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One year will have passed Sept. 6 since Todd succumbed to a 5 ½-year ordeal with Stage 4 congestive heart failure, an intensely personal odyssey that was nothing less than valiant in that Todd survived 3 ½ years beyond the original one- to two-year life expectancy he was given when diagnosed in February 2012.
Todd, as he was known by most people rather than his given name of Gilbert, bequeathed to his beneficiaries a legacy of unwavering faith, strength and courage. They are the character traits Todd’s in which caregiver for the duration of his condition finds solace as he continues to work through the grief process. To his disappointment, the taboos that men don’t cry and should be “over it” remain firmly rooted in a sexist set of norms that requires men to “get over it” quicker than women and not to wear their hearts on their sleeves. The man who doesn’t adhere to the rules is seen as either weak or, at the very least, wallowing in self-pity.
However, grief does not follow any rules much less the unbalanced gender- and sexist-based ones that require women to grieve one way and men another way. As such, it is not wise to try to follow the rules, to “fit in.” The “rules” are not likely to reconcile the dynamics of the multiple emotions that are stirred when Death steps in, even when his arrival is foretold.
For Todd’s caregiver, he has learned that anger is allowed and even an appropriate reaction to death. Perhaps life experiences and learning from them come into play as the ex-caregiver directs anger on either the terminal medical condition that finally won out, or on doctors whose treatment strategies and ethics later fell into disrepute. Generalized anger, the type that is aimed at everyone perhaps because they are either unsupportive or even simply alive, is toxic, a cancer the will quickly and painfully devour anyone who carries and feeds it.
The anger Todd’s caregiver continues to work through are at so-called friends who put down Todd when he answered questions about his health with comments like, “I hear the same thing over and over,” so condescending and uncaring that it reeks of intentional hurt and hate. So it goes with those who fancied themselves as doctors and prescribed that Todd needed nothing more than to “get his ass out of bed” and exercise.
Anger is fed with a sense of offensiveness by others who want to know if the deceased had any money and, if so, how much, and if and how much the caregiver got.
Those “friends,” mercifully few in number, have been purged from the caregiver’s life.
There is also a doubt after the role of the caregiver is done, a question if the caregiver did something he should not have done or if he failed to do what he should have done. Todd’s caregiver has the reassurance – and comfort – that Todd lived 3 1/2 years longer than expected and that the quality of life in that extra time was “fairly good” as doctors and hospice providers said. There is solace as well in multiple medical opinions that Todd passed from this life without pain and struggle as suggested by the condition of his body after death.
Sadness for losing anyone, especially someone whose very life to some extent is in the hands of a caregiver, does not linger. In its own time, sadness yields to a bittersweet memory that is neither sad nor uplifting but is “something else” that is bearable.
The caregiver has also learned what not to say to anyone working through grief, taught by well-intentioned but perhaps socially awkward or inept friends and acquaintances:
1) Do not suggest, “It’s time to get back to your life.”
2) Do not presume, “I know what you’re going through.”
3) Do not ever bring up anything about relationships, chiefly that “you need to get out there
and meet people and maybe find someone.”
4) Do not say that it “must be a relief” not having to carry out the functions of caregiver
5) Do not ask how death came in the final minutes and seconds.
In the case of Todd’s caregiver, his journey through grief is somewhat complicated but not crippled by two other factors: the death 4 1/2 months earlier of a younger sister from breast cancer, a loss he couldn’t confront because he could not leave Todd alone long enough to drive two-thirds of a state away for the funeral; and, second, the caregiver is a recovering alcoholic whose history of drinking is based on the idea that booze makes anything better.
The first has been the more difficult to reconcile, the second less so probably because the caregiver’s history with alcoholism has firmly embedded in him the certainty that a whiskey bottle isn’t packaged with comfort but the promise of deeper despair and even death.
He is also keenly aware of symptoms that suggest clinical depression that may require medical treatment. But men remain notoriously resistant to professional help. The motivation to get it may well rest in the fact that no one, not the most supportive loved ones or friends, can travel the road any other person walks. A reluctance to get help with that journey, an intensely private and personalized one, is guaranteed to make the journey lonelier and desperate, even to self-destruction.
A grief counselor wrote in a published professional booklet that the prime difference in how men and women grieve is that women fall into the past and grieve the loss of what once was, and men grieve by looking into the future and mourn the loss of what will never again be. Neither is applicable for Todd’s caregiver. His recovery from grief rests in objective logic rather than subjective emotions, that is that he may have been an effective caregiver based on medical opinion and the person he tended to probably transitioned from this life to the next fully prepared mentally and spiritually, without pain, struggle and fear.
Above all, Todd’s caregiver holds onto an attitude of gratitude rather than mourning a loss, gratitude that he had the experience of caregiver for 5 1/2 years and gratitude for the example of faith, strength, courage and integrity that Todd exhibited throughout his illness. Gratitude may well be the strongest form of remembering and respecting that and who have gone.
One day at a time.
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Photo credit: Pixabay