What Whiskey to Drink When Your Dad Dies

My father died last month.

I was there for it. I was in the room with him when it happened. He was in hospice care for a couple days that slowly and silently turned into a month. Daily vigil to make sure he wasn’t alone when it happened. His end was foregone and inevitable, as hospice care is. But knowing it was coming didn’t make it hurt any less when it came.

I’m now an orphan. You wouldn’t think that that would feel like a thing at age 60, but it does. Yes, I’m as surprised by this as you are. To be honest, I feel like my roots have been ripped out of the ground.

I have a stepmother who I’ve known my entire adult life. I love her dearly. She has been a calm, positive presence for decades. She and my father had one of the most devoted marriages I’ve ever seen. For 44 years. I can’t imagine what she’s going through, but I’m glad she’s still with us and hope it stays that way for a long time to come.

But having both of my biological parents gone feels…disjointing. I feel disconnected now from my past somehow. Like some sort of continuity has been broken, but I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what was continuing or why. My father was an only child, so I have no extended family there. And for reasons unknown to me my mother’s side of the family cut us off for good before I even started kindergarten. I don’t know why that half of my family cut us off for my entire life, but I do know that the people who did know the answer to this question have now all passed away. Every single one of them is gone now. My father was the last one who knew, and he wouldn’t talk about it. Not even on his deathbed.

Taking secrets to the grave isn’t just a Hollywood plot construct. It apparently happens in real life. My life. And I don’t like the finality of never knowing the answer to this question, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Nobody wanted to talk, and now they can’t talk. I suppose I’ll have to figure out how to live with that.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once famously wrote “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”. I can only assume that my father was trying to be a loving dad by buffering me from what was likely a very unpleasant truth. Because I think it’s safe to assume that good news doesn’t get taken willingly to the grave.

DEATH IS A SWIFT ACUTE HURT FOLLOWED BY A LINGERING, ETHEREAL PERMANENCE

A parent passing away is a point-in-time event. If you were with them when it happened, it is jarring and forceful and immediate. If you weren’t there when it happened, then you got that phone call from someone and it punched you in the gut and shrunk the boundaries of your world forever into something smaller than it was. However you experienced it, the pain of that point-in-time event is acute, razor sharp and serrated.

The permanence of the loss, on the other hand… the permanence is sly and subtle.

The permanence of a death quietly slips into your head at unexpected times in unexpected ways after you go back to your “normal” life. Sunday mornings I’ll be sipping coffee and still think to myself “gotta call dad today”. Something good will happen and I catch myself wanting to tell him about it. Our clothes dryer wouldn’t start recently, and my first thought was to ask my dad what to look at first. Then a quick involuntary breath grabs the back of my throat. Every time. Because I remember he’s not here anymore, and I wonder how long I’m going to keep catching myself thinking that he is. To be honest, I’ve properly processed the point-in-time event. And I am uneasily aware that the permanence will continue sneaking up on me in the coming days, weeks, years. Maybe forever.

MOURNING IS A TIME FOR BEING, NOT DOING

People who care about you want to help when you’re mourning a loss of this magnitude, but most don’t know what to do or what to say. Because it’s hard. Its discomforting and provocative. Someone actually dying challenges and reminds us that none of us – not one single one of us – is getting out of this life alive. And when we have those brief moments when we are aware with stark clarity that our time in this life is limited, that everyone and everything we’ve ever known will no longer exist one day… that’s a lonely thing to look at.

Our culture is weird about death. We don’t know how to process it, we don’t know how to talk about it. Death spooks people in that way that people who swear they aren’t superstitious will look at you when you break a mirror or walk under a ladder or boldly claim that there’s no way it’s going to rain today. A flash of panic shoots through their eyes that exposes a primitive, irrational fear that bad luck – like death – is contagious if you happen to get too near to it.

So what ends up happening is that some people who sincerely care about you simply say nothing.

If I’m being candid, I’m kinda surprised and a little disappointed by some of the people I didn’t hear from during the four weeks of hospice vigil or after. Some of them who I thought were my inner circle, my “ride or die” folks. They weren’t there for me this time when I was drowning and really needed their strength to lean on while I tried to steer myself through this. Just like we’d been there for each other through other kinds of life crises. But death is a different kind of crisis. I’m trying to navigate how the foundations those relationships are going to be different after this. Or maybe the reality is that those relationships weren’t really what I thought they were.

I was sharing this inner conflict with a good friend of mine recently who gave me some sage advice:

“Questions are a super power,” she said, “Ask these people why they didn’t reach out or respond to you. Ask them why they prioritized their discomfort with death over their desire to support you. Give them a chance to explain, a chance to explore this question with you.”

Cuz that’s what it is, right? Its not that they didn’t care or didn’t want to provide support. Its that they made the choice to avoid their own discomfort over choosing to be there with me in mine. Two values conflicted, and they had to chose one, so they did, consciously nor not. Not with any malice or bad intent or apathy. But simply having to chose from one of two uncomfortable options, and choosing one.

Conversely, I was equally surprised by some of the people at the margins of my life who stepped forward and made themselves present. Not in the sense of offering unsolicited Hallmark card advice, but in terms of just being there. Coming from a common experience of having been through a similar loss themselves. What I’ve learned about mourning is that someone asking you “what can I do to help?” isn’t nearly as meaningful as getting a text that simply says “I’m thinking about you, you’re not alone.”

Because there’s nothing to “do” for someone when they’re mourning a death. You can only be present with it. You can’t un-dead somebody. There’s no Grief Checklist to run through where once all the boxes are ticked you stop feeling the pain of loss. All one can do is be present with someone who is suffering through this kind of loss.

This lesson will foundationally inform my own behavior going forward when people close to me lose someone they love. These beautiful, meaningful, authentic gestures that opened an opportunity for me to build a deeper relationship with someone I know but don’t know. Clearly these are relationships worth investing more time in.

FEAR OF DEATH IS NOT THE SAME THING AS MOURNING.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote to his friend Menoecus:

“This death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us. So long as we are here, death is not. And when death is here, we are not.”

If we’re being frank with ourselves “fear of death” is (really) about fear of our own death. But mourning… well… that’s all about someone else’s death. It’s easy to confuse the two – fear of death vs mourning – to project our own fears about dying onto the mourning of someone else dying. In the emotional swirl it’s easy to mash them together. But they are not the same thing.

You probably fear your own death. Most of us do. Or at least we fear how we’re going to die. Nobody aspires to die in a burning building or by drowning in a lake or by succumbing after months of a painful, painful cancer. I think most of us hope to die quietly in our sleep. To die the most uneventful, drama-free death imaginable. But as Epicurus so deftly pointed out to his friend: there’s nothing to fear about our own death cuz we’re not gonna be here to see it.

WHEN DOES THE MOURNING END?

Where to go from here? I’m sitting with a bitter, sometimes suffocating, loss. Some mornings I wake up and emotionally feel like someone has covered me in warm, wet towels on a hot, humid day. On days like this the presence of the loss is heavy and suffocating. But in my head I know the pain and the hurt and the sadness will eventually ebb. It only requires time and grace to heal from this. Time to let the happy memories gradually slip themselves one by one back into the room to balance out the sadness. Grace to cut myself and others some slack while I’m navigating the riptide of painful emotions.

The pain can feel energizing and empowering for a while. It can prod and provoke us to make changes in our life, bring our chosen priorities into sharper focus, really put our time and money where our mouth is. But when the emotional pain becomes overly familiar, when its utility has run its course, it leads to feeling hollow and empty. Pain’s gift is in its potential to be a catalyst for growth. But that same pain needs to be released once it is no longer serving us well. When it’s no longer pushing us forward but becomes instead a comfortable buffer from participating fully in our own lives.

That’s the trick of it, I think: to embrace it while it is a provocation that pushes us towards a better version of ourselves on the other side of it, but to let it go before it becomes an anchor that drowns us in a past that doesn’t exist anymore. That’s a delicate timing, the letting go. None of us is probably going to get it right the first time. Maybe not the first few times. That’s where the grace comes in, the grace to be kind to ourselves while we try to figure this out.

What whiskey to drink while mourning the passing of my father? None really. He wasn’t much of a drinker, so it wouldn’t be any sort of homage to him. And its not my style to drink when I’m unhappy or angry or sad. But for me my father’s death will forever be associated with his retirement to North Carolina, and I imagine that sometime down the road, whenever I’m having a sip of one of many, many fine whiskeys made in North Carolina I will a say a silent toast of sincere gratitude to the staff at the Kate B Reynolds Hospice Home who treated my father and my family with such compassion and kindness and respect in my father’s last days. My boundless appreciation.

Prost!