left.  We are their tethers to this life after they are gone.