Today my father turned 91! Ninety-one years on Madre Tierra. That’s a long time! He has seen many changes to the planet, to our human culture during these years. At this moment, he is feeling them all.
It has been a tough six months for Dad since Mom died. Everything feels off kilter. ‘Meaningless’ is his word. He recently moved to a senior’s residence and is feeling his days of empty time. Lots of silence and solitude and loneliness. His Paradise feels very far away.
Nor does he want to celebrate his birthday! Birthdays were not celebrated back home in Ireland (as he was reminding me at Sunday lunch)—not for his mother, not for his father and not for him today. For him a birthday is just another day of emptiness, a day for dreaming of bygone days, another day for contemplating a cloudy future.
The pain of grief and’attachment.’ Sigh.
A counselor friend tells me there is no side-tracking the grief process. Only time will temper the hurt. But my Buddhist friends say that ‘attachment’ is an unnecessary addition. Attachment (or co-dependence perhaps) can cling so closely that the self is almost lost—a scary place for anyone. This is where my dad is at on his 91st birthday.
He and I talked about this notion recently. He even accepted it in theory, but at 91 it is hard to make a course correction. It didn’t get much farther than ‘it isn’t good to get too close to anyone!’ Not what I hoped he would glean from the conversation. Another sigh.
So I yell loudly to the world, ‘Happy birthday, Father, mi padre!’ You may not be able to hear it today but it is good for the planet to enjoy your name day. The tide will eventually come in and the dry places will be watered. You will once again catch the current where joy resides.
Your joy will come again, Dad.
Alan, I have experienced this grief of attachment, and assure you that none of us are completely free of it or ” codependency”.
At 71 my father was diagnosed with cancer and the grief was quite brutal.
A friend suggested I write a letter to my father, which turned out ,after much prayer, to be a gratitude list of all that I think could of to thank my father for.
Everything from baseball gloves to just being there when I called.
Several pages, I gave it to him for fathers day. It was a loose paper folded in a card, he set it aside.
I had assumed he read it, with never a comment about it. It was painful at first but, I let it go.
Several months later, he called me, he was going thru all his papers preparing to die. He was in tears, and so thankful.
I was blown away, and so was a lot of the attachment.
After he passed, I could see the attachments of my brothers and the pain they experienced was so much greater than what I was experiencing, sure I grieved, but what a difference prayer and action make.
May Love have it’s way with you , Tim
I remember the passing of my Mother over twenty years gone by now. My Father, who like Jim, was lost for awhile. His grief and loneliness took him away from us for awhile but in his own way he found a higher power and he came back to us.
Now my Father has passed and the sadness still comes and I miss him. But then I think back to my Mothers passing and realize there is a different grief that comes from losing a soul mate to losing a parent. We know that our parents are going to pass eventually and we accept it. So my grief is there but not overwhelming. Now if it was my wife Darlene, I am not sure where I would be. I probably would still be there, in that dark place, missing the love of my life.
Thanks for posting this-it was a helpful read for me as I consider what to do with my own memories of gram, grandpa’s hurt, your experience as their son…and the concept of attachment. Much to ponder