It was just two years ago this week that Dad moved from Central Florida to Denver to be closer to some of his family members. I think his second hospitalization for pneumonia that spring must have been the catalyst for his decision.
Bill and I were relieved that he was finally willing to make this change. We had grown more concerned about Dad’s increasing frailty and forgetfulness over the several years since the death of Elizabeth, his second wife, in 1999. We wanted to have more impact on his life and well being than we could from so far away.
Dad died about three and a half weeks ago. Along with the shock and the sadness, I feel as if I have suddenly emerged from a dense, pervasive fog that clouded my mind, preventing me from really knowing why I was feeling as I was throughout these last months of my father’s life. A recent post by Marty D of The Amazing Mind blog started me thinking about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her theory of the stages of grief as it might apply to my journey as a caregiver.
With the clarity of a little bit of hindsight, I am beginning to see the last two years as a slow and steady process of working through these stages of grief about the decline and inevitable death of my aging father. While we knew that Dad would die someday, I had thought of our caregiving task more in terms of his life and his well-being. Yet stronger forces were constellated—forces that determined the pathways I walked and the challenges I struggled to master; forces that inevitably shaped my responses and my feelings about what was happening.
Kubler-Ross’s first stage is Denial. In Marty D’s reworking of the stages specifically for caregivers, she calls it Delusion. I experienced this stage early on, even before my dad moved to Denver, while we were trying to find the best living situation for him here. I imagined leisurely lunches and elegant holiday meals in the dining rooms of the facilities we visited. I saw us attending lectures, concerts and opera performances together. I thought I might join him and his new friends at Happy Hour from time to time. I could see us at family gatherings and casual visits at his home and mine. In my imagination I was getting back a father I remembered from childhood and adolescence.
And we did do all of those things together, with the exception of Happy Hour–he gave up his evening cocktails the day he moved to Denver. But the festive meals, the opera, the visits and family gatherings were not as I had imagined them. His frailty and mild dementia seemed to make him a different man than the Old Dad I remembered, and the times we shared together were colored by worry and concern over his physical and mental disabilities.
In Part Two of Looking Back I’ll talk about my experience of the remaining four stages of grief.
