Rare Steak

I want to preface this and say that my best advice to someone handling death is to handle it however you want. That’s the advice I give everyone I bump into who is struggling with the sudden death of a loved one. People are going to judge you or make excuses for your actions or talk shit about whatever it is you’re doing/saying/existing about for the next 3 months to a year and a half so just so whatever it is you need to do to cope with this thing you’ve been handed. 

I thought I would take the time today to talk about my dad and put death into perspective for the people that are on the outside circle of someone who is dealing with it. Now, what’s that one phrase everyone robotically repeats to someone to try and console them when they are dealing with the death of a loved one? “Sorry for your loss”. This in actuality means “death makes me incredibly uncomfortable, I probably haven’t handled a death that truly affected me ever, I don’t know what to say and this is what I heard other people say. I am helping”. It means well. We can’t get mad at someone for not knowing how to help you (and themselves in such a terribly awkward and shitty situation) feel better. This is the best 90% of people can do. The other 10% get you drunk and let you make a fool of yourself for a night to feel better. Humans aren’t good with this shit. You can’t blame them. 

Now, my biggest pet peeve in the entire world is being interrupted, especially while telling a story. You can imagine how obnoxious it is to not only be interrupted telling a story, and not just a story, but a great story about my dad, and someone interrupt me with “sorry for your loss” as I’m balls deep in a story about my dead dad. Him being fucking dead has nothing to do with the story and you asked where he’s at! He’s dead; that’s a fact. What the fuck do you have to be sorry for? Lol, let me get on with the fucking story before you ruin it with your pissing and moaning and drag the whole emotional state of the room down. And it’s been like this for 14 years today. 

I often equate the death of a close family member at a young age to someone having a physical or mental illness. Handicaps, much like death, make us uncomfortable. We feel for that person, and unfortunately, it’s not with empathy; it’s with pity. When you’re having a bad day and you come into work late because of a break up followed by a flat tire followed by losing your wallet, what’s the most obnoxious thing in the world? Everyone’s fucking eyes on you walking in late and having to explain to every Chad, Sarah, and Becky the same nosy ass story again and again, when all you’d like to do is get into work and count down the hours ‘till lunch. You want to be treated normally. You don’t want to be treated like the girl in the wheelchair, the autistic kid who is great with animals, the girl without a dad. You’re never allowed to excel or have a breakdown because no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s because of this thing you carry with you.

I can tell you that people have blamed a lot of things on my dad passing away when I was young. But I have a great family - I have a mom and siblings, and a stepdad I’ve known and loved since I was 3 lol like your scorn is pathetic. My dad is the one who passed on a lot of the good and bad genetics that you’ve come to know and love as Kerry. I’m not saying I’d be this person, but a lot of the things people look onto with pity aren’t the simplistic nonsense you picked up touching things at Crate & Barrel. 

It took me a long time to understand the silver lining but it exists in all situations. I’ve been able to help a lot of people get through their nonsense, even if I, unfortunately, hurt a lot along the way. Death doesn’t have to be sad. Death is change and I think that’s why we all struggle with it, but it doesn’t have to be sad. I think about death all the time. And it makes me sad, but it doesn’t have to be sad. My dad was a stubborn guy and would always tell me this story about his few times a decade going to the doctor. His doctor would say “John if you stop smoking a pack of cigarettes a day (my dad smoked a pack of Reds a day, I used to hide my picture in the pack for him to quit, he’d sometimes tried with cinnamon gum), you’ll add five years to your life”. And my dad would reply and say “you know what doc, those five years I’ll probably be pissing and shitting myself in a home, so if you don’t mind, you can keep the five years”. Ironically enough, he didn’t die from anything smoking related at all, go figure. But anyway, death doesn’t have to be sad. My dad got everything he wanted out of life - he even lived to see the Red Sox finally win. He used to tell me sometimes he’d think about his ideal death, and it was to die peacefully on the couch, with his feed up under the afghan, with the Sox on the TV, hearing the kids play outside on a quiet summer’s night. He got that to a degree. The EMTs took him to the hospital on his 69th birthday, June 5th, and he passed away on July 10th, 2015 at Mass General from complications from tuberculosis (crazy right?). I’ve been chasing trying to remember his speaking voice for probably ten out of those 14 years. 

Anyway, I always hate the sob story when anyone posts about their parent dying on facebook and people don’t know what the fuck to do. Sadness around death is selfish to a degree I think. And not that we shouldn’t get sad, because that’s normal and healthy, but that we should realize that our close relatives needed to go at that time - they were sick, or not all the way there, or weren’t going to live healthy full lives anymore - and it was their time. We want to hold onto these time periods and happy memories but what year was that from? Was it even recent? Are we holding onto the songs from our youth and physical pictures in a photo album? Maybe its time to share and experience our own memories. And create those with the people we love around us. 

I was going to post “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost but I think it’s cheesy to post quotes so you can read it. It’s about death. That was his favorite poem and he would recite it to me on Christmas evenings in the car, along with “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry, which is a gift about two young lovers who sell their prized possessions to pay for their lover’s present. The gifts are unusable because of what ends up being sold by each.  My dad decided early on he felt that Christmas car rides between both sets of family (my mom and dad were never married and I was carted around nonstop) parties weren’t fair so he gave up Christmas with me, but I remembered both stories well. Ironically enough, my PhD shrink, Dr. Deforge, graduated in 1954, and was the first nurse practitioner to speak before the supreme court to allow nurse practitioners to write scripts for patients. She worked with both Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath in her clinical hours at McLean Hospital while getting her credentials. Both RF and SP left very unpleasant journals and writings in their last time there at the hospital. So much that I know it was kept from family. As you can see, silver lining isn’t always apparent right away. Writing, art, movies, television, music, it’s a lot like going to the gym or therapy. A lot of people sit in suffer in bullshit until someone realizes that they had something going but they’ve been dead 50 years and who cares. 

So in the meantime as i'm rambling, remember to keep pushing and keep writing and being creative and you. Nothing is worth doing because you feel like you need to. But a lot is worth doing because you feel like yo uwant to.