complicated grief

I lingered at the hospital with my two sisters, my brother and my mom not really knowing what to do or say when my father was dying. He was an alcoholic and had been quite verbally abusive throughout the last two decades of his life. The father I knew was a very difficult person to love; not because he was unlovable, but because he found it impossible to receive love.

Illustrations © Barbara J Holzapfel

As the baby of the family, I was the one who lived with him longest during those years. Because my other three siblings knew him mostly as an engaged, loving father, before he was twisted from drinking, they experienced a profound and confusing loss many years before he actually died. For the last twenty years of his life his older children resented, not only who he became, but also the unnecessary loss of the dad they knew and loved. I, on the other hand, only really knew the alcoholic version of my father, so it was easier for me to love him for who he had become, the father I knew him to be, in spite of his mean, hurtful behaviour.

When he finally left this earth on that warm August morning I experienced a different flavour of grief than that of my siblings. While they mourned the loss of the 'concept' of having a father, I mourned the man himself. Many years earlier their anger had shepherd them through their grief of loosing the loving father they knew. My dad's death bed was the place and time of final farewell for me and when my grief of losing my father officially began.