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Twin Cities Mom Collective

Parenting After the Death of Your Parent

It was around 6:00pm on a Thursday night in mid-August when my Mom called and said it was time to come home to Wisconsin to say goodbye to my Dad. He had been ill all year, since turning 80 last December. He was in and out of the hospital and nursing home care all year, but this was it. The doctor said ‘days’. So I frantically threw things in a suitcase and took off for home, 4 hours away, leaving my 1-year-old and 3-year-old boys in the care of my husband.

My mind raced the entire drive down to the hospital. No music, no podcast, no audiobook could hold my focus. I prayed that this was just a miscommunication and that he would recover again. But he wouldn’t. I texted my husband from the hospital later that evening, “It wasn’t a miscommunication. He’s bad.” I stayed by his side. I held his hand. Just before 6:00pm the next evening, my Mother and I stood by his bedside, holding his hands, stroking his hair, and telling him of our love and gratitude for him as he took his final breaths. I held his hand until the warmth left it. I held his hand until it wasn’t his hand anymore, but a compartment left behind on earth.

I thought I was prepared. I thought because I got ‘goodbye’, that I would be able to prepare myself. I thought that because our relationship wasn’t as close, it wouldn’t hurt as much. It not only hurt but felt like a loss on an entirely different level than when my brother died in 1997. Losing a parent felt like losing one of my memory keepers. My babyhood, my childhood, those memories… he held them. He took them with him. Our memories together, our stories, our jokes… They only live in me now, and I felt that hard. And then, ‘what if’ sunk in. What if I didn’t ask him enough questions? What if I didn’t let him ramble on about the ‘good old days’ enough? What if he had more to share, and I missed it? What if I wasn’t a good enough daughter all those years? What if he could have spoken in his final hours, what would he have said?

Within 48 hours of his death, in a sleepless fog of emotions and funeral planning, arrangements were made to have my in-laws bring my boys from Minnesota to Wisconsin to be with me. It was time for both my husband and me to go back to work, him as a Physician Compensation Consultant, and me as a stay-at-home-Mom. Or in this case, I would be a stay-at-your-Mom’s-home-Mom, for the next week. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea, but options are limited when you’re a parent of young children. They needed me, and I missed them. So, I jumped in and thought, ‘I got this!’

It didn’t take very long to realize, I do not ‘got this’, I did not have ‘this’ at all! Friends, I was a disaster of a parent that week, and probably for a couple after. After the initial hugs, kisses, and sweetness of missing each other, they went right back to being the same 1-year-old and 3-year-old boys that I left home days before. But for me? I was not the same. There was so much on my mind, so many decisions to make, people to contact, and so much to do. I was trying my hardest to take care of my now-widowed Mother. I made sure she was fed and never alone. I helped her make funeral arrangements, revise his obituary. I tried to support her in her grieving. I held her when she cried and told her it was okay. I drove 20 minutes each way to buy special scrapbooking stickers that she wanted for his photo display boards on the day they were to be shown because it needed to be perfect. We picked out clothing, food, and music. I wrote his eulogy. All while trying to parent and grieve for myself.

Parenting After the Death of Your Parent | Twin Cities Moms Blog

Parenting and grieving go together like oil and water. Add on top of that I was not sleeping at night. It was like trying to rake leaves in a tornado. I felt like the worst Mom. I was short with my children. I snapped at them for being too loud, too rambunctious. I fed them, but didn’t put up the usual mealtime fight. If the 16-month-old wanted to eat only crackers at lunch, fine. If the 3-year-old wanted to watch 4 hours of TV, fine. I told them to go away, go find something to play with. The normally cute games they played, annoyed me to my core. I wanted nothing more than to be alone. By the time they were in bed asleep, I was mentally and physically exhausted. I would crash for a few hours and then lay there awake many hours each night. The more they demanded of me as a Mom, the less helpful I felt to my own Mother. I felt like I was running a marathon that I didn’t sign up for.

I held my Mom’s hand all the way to church on the morning of my Dad’s funeral and reminded her (and myself) that we could do hard things together. Just as we had when we entered this same church 20 years earlier to say goodbye to my brother. As I stood at the front of a packed church, delivering the eulogy that I wrote, I noticed a small person out of the corner of my eye. I had just finished the paragraph where I talked about my Father’s love of my children, and the joy they restored to him. And there, at the back of the church was my curious 3-year-old, slowly stepping farther away from the nursery door and closer to the aisle. I stopped and smiled at him, and he knew my message. He marched up to the front of the church and up to the lectern. I finished delivering the eulogy with him on my hip and reveled in the moment of getting to be a daughter remembering her father, and a Mother at the same time.

Parenting After the Death of Your Parent | Twin Cities Moms Blog

When we got back home to Minnesota, the reality of the loss hit me in strong waves. All of a sudden, back in my own space, I was drowning in grief. My children overwhelmed me. I yearned for our old ‘normal’. I wanted their small demands for snacks, books, and help with everything, to feel less suffocating. Truth be told, the month before my Dad died, I felt like I had just started to hit my stride. I had been a stay-at-home-Mom for almost 5 months and felt like we were getting into a good routine. I had recently started working on two personal goals, weight loss, and home organization. I was down 10 pounds and had a few closets and the junk drawer checked off my list. And then… life blindsided me. Here I was drowning while trying to give my children my best, day in and day out. Besides the newborn days and postpartum mood disorders, I can easily say that this was the biggest challenge I’ve faced in my young Motherhood journey.

It’s been just over two months now, and it’s a work in progress. I haven’t fought my way back to working on my personal goals yet. But I have fought for myself the best I can. I know that healing from loss means having to sit in grief and not mask. I process my feelings as they come when I can find space away from the children, and I go to bed early on nights when the days were just too exhausting to deal with anything else. I’ve come back to my parenting ‘norm’, and take joy in knowing that when I’m having a great day with my boys, that my Dad is watching. He’s with us. He is laughing at their silliness, their sticky smiles, their endless energy, and their belly laughs. Last year my Dad told me, “You are a good Mom”, and he probably didn’t know it, but it’s the greatest gift he ever gave me.

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