50 Years Later, I’m Still Flooded by Waves of Sadness About My Father’s Early Death

As one of my father’s caregivers — looking after him every day he was ill when I came home from high school and before my mom returned from work — I, too, am prone to bouts with grief, even after a half century. For the first decade after his death, I felt heightened emotions at the start of every Major League Baseball spring training when it would hit me again that my father and I could no longer talk about the upcoming Yankee season. For years, whenever I heard about someone having cancer or any kind of brain injury, I felt my chest tighten and eyes water. Last spring, on that wonderful day that I heard my son and his bride read their wedding vows to one another at their beautiful ceremony, my joy as a father was mixed with sadness that my own father never got to meet my son and daughter-in-law, nor my wife or our daughter, and he never knew me as an adult.

A psychotherapy axiom is that each of us grieves in our own way. My grief experiences are mine, but I share them to at least raise some questions. What should former caregivers expect from their own mourning over the long term? Will grief fade or endure? Here are some ideas:

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No “getting over” or even “accepting” it

Whenever I hear of someone telling a former caregiver they will eventually “get over” a loss, such as the death of a parent or a spouse, I wince. It seems dismissive and disrespectful of the mourner’s emotions and the powerful impact of their caregiving experience. Almost as objectionable to me is the concept of “acceptance.” In her well-known five-stage model of recovering from grief — which includes denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed in 1969 that most of us gradually find our way toward accepting the loss, our sadness fades, and we move on with our lives. Though I don’t deny that my father is dead or that most of my life has unfolded in his absence, I’ve never been able to view his death as other than needless and unfair. I’m resigned to it but don’t accept it. When the sadness hits me, angry feelings still arise, too.

In the mind’s eye

Social psychology researchers Richard Schulz and Joan Monin have found that caregivers suffer when they witness but can’t remedy their care receiver’s suffering. As my father declined from his brain cancer, I saw terribly upsetting things I couldn’t change that are still visible to me almost as scratchy photos or shaky 8 mm films in my head. I can see him struggling to get his point across when the cancer that invaded his brain prevented him from finding the right words to speak. I can view replays of him brusquely telling me to leave his bedroom because he was embarrassed about losing his hair from his harsh chemotherapy treatments. In psychology, we call these “post-traumatic” images, and they don’t easily dissipate even with time. Many former caregiver psychotherapy clients have shared with me their own unbidden images — such as watching their loved ones confused and agitated or covered with wires and tubes in intensive care units — which are seemingly permanent aspects of their experiences of grief.

What’s integral and meaningful

I can’t separate my father’s death and having been one of his caregivers from the way my life has turned out in the 50 years since. They are woven together tightly. I learned something about loss, sadness and empathy while grieving my father; these have become the foundations of my work as a psychologist. I wish I had done more to help and comfort him and make sure he knew I loved him; those have been the impetus for my life’s mission helping people with illness and their caregivers. When I talk with other former caregivers, my dad is never far from my mind. Like me, many of them have shifted their priorities and life directions in the aftermath of their caregiving experiences and losses. Their moments of grief are reminders for them, too, to stick to the paths they set for themselves to make meaning of their personal tragedies.