What now seems like an ice age ago, someone said to me "What if your father dies and you never confront him – how do you think that you'd feel?"
It hit me like a mac truck..
Well, thanks a fucking lot buddy!! I became obsessed – I had dreams of standing over a deep grave – peering down into it saying "Um, excuse me, um I just had a few questions".
At this juncture I hadn't spoken to my father in 4 years or so and actually had no idea if in fact he was still upright – with a pulse. I gradually became a stalker. The 5 hour time difference between America and the UK meant that when I got home from work and worked up the nerve to call his house… I would wake him from his trouble free slumber… he would answer the phone disorientated…listening to him repeat his greeting over and over – I would feel re-assured that the prick was in fact still with us on the planet and then I'd hang up.
Eventually there was a 6 hour international telephone call – which took care of my needing to know whether dude was still breathing or not. That is a whole other story and not the one I'm here to tell. How the frig is it relevant then, you may ask…? It was the source of and prodded many conversations over the years about the regret of not saying stuff to people before they take that final leap from the physical world to the great spiritual beyond.
There were varied threads:
Not telling people how much you loved them or how important they had been to you
Apologizing for things you had done or said that were less than gracious
Utter remorse for that last stupid argument (which of course you didn't mean)
Abject guilt for cutting someone out of your life over something petty
Not having the balls or the opportunity to confront difficult relationships or difficult events that ultimately were left with no closure
I think it was an Oprah show… some chick crying into her Kleenex needing some peace between her and her mother. The therapist suggested she write a letter which she could read at her mothers' graveside – she could even bury it right there if she felt moved to do so. Flash – the show- Forward 6 months. Like the 1-800 Jenny commercials, this woman looked like a different person – happy, calm and confident. Wow!! This chick had been able to let go of the pain that was holding her life in a vice grip – just by sending her dead mother a letter…. Damn near genius, I thought!!
You pretty much get the jist of my topic, right? Ok…. The series of events began with a premonition.
I awoke from a horrendous dream in which I am dry heaving; choking… tiny white things are flying from my lips with every stomach spasm. Amidst my dream vomiting I am also sobbing uncontrollably.
The choking and heaving stay in the dream world… the sobbing however, yeah I bring that one through the doorway with me.
I frantically woke up my girlfriend with sobbing pleas… "I need the phone, please get me the phone, please…Oh my god". To her credit – she would never judge, she accepted that it was not a choice for me, it was (and is) a driving compulsion to act.
She ran downstairs to get the phone and in those brief moments I took stock of my physical state. My throat was raw, my stomach was cramped and sore – the physical sensation was as if I had been throwing up for hours and tiny fragments of glass had been stuck in my throat.
Have you ever gotten a potato chip stuck in your throat? The one with the nasty broken pointed edge sticking right into your esophagus? Holy "enough said" Batman!
I call my mother in England. It came as no surprise to me, that she answered the phone immediately as if she had been expecting my call…. In fact, she had been expecting something and couldn't sleep.
My rush of breath comes out urgent and demanding
Me:
"What happened?"
Mum:
"I didn't want to wake you"
Me:
"Ma, what happened, something happened"
Mum:
"It's my mother, it's Kate… she has cancer"
With those words the power of the dream slipped away, as always - once I have the answer it's grip releases me. I whisper down the phone line, across continents and oceans to a woman who didn't want to wake me but had unknowingly sent the bat signal into my sleep.
"Oh, mum… I'm so sorry"
I explained my dream in its few details. My mother filled me in on the rest. My grandmother had cancer in her stomach, her esophagus and one other place. She had been vomiting repeatedly and that day had been eating nothing but white rice – trying to keep something in her stomach. No symbolism to misinterpret there… it was a pretty straight forward translation.
The problem with diagnoses like cancer is that the grieving begins with the results. Once they say it's fatal, you and your loved ones now have a measured amount of time until the patient passes. Family members project how they are going to feel with the loss and start grieving there and then or they get very business like and want to take a good run at wrapping up affairs that may get messy later. Either way the process sucks…
In my experience, death can come at you out of nowhere. We are all on a measured amount of time and the beauty is… we don't know what that is. If the response is to grieve whilst the person is still living – should we not then grieve for every person around us? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow – so if you'd like to send me flowers today… I would love that!! (I am such a flower whore).
My mother is the eldest of four children, three girls and one boy. Her Mother was cold, stoic and didn't like kids much. Did I say much? I meant to say, she couldn't stand kids … any of them… yours… hers… it really didn't matter. She cared very little for being a mother and even less for being a grandmother. The mothering responsibilities for her own brood fell onto my mothers shoulders. If household chores did not measure up to her standards, there would be hell to pay. All four children were terrified of this iron fisted matriarch.
Don't get me wrong, Kate is a huge part of why we are all the women we are today. She is an icon that I could write movies about. Later in life, she lived an avant-garde lifestyle; a jet setter living among millionaires on the Costa Del Sol, Spain. She was as infamous as she was glamorous. She was also controlling and manipulative.
The fear and control carried over into adulthood, they were all uniquely affected. It seemed that there were times, for no other reason than her own entertainment or perhaps a deep seated resentment, she pitted sibling against sibling; parent against child and child against parent. She was not a joy to be around at family gatherings.
Desperate to be a part of the fabulous four, I was raised as an only child and wanted in on their tight knit sibling club. Being the eldest of my generation I took on an almost peer role within theirs. They never excluded me from family discussions, no matter the severity or adult nature of the topic. I would listen and absorb whatever situation everyone was currently up in arms about and invariably my uncle would turn and say "Let's see what Nik thinks about all this", all eyes would turn to me and I would be given the floor. Honored, I would weigh out the neutrality of the issue and give advice removing as many of my own personal biases as possible.
Kate didn't have the same effect on me as she did on her first generation offspring– so in those matters – I was able to step back and see a broader view of situations. They were simply incapable of standing up to her. I was, however, fiercely protective of them when it came to interactions with their mother. I refused to play her game and I refused to be in fear of her. I had fears even she couldn't compete with. She and I played a hard core game of offense and defense – we didn't speak for seven years – though in some strange way we had a tenacious mutual respect for each other. In later years she proudly announced that I was more like her than anyone else in the family…. It's a declaration I bear willingly.
The news that she had a terminal cancer rocked my family. A powerful figurehead, this tower of a woman who on a whim could cause a civil war, this woman could not die. It was unfathomable.
It's often harder to lose someone with whom you have a troubled relationship versus someone with whom you have had a loving relationship.
Our family gatherings were consumed with a pendulum of emotions from anger to threats of peeing on her grave. It wasn't pretty. These people were shell-shocked and had no idea how to handle it. When the news broke that she planned to move from Spain back to England it was ill- received. No-one wanted her trouble making presence to become a constant and all shuddered at the thought of caring for her. Sound awful? Not really, it was simply adult children freaking out about losing a mother they never really had. I knew it was going to be a long road.
During an evening of volatile emotions, my uncle turns to me and says "Let's see what Nik thinks"… If I could only turn back time I may have gotten up to use the bathroom at that exact moment or maybe just have pled that I was sick and needed to lie down – excusing myself from the whole affair. I didn't do either of those things…I threw out the line that had been thrown out to me, I said…
"What if your mother dies and you never confront her – how do you think you'd feel?"
I asked each of them to visualize themselves standing graveside.
"Look inside yourself. Do you have things you wish you had said or questions you wish you had answers to?"
They got kinda quiet (a miracle in itself), they all agreed there were things they had carried with them for years.
"This is your opportunity to say anything you have been afraid to say before. You have been given a gift. You have been given time to heal old wounds and develop a relationship with your mother so that you can hopefully spend time loving her and not harboring resentments"
I had their full attention and so I ran with it.
"My suggestion is that you each write her a letter, you don't even have to send it. It can be between you and her when she passes or you can confront your fear and actually try to have a real relationship with her"
They all bought the idea and this became the new obsession. All but one sibling decided to write a letter. It sounded like good advice at the time, besides why would anyone listen to me… what do I know?
Kate moved to England and began to give away her belongings. Fur coats, jewelry, ornaments, memorabilia… all of it. She gave it away, not generously but in more of an underhand game fashion that created trouble and tension between her children.
Hospice registered her as a client and she received hospice benefits from the government. Medically, she was under going treatments on the long shot that her aggressive cancer may respond to extend her life expectancy even just a little.
From three of her children she received emotional letters addressing issues of the past. The exact contents of these letters remain a mystery but we could take an educated guess and surmise that it wasn't all sunshine and roses. The letters were not well received.
The three authors were written out of her will.
It was ugly. Not my best work for sure. Despite the fall-out from the postal deliveries, her kids still came around and they all continued on. They now had another unspoken wound to add to the heap, the unacknowledged letters of adult children who really just wanted to feel their mothers love. She was a tough old bird and Leopards do not change their spots, even if they think they are dying. She had everyone jumping at her beck and call. The letters asking for closure were added to the weapons arsenal; it exposed the vulnerable underbellies of the writers and gave her a powerful tool to use against them. If their original fears weren't enough – they now had this new self imposed twist.
Trying to support my strategy and not negate the outcome completely, I re-assured my mother that at least she would not regret the things she hadn't said – even though right in that moment she was regretting the things she had said. I convinced her she would feel differently once her mother had passed.
Then the bomb dropped.
Kate went to her doctors for a progress report and sat across the desk from men scratching their heads…. My mother called me at home…
"It's gone"
"What's gone?"
"The cancer is gone"
"Where has it gone?"
"I don't know, it's just bloody gone"
"Holy shit, what does that mean?"
"It means there's been a bloody miracle and they can't explain it"
"But she's in hospice"
"Not anymore, she's going home and she wants all her stuff back"
"What?"
"She called everyone and asked for her stuff back"
I began to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation. Of course her cancer was gone – had any of us met her? She was cured. The doctors were amazed and they couldn't find any trace of the cancer they had predicted would kill her in just 6-12 months.
She was gonna be just fine, which was great news except for the fact that now she was really pissed off!!
I considered our options… ok there really weren't any. We all just sucked it up and tried to make nice pretending it had never happened; after all she was the queen of ignoring the looming white elephant. My last hope was that she's had enough of England and would go back to Spain – giving everyone a little breathing room.
The cancer did come back a couple of years later, this time it took her with it. There was no talk of healing childhood wounds and shit, everyone just got on with the job of caring for her and spending time with her. She was a trouble causer to the very end and actually managed to create some family cracks after the funeral was done and dusted. Her antics were viewed as par for the course and didn't anger everyone as much as they had historically. It all became kinda funny… beware of what you say or do, this lady may not be headed out the door anytime soon!
I learned some seriously valuable lessons from these events. These are a couple that stand out:
Painful childhood memories don't compare to the pain you could currently be feeling - so it may be better to keep your big mouth shut!
If someone terminal gives you something, don't get attached and be prepared to give it back.
If you want to write a letter to gain closure, do like the Oprah chick did and read it to the sleeping spirit of the person once they have reached eternity– she seemed much happier with the outcome.
It hit me like a mac truck..
Well, thanks a fucking lot buddy!! I became obsessed – I had dreams of standing over a deep grave – peering down into it saying "Um, excuse me, um I just had a few questions".
At this juncture I hadn't spoken to my father in 4 years or so and actually had no idea if in fact he was still upright – with a pulse. I gradually became a stalker. The 5 hour time difference between America and the UK meant that when I got home from work and worked up the nerve to call his house… I would wake him from his trouble free slumber… he would answer the phone disorientated…listening to him repeat his greeting over and over – I would feel re-assured that the prick was in fact still with us on the planet and then I'd hang up.
Eventually there was a 6 hour international telephone call – which took care of my needing to know whether dude was still breathing or not. That is a whole other story and not the one I'm here to tell. How the frig is it relevant then, you may ask…? It was the source of and prodded many conversations over the years about the regret of not saying stuff to people before they take that final leap from the physical world to the great spiritual beyond.
There were varied threads:
Not telling people how much you loved them or how important they had been to you
Apologizing for things you had done or said that were less than gracious
Utter remorse for that last stupid argument (which of course you didn't mean)
Abject guilt for cutting someone out of your life over something petty
Not having the balls or the opportunity to confront difficult relationships or difficult events that ultimately were left with no closure
I think it was an Oprah show… some chick crying into her Kleenex needing some peace between her and her mother. The therapist suggested she write a letter which she could read at her mothers' graveside – she could even bury it right there if she felt moved to do so. Flash – the show- Forward 6 months. Like the 1-800 Jenny commercials, this woman looked like a different person – happy, calm and confident. Wow!! This chick had been able to let go of the pain that was holding her life in a vice grip – just by sending her dead mother a letter…. Damn near genius, I thought!!
You pretty much get the jist of my topic, right? Ok…. The series of events began with a premonition.
I awoke from a horrendous dream in which I am dry heaving; choking… tiny white things are flying from my lips with every stomach spasm. Amidst my dream vomiting I am also sobbing uncontrollably.
The choking and heaving stay in the dream world… the sobbing however, yeah I bring that one through the doorway with me.
I frantically woke up my girlfriend with sobbing pleas… "I need the phone, please get me the phone, please…Oh my god". To her credit – she would never judge, she accepted that it was not a choice for me, it was (and is) a driving compulsion to act.
She ran downstairs to get the phone and in those brief moments I took stock of my physical state. My throat was raw, my stomach was cramped and sore – the physical sensation was as if I had been throwing up for hours and tiny fragments of glass had been stuck in my throat.
Have you ever gotten a potato chip stuck in your throat? The one with the nasty broken pointed edge sticking right into your esophagus? Holy "enough said" Batman!
I call my mother in England. It came as no surprise to me, that she answered the phone immediately as if she had been expecting my call…. In fact, she had been expecting something and couldn't sleep.
My rush of breath comes out urgent and demanding
Me:
"What happened?"
Mum:
"I didn't want to wake you"
Me:
"Ma, what happened, something happened"
Mum:
"It's my mother, it's Kate… she has cancer"
With those words the power of the dream slipped away, as always - once I have the answer it's grip releases me. I whisper down the phone line, across continents and oceans to a woman who didn't want to wake me but had unknowingly sent the bat signal into my sleep.
"Oh, mum… I'm so sorry"
I explained my dream in its few details. My mother filled me in on the rest. My grandmother had cancer in her stomach, her esophagus and one other place. She had been vomiting repeatedly and that day had been eating nothing but white rice – trying to keep something in her stomach. No symbolism to misinterpret there… it was a pretty straight forward translation.
The problem with diagnoses like cancer is that the grieving begins with the results. Once they say it's fatal, you and your loved ones now have a measured amount of time until the patient passes. Family members project how they are going to feel with the loss and start grieving there and then or they get very business like and want to take a good run at wrapping up affairs that may get messy later. Either way the process sucks…
In my experience, death can come at you out of nowhere. We are all on a measured amount of time and the beauty is… we don't know what that is. If the response is to grieve whilst the person is still living – should we not then grieve for every person around us? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow – so if you'd like to send me flowers today… I would love that!! (I am such a flower whore).
My mother is the eldest of four children, three girls and one boy. Her Mother was cold, stoic and didn't like kids much. Did I say much? I meant to say, she couldn't stand kids … any of them… yours… hers… it really didn't matter. She cared very little for being a mother and even less for being a grandmother. The mothering responsibilities for her own brood fell onto my mothers shoulders. If household chores did not measure up to her standards, there would be hell to pay. All four children were terrified of this iron fisted matriarch.
Don't get me wrong, Kate is a huge part of why we are all the women we are today. She is an icon that I could write movies about. Later in life, she lived an avant-garde lifestyle; a jet setter living among millionaires on the Costa Del Sol, Spain. She was as infamous as she was glamorous. She was also controlling and manipulative.
The fear and control carried over into adulthood, they were all uniquely affected. It seemed that there were times, for no other reason than her own entertainment or perhaps a deep seated resentment, she pitted sibling against sibling; parent against child and child against parent. She was not a joy to be around at family gatherings.
Desperate to be a part of the fabulous four, I was raised as an only child and wanted in on their tight knit sibling club. Being the eldest of my generation I took on an almost peer role within theirs. They never excluded me from family discussions, no matter the severity or adult nature of the topic. I would listen and absorb whatever situation everyone was currently up in arms about and invariably my uncle would turn and say "Let's see what Nik thinks about all this", all eyes would turn to me and I would be given the floor. Honored, I would weigh out the neutrality of the issue and give advice removing as many of my own personal biases as possible.
Kate didn't have the same effect on me as she did on her first generation offspring– so in those matters – I was able to step back and see a broader view of situations. They were simply incapable of standing up to her. I was, however, fiercely protective of them when it came to interactions with their mother. I refused to play her game and I refused to be in fear of her. I had fears even she couldn't compete with. She and I played a hard core game of offense and defense – we didn't speak for seven years – though in some strange way we had a tenacious mutual respect for each other. In later years she proudly announced that I was more like her than anyone else in the family…. It's a declaration I bear willingly.
The news that she had a terminal cancer rocked my family. A powerful figurehead, this tower of a woman who on a whim could cause a civil war, this woman could not die. It was unfathomable.
It's often harder to lose someone with whom you have a troubled relationship versus someone with whom you have had a loving relationship.
Our family gatherings were consumed with a pendulum of emotions from anger to threats of peeing on her grave. It wasn't pretty. These people were shell-shocked and had no idea how to handle it. When the news broke that she planned to move from Spain back to England it was ill- received. No-one wanted her trouble making presence to become a constant and all shuddered at the thought of caring for her. Sound awful? Not really, it was simply adult children freaking out about losing a mother they never really had. I knew it was going to be a long road.
During an evening of volatile emotions, my uncle turns to me and says "Let's see what Nik thinks"… If I could only turn back time I may have gotten up to use the bathroom at that exact moment or maybe just have pled that I was sick and needed to lie down – excusing myself from the whole affair. I didn't do either of those things…I threw out the line that had been thrown out to me, I said…
"What if your mother dies and you never confront her – how do you think you'd feel?"
I asked each of them to visualize themselves standing graveside.
"Look inside yourself. Do you have things you wish you had said or questions you wish you had answers to?"
They got kinda quiet (a miracle in itself), they all agreed there were things they had carried with them for years.
"This is your opportunity to say anything you have been afraid to say before. You have been given a gift. You have been given time to heal old wounds and develop a relationship with your mother so that you can hopefully spend time loving her and not harboring resentments"
I had their full attention and so I ran with it.
"My suggestion is that you each write her a letter, you don't even have to send it. It can be between you and her when she passes or you can confront your fear and actually try to have a real relationship with her"
They all bought the idea and this became the new obsession. All but one sibling decided to write a letter. It sounded like good advice at the time, besides why would anyone listen to me… what do I know?
Kate moved to England and began to give away her belongings. Fur coats, jewelry, ornaments, memorabilia… all of it. She gave it away, not generously but in more of an underhand game fashion that created trouble and tension between her children.
Hospice registered her as a client and she received hospice benefits from the government. Medically, she was under going treatments on the long shot that her aggressive cancer may respond to extend her life expectancy even just a little.
From three of her children she received emotional letters addressing issues of the past. The exact contents of these letters remain a mystery but we could take an educated guess and surmise that it wasn't all sunshine and roses. The letters were not well received.
The three authors were written out of her will.
It was ugly. Not my best work for sure. Despite the fall-out from the postal deliveries, her kids still came around and they all continued on. They now had another unspoken wound to add to the heap, the unacknowledged letters of adult children who really just wanted to feel their mothers love. She was a tough old bird and Leopards do not change their spots, even if they think they are dying. She had everyone jumping at her beck and call. The letters asking for closure were added to the weapons arsenal; it exposed the vulnerable underbellies of the writers and gave her a powerful tool to use against them. If their original fears weren't enough – they now had this new self imposed twist.
Trying to support my strategy and not negate the outcome completely, I re-assured my mother that at least she would not regret the things she hadn't said – even though right in that moment she was regretting the things she had said. I convinced her she would feel differently once her mother had passed.
Then the bomb dropped.
Kate went to her doctors for a progress report and sat across the desk from men scratching their heads…. My mother called me at home…
"It's gone"
"What's gone?"
"The cancer is gone"
"Where has it gone?"
"I don't know, it's just bloody gone"
"Holy shit, what does that mean?"
"It means there's been a bloody miracle and they can't explain it"
"But she's in hospice"
"Not anymore, she's going home and she wants all her stuff back"
"What?"
"She called everyone and asked for her stuff back"
I began to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation. Of course her cancer was gone – had any of us met her? She was cured. The doctors were amazed and they couldn't find any trace of the cancer they had predicted would kill her in just 6-12 months.
She was gonna be just fine, which was great news except for the fact that now she was really pissed off!!
I considered our options… ok there really weren't any. We all just sucked it up and tried to make nice pretending it had never happened; after all she was the queen of ignoring the looming white elephant. My last hope was that she's had enough of England and would go back to Spain – giving everyone a little breathing room.
The cancer did come back a couple of years later, this time it took her with it. There was no talk of healing childhood wounds and shit, everyone just got on with the job of caring for her and spending time with her. She was a trouble causer to the very end and actually managed to create some family cracks after the funeral was done and dusted. Her antics were viewed as par for the course and didn't anger everyone as much as they had historically. It all became kinda funny… beware of what you say or do, this lady may not be headed out the door anytime soon!
I learned some seriously valuable lessons from these events. These are a couple that stand out:
Painful childhood memories don't compare to the pain you could currently be feeling - so it may be better to keep your big mouth shut!
If someone terminal gives you something, don't get attached and be prepared to give it back.
If you want to write a letter to gain closure, do like the Oprah chick did and read it to the sleeping spirit of the person once they have reached eternity– she seemed much happier with the outcome.
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hi, new to the site, thanks.
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