Strive Seek Find

Bonus Episode: Grief Lives Here.

July 07, 2022 Chance Whitmore Season 2 Episode 55
Strive Seek Find
Bonus Episode: Grief Lives Here.
Show Notes Transcript

This week Strive Seek Find addressed grief under the guise of an unexpected trip and undealt with emotion.   


Contact Chance/Support the Show

Support the show
Unknown:

So I'm going to be a sledgehammer tonight a little bit. So let me get this out of the way right off the bat. Grief sucks. And I'm terribly, terribly bad. Welcome to a very special bonus episode of strive seek find, I'm your host chance. It has been another year where I have had to say, W T, F, a whole bunch. Not a bad year in the least. Yeah, that might be a little bit of a lie. But it was definitely one that the hits just kept on coming. In part, this year has been a lot of learning specifically, how to work through grief. Because apparently, it's bad to just put it in a box, mentally throw it in the river, and let it sit there. Though I have really, really wanted to now as a warning, because a few of my family members listen to the pod from time to time. And a few of our friends have lost loved ones this year as well. If grief is fresh for you, it's completely okay to bail out now. And jump to the next podcast. Go on. I'll wait for a minute. Now let's get started. By way of a quick catch up for those people here who have stumbled in new to the pod. I lost my father November, two days before Thanksgiving. Last is such a convenient, non emotionally loaded word. So let's throw that one out the window. He died, died driving down a road with my mother in the car. He died. Fortunately, and perhaps Miraculously, she was not badly hurt. And I'll add this. I feel extremely fortunate to have had him as long as we did. There have been many times in the past eight years that I expected the call to let me know a past that he had died. But he had been doing so well as of late that this one surprised me. I can remember when we got the word. We were standing in our furniture store. And we didn't know he was dead yet, just that there had been an accident. And I looked at my wife and said he's too stubborn to let a car accident get him. I was right. But because he was gone before the car even went off the road. Now, my father was perhaps the most stubborn human being on the planet. So in December, we had a Fayette family gathering in his honor. Just immediate family couldn't call it a funeral couldn't invite or even let people know when it was happening. Because it was against his wishes. So I ended up officiating a very small ceremony in the blizzard for my mother, my siblings, the grandkids. And my dad's one surviving sister. Even though we are still kind of numb, it hurt, because we felt he deserved more. But he didn't want it. And we honored that. So after the graveside, and our gathering afterwards, my family and I stayed for a few days to help out on the farm. Little things, just making sure mom had food to eat. Making sure that she didn't have to worry about dealing with guests and visitors until she was ready to filling out paperwork because you can't even die in this country without having to fill everything out triplicate little things. And then we came home and we started taking steps over there to make life move forward. And I wasn't supposed to be back until last week. But that didn't mean I didn't help try to help out where I could a little more paperwork, some time on the phone with dad's retirement, helping with the details on the headstone. Little things to keep things moving forward. Now last week, I was supposed to go over and help for a week. Be there for the fourth head out to the cemetery because I hadn't been out there. Since the headstone was pulled Taste and see some family who had come to town that I hadn't talked to in probably 20 years. And as tends to be the case, especially in the last three years, just when you need to do something life struck. One of my daughters went down sick. Done evening before we were supposed to leave. And we couldn't go. Well, the family couldn't. My middle daughter was already over there helping grandma being an extra set of hands, doing whatever Nana needed, but had been a little more than a week and Nana was exhausted, my daughter was exhausted. It was time for her to come home. So I needed to run over and pick her up and honestly deliver the food I had pre made for all the family coming to mom's house. So at six the next morning, instead of loading the car and getting the family out of there, I rolled out. And in about an hour, I realized the last time I made this long drive completely alone was the day he had passed on. There, I did it, I set it, the day died. That didn't help. I was already feeling a little guilty and emotional after not being able to go over and help mom. So I kind of put that aside a little bit. And then about five hours into the drive. Almost to where I grew up. I passed the place that they'd crashed. And with the Tetons, in the background, I was hit with wave after wave of emotion, and it slipped out. First time I'd spoken the entire drive. My grief lives here. I don't know where it came came from. But it was palpable in the truck. At home, where I didn't expect to see that daily, I was mostly fine. At times a little short tempered times a little sad. But every week it got a little easier. Here where I was used to spending time with him. Here where I hadn't had opportunity to work through feelings, it wasn't going to be easy. And before I even hit the driveway on the farm, my throat was tight. I was struggling. Everything I had been able to push aside to not think about to box up and throw in the river was roaring in my ears. And flowing in my memory. Honestly, I wasn't handling it very well. And on top of this, I knew I couldn't stay and work through things. I didn't want to expose almost 80 year old to whatever crap my daughter had caught. That left her with 103 Fever. So I pull in, I quickly offload the food. Side note, I had brought a damn fine pulled pork in a smoked turkey to take care of the family and extended family over the week. loaded my daughter visited with my mom for a split second. All in all, I was there for maybe 20 minutes. And mom would try to talk to me and my throat was so tight, I could barely get anything out. But I didn't want to admit it, because that's not what we do. So I loaded her up. And with a little bit of tears in my eyes. I hit the gas for a six hour drive back to the Treasure Valley. And almost immediately my daughter started to tell me about her wonderful trip and then paused and looked at me and says, Daddy, you're crying. And I lied to her flat out. I said no, no, I'm not crying, I'm coughed as I was getting in the truck and you know who I am when I'm coughing my throat chokes up and I can tear up real easy. I don't know if she bought my line of crap. But she accepted it and and spent the next 30 minutes talking about everything that she'd got to do while she was visiting grandma. Now, I asked myself later, why did I lie? And my answer is not great. It's probably I've got a rationalization. And I've got the real answer the rationalization. I wanted my daughter to talk about her experiences on an unimpeded by my sorrow. And that may even be 100% True. I couldn't tell you it wasn't. But there's also this idea that I absolutely didn't want to discuss it. I didn't want to discuss what I was feeling. I wanted to get down the road would. And if I didn't have time to deal with what I was feeling there, I wanted to get the hell away from it. And it did make me wonder if I'd ever seen my father grief, his parents died, one before I was born. The other one is very young. And in retrospect, I do remember seeing him come in and tell me at age three, that my grandmother died, but wasn't able to process it. Because he just walked off after he did it. Probably because of his grieving. I don't remember him processing my surrogate grandfather's death, a guy he was as close to as anybody else I ever knew, though, I'm sure he must have in his way. And honestly, obviously, the healthier thing would have been to talk through it with her then. But I wasn't ready. So it took me a good 30 minutes to get myself fully under control. So what I'm here to tell you tonight is I'm shitty at grieving. So don't be that guy. Talk to someone. Give yourself time to think. Work through it with your kids when they're grieving. Don't compartmentalize. Because eventually the hinges fall off the compartments and it comes flooding to punch you right in the chops. Right now, after missing another chance to process. I desperately want to head back and to deal with it. Not to make my old home the place where grief lives, but rather a place of strong and meaningful memory again. And thanks for letting me process that for a bit with you. This is chance saying good night. Hug the ones you love