Dead Weight

I am always shocked at how quickly a body cools once a person has died.

Within minutes, seconds of passing, the difference is tangible. Skin becomes thicker, harder, less yielding. I think this must be why people say they could feel when someone passed - this texture change that overtakes the body as it switches course from active, coursing, roaring machinery to the stillness before decomposition.

I have been mere feet from both of my parents as they passed. I held their hands and hugged them minutes before they died, and minutes after. I kissed cheeks warm with the last minutes of life and cool with the first seconds of death. The difference is palpable; I can feel the variations on my lips still.

When my daughters were babies and would fall asleep in my arms, they would grow so heavy - “dead weight,” we’d joke as we struggled to climb stairs and lift them over crib railings.

Dead weight is real. It’s a thing. I spent the hours before Mom passed helping to lift her, move her, make her more comfortable. After her last breath, I instinctively went to lift her head to draw her to me, and the weight of her head resisted me. When your body is completely and utterly done, it becomes impossibly, completely heavy.

Dead weight.

That’s how the grief sits on your chest, too.

When my dad took his last breath, my sister wailed. Keened would be a more accurate word. That sound of grief will always accompany the memory of realizing he was gone. My mother, on the other hand, had faked us out multiple times - breath stopping for impossibly long times, then gasping again as we all sighed, realizing she hadn’t actually passed yet. By the time she passed we didn’t fully trust it, so no keening chorused her exit from life. Later, her sisters would wail as she was being rolled out of the apartment; my nephew would keen as he saw her in the blue velvet brocaded coffin my brother chose.

My keening was a private show.

After I kissed my mother, I hugged my sisters. I thanked my cousins -- professional nurses who lovingly cared for my mother so we could keep her home to die. Then I called the hospice line and let them know Mom had died, and walked out the door. I crossed the apartment complex to my sister’s best friend’s home, where my partner had retreated to sleep for a couple of hours. I opened the door, and he said, “Becca?” and then the sobs rushed out of my body. I fell into the bed, fully clothed, feet still in the slippers I had been wearing for 36 hours, and he wrapped me in blankets and his arms, and I keened.

I wailed without thinking; cried as if it was my new normal and the tears would have no end. The grief of losing your last living parent is so deep that emotions cannot be expressed with words; they can only be communicated with sobs deep from your soul. I sobbed until I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep, weary from operating on sheer determination and coffee for 3 days. I slept, crying until the hospice nurse arrived to perform her death duties.

I have signed the coroner's paperwork for both of my parents.

When my father passed, my keening was again private; however, it was also delayed.

Dad died in a hospice house; there were no Covid-19 restrictions in 2016, and we could surround him in the large room without risking anyone’s life. My mom, sisters, and brother were in the room with him, as well as the hospice minister. We were talking and laughing one moment, and then grieving the next. He seemed to have waited until we were distracted, behaving normally and not as if we had a parent on his deathbed.

Afterward, we threw our energy into making things okay for my mother. My sisters and brother took her away, somewhere sunny and away from death, to be with her grandkids. I called my best friend and went to my mom’s apartment. We spent hours cleaning out the detritus of death: medical equipment, chux pads, hospital blankets, pill bottles and ointments, empty packages of swabs and saline syringes, and the powders and accouterment needed for flushing ports and changing ostomy bags and dealing with catheters and urinary diversion lines. We threw out what was used and packed her trunk full of equipment to be taken back to the hospice or the equipment rental place or the police station; she had a walker in the back of her compact SUV for months before finding a use for it.

During the funeral process, we kept checking in with Mom to make sure everything was right for her.

At home, I consoled children barely old enough to make any sense of death, but old enough to know Poppie was gone and that it was sad.

There is a scene in the BBC show, “Call the Midwife”, in which Reggie - a grown man with Down’s Syndrome - is trying to process his mother’s death, and asks when his mother will be back from seeing Jesus. It punches me in the gut as I remember the repeated talks with my then 4, 7, and 10-year-old daughters: long, cyclical conversations about topics to which children should not have to be subjected. My grieving was placed aside as I shopped for funeral clothes -it is nearly impossible to find black clothes in 4T sizes-, created memory boards, cleaned houses that were not my own, attempted to make sure everyone was ok.

“I’ll cry at the funeral,” I told myself.

Then the funeral came.

Before the service started, my then-husband began sobbing, loudly. He continued to do so throughout the entire service, grieving too loudly and deeply to comfort my daughters or me.

I comforted my daughters.

My youngest sister had her husband. My other sister and my mother clung to each other. My brother had his wife.

I comforted my daughters.

My best friend graciously offered to sit with me and help me with the girls. She hugged me and handed out tissues, and weathered the glares of my sisters and aunts who wondered why this woman they had just met was in the family pew. Eventually, Jessica would become family to the point of being an honorary sister, but at that point, she was treated as an interloper. Luckily, she didn’t care; she was my rock at that time. However, I did not keen.

I did not let my grief wash over me until Father’s Day.

It was 25 days after my dad passed. I had all intentions of celebrating with my husband like we always did. Instead, I could not get out of bed. I cried so deeply and completely that my body could do nothing else. I was utterly broken.

And then I was lighter.

Grief is an amazing and awful thing. When you are in the throes of it, it will drown you. It will consume you. You will feel like you will never feel totally okay again; but if you feel it, really truly experience it, you have the potential to feel even happier and more grateful than you ever have.