The Beginning of My Grief Journey

Grief is one of those emotions that you can never fully understand unless you have actually experienced it yourself. Of course one can always empathize with another’s grief during loss, but it never is quite the same until you have gone through the process on your own. There are many layers or depths of grief as well. For example, the grief I have experienced over the loss of a pet is different than what I felt when I had a miscarriage. That same miscarriage grief is also different from how I feel since losing my parents.

I used to consider myself lucky and had always been grateful for the fact that I had not not yet experienced much grief in my 37 years of being a soul on this planet. As previously stated, I’ve had several pets pass away over the years, went through a miscarriage and knew people who died but they were never anyone I was extremely close to at that point in my life. But, that all changed drastically July of 2020.

On July 6th, I received a phone call from my sister that our dad went into cardiac arrest and was in a medically induced coma. I had an urgent feeling in the pit of my stomach that I could not ignore no matter how hard I tried. I knew right away that I had to go be with my family (I live in Minnesota, while the rest of my family lives in Michigan.). We took off as fast as a family of 3 with 2 cats and a dog can pack up and eventually arrived at my sister’s super early the next morning.

We went to the hospital once visiting hours started. My mom updated us all and things weren’t looking good in dad’s favor. They had to delay some testing due to the process of him being in a coma. Once we got all the test results back later that morning, we basically had to make a decision as to whether or not we allowed my dad to stay in a coma and hope he wakes up. If he did, the amount of brain damage he had due to going into cardiac arrest and coding twice (basically his heart stopped two times since the initial cardiac arrest) was enough to leave him completely dependent on others for every aspect of his life. Or, we could take him off of the ventilator and other mechanical devices keeping him alive, give him medication to help with any pain he was in and let him die.

Thankfully, it wasn’t an agonizing decision for us because dad had already made his medical wishes known to all of us years prior. It didn’t take long after the machines were all turned off. Dad passed peacefully sounded by the few of us that were allowed to be in the room with him because of COVID-19 restrictions.

It all seemed to happen so fast. My family (my mom, brother and sister) and I had a difficult time understanding what had happened because in our minds, it was all such a blur. Unfortunately because of COVID, it was almost a week later that we could bury dad with his well deserved full military honors. So even though his death seemed to happen abruptly, getting through those next 6 days felt like walking around in a daze while time slowed still. Little did we know that Dad’s funeral would be the starting point of another lesson in loss for my family.

I’ll continue with more about the beginnings of my grief journey in my next post. Thank you for being here with me and reading this far. It is my prayer that those who need to find support during their time in coping with loss can find a spark of hope here. Even if it is only a mere spark of knowing they are not alone in their chasm of grief. We all grieve differently and in our own ways and timeframes, but we can always find support and love if we just take a moment to look around us. I am holding space while sending love and comfort to those of you who need it in this moment.