After a year-long struggle with complications after an extremely aggressive cancer surgery, Dad died early this morning. (Note to self: if you have a mass in your abdomen the size of a 3rd-trimester fetus, and your doctors’ responses are along the lines of “Fatigue and shortness of breath? You’re 81 years old, and you just had a hip replacement a few months ago and you’re asthmatic,” maybe be a little pushier about making them order imaging. It turned out to be a 20-pound malignant tumor.)
I am full of mixed emotions. Like when my grandmother died, I am in get-shit-done mode and it probably won’t really hit for months. Oddly, my parents have been divorced for more than 40 years, but Mom called and wants to sit shivah for him, because as she explained it, she wouldn’t have been a mother without him. I think we should just time-shift Mother’s Day, because nobody is in the mood.
Currently waiting to hear when the funeral will be (the family is all in NY/NJ and I am 700 miles away). It may be the slowest Jewish funeral I have ever heard of; apparently the crematorium is booked up, so the funeral may not be until Thursday or Friday. As Dad would say, people are dying to get in there.
It’s crazy to think that I should even try to work at all this week, regardless of when the funeral is - right? Not sure when I will fly out to NJ if the funeral won’t be for several days. I imagine we will stay with one of my cousins, and they are all working and I don’t want to be in their hair for a week.
I probably shouldn’t even try to figure any of this out until I actually know when the funeral will be…hoping for sooner rather than later for all kinds of reasons. Not that my dad was a religious person (thus the cremation), but it’s still weird to me to wait several days for a funeral.
Yeah, I feel more for my much younger half-brother, who lost his mother to COVID in April 2020. Dad dropped her at the door of Mt. Sinai Hospital and they never saw her again. I think Mother’s Day will always suck for him, even if he ever has kids of his own.
I read about these kinds of large tumors on occasion, but I simply cannot imagine carrying one inside me. I’m very sorry you lost your father today. My father passed away several years ago, and when my mother goes, I imagine I’ll need a few more days than the bereavement leave at work will get me. If you need the whole week and can take it, why not? Take care of yourself.
My mother had a tumor the size of a grapefruit on her kidney. She told her doctors she felt “a little bit pregnant” and they Pooh poohed her, until it was imaged many years later. It was benign, though.
I am pretty sure I do need the whole week, and I do get 5 days of bereavement leave. But a) work is insanely busy and we have a new person starting tomorrow morning; and b) I don’t want to hang my boss out to dry because he does actually need the help and he is a decent person.
And there is really nobody else to cover for me while I am out. The new person will have a few days of training before she is actually producing work. But I know my brain is simply not functioning properly, either. And I have a vacation trip over Memorial Day weekend and the following week which we booked months ago, and which I really do need to take…I just feel badly for being out that much. I know it really can’t be helped, but still. If I weren’t feeling guilty, I’d be betraying my ethnic heritage!
I’m very sorry for your loss. May him memory be a blessing to you.
Yes, of course it’s crazy to work this week. And if it’s more than a day or two until the funeral, you should sit shiva now, and just take off enough time to do what needs to be done regarding the funeral. The idea of waiting is that there really is practical stuff you need to do right away, but the time when you need to mourn, and when you need your friends to gather around you, is now-ish, not after the funeral.
My brother and aunt and cousins are local to the funeral and are taking care of the logistical stuff. All I need to do myself for the moment is pack and get myself on an airplane. I am sure I will need to make one or more future trips to deal with Dad’s apartment, but that will be later.
Yes. If you ask people about me at work, a word you’ll hear a lot is “calm.” And despite being what is considered calm and level-headed, I absolutely was in no shape to work immediately following my parents’ deaths. You’re not going to be in the right frame of mind to make a positive contribution to on-boarding the new person, so be kind to yourself and don’t even try.
When my dad died I didn’t work the day immediately after, but I did work the next couple days until I left for the memorial service. It gave me something to do while waiting to leave other than go crazy and bounce off the walls. Fortunately, the work I had at the time did not require a lot of thought or concentration, if it had I might have chosen to bounce off the walls instead. Other times when I had a death in the family I took off work until the travel/memorial was over.
Do whatever works for you.
Although I’d suggest not doing any overly complicated work, even if you seem OK you’ll almost certainly be distracted.
I think I will take tomorrow off for sure and do some gardening. I just don’t have any focus and really haven’t in weeks because I knew this was coming. Weeding is about the level of intellectual exertion that I am up for right now.
I am so sorry for your loss. Losing one’s parents is a blow, no matter how foreseeable or their age when they go.
I’m glad you are taking time to take care of yourself. Grief takes its own time. If there is any comfort this place can offer for you, I hope you will use it liberally.
My mom had multiple appointments with her doctor who said her coughing, purple skin, sudden incontinence, weightloss etc were also “just normal signs of aging”.
It was her rheumatologist who picked up on her cancer. He asked her one question “do you get full fast or do you not have an appetite?”. She told him she got full fast and he immediately made a call to have her get a scan and blood work. Sure enough - cancer.
