My Grief, Unstacked

The Grief That’s Keeping Me from Mourning My Dad

My dad passed away almost two years ago, and I have yet to mourn his death. For a while, I thought I had already processed my loss by being by his side leading up to his departure. That year, I spent over three months in Vienna, preparing for my dad’s death and being there for my mom to help her prepare. It was his decision to discontinue treatment for his pneumonia. 88 years old and tired after having lived a full life, he preferred to die in the hospital rather than the nursing wing of their assisted living facility, and home hospice wasn’t an option.

For six weeks, we watched him cycle between moments of lucid wakefulness and periods of pain and delirium. We visited every day. I often went twice and read to him or just watched him sleep. On his 89^th birthday, we brought cake and champagne. He had been rapidly declining for a couple of days, and we were unsure what condition we would find him in. When we arrived, he was in awful shape, and I knew he was close. I prayed he wouldn’t have to suffer for too long.

The next day, just as I was about to start an early morning yoga class, my phone rang. I had forgotten to turn the ringer off. Embarrassed, I jumped up to cancel the call when I saw the number on the screen: it was the hospital calling. I rushed out of class and answered.

“Hello?” I pressed the phone against my ear and half-sat on the edge of the sofa in the foyer.

“Is this Antonia de Heinrich?” a female voice asked.

With my eyes squeezed shut and my forehead in my hands, I braced myself for the news.

“We’re sorry to inform you that your father passed this morning at 6:10am.”

I let out a wail so primal, I hardly recognized it as my own. I thought I was prepared. I had found comfort in the fact that he was ready. All he needed was a little help letting go. If he needed our permission—we don’t know, he never explicitly asked for it—we gave it, repeatedly. When he asked for support in preparing for the end, we arranged visits from a therapist, the palliative care team, even a Catholic priest. But it wasn’t until his birthday that we realized what had been missing all along: my brother. His visit was his final wish. He passed the following day.

That moment on the sofa in the yoga studio, when the yoga teacher left class to comfort me, was the only time I cried. I had no time to accept grief. My focus immediately had to shift to the business of death. For the following eight weeks, I was distracted by organizing the memorial, taking care of my mom, and handling all the soul-sucking administrative tasks associated with death. In the end, I was exhausted and just wanted to go home.

A month after I returned from Vienna, I began writing my memoir. The idea to share my story of blowing up my career in New York, my marriage, my life plan had been percolating in my mind for almost a decade. Until now, it had not occurred to me how the timing of finally putting it on paper and my father’s passing might have coincided. By writing my memoir, I am dealing with a different kind of grief: the collapse of a life I had taken many risks and spent years planning and building, and that I—rather ungracefully—left behind. The chaos that ensued again kept me distracted from mourning my loss. As many memoirists can attest, the first draft is often a form of catharsis. It’s writing for you as the writer, the mourner, the victim. It isn’t until the second and third, and twelfth draft, when digging into the store of memories, the trauma and pain, and the impact of the experience, that the transformation reveals itself. By writing, I am processing the guilt and the shame I felt—and still sometimes feel today—slowly peeling away the layers of grief. Only now, fifteen years later, am I mourning the loss of my marriage.

Quote: “Grief was passive, grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.” (Joan Didion, “The Year of Magical Thinking”)

So, what does this mean for any of the losses I have experienced since? When will I get to those?

A few weeks ago, during a session with my coach, we talked about the string of rejections I’d received from recent winery job applications. As a lighthearted analogy, I compared my career to relationships—at first, I walked away from the wine industry, convinced I was destined for bigger and better things. But then, hoping I’d still have a chance, it wanted nothing to do with me. She went with my analogy and asked,

“Was there a particular winery that broke your heart?”

I pondered her question. “R Winery,” I said. “There was never another like R Winery.”

It was true. I left a long-term relationship with R Winery because they hurt me, and quickly moved on to Bad Boy Wines. Of course, that didn’t last, because they weren’t good for me—after a year of abuse, lying, cheating, and gaslighting, we broke up. That experience caused me to stop pursuing monogamous partnerships altogether, and I became a winemaking consultant. If I cannot have the kind of relationship I had with R Winery, I don’t want one at all.

R Winery was the best place I had ever worked. Now, every time I apply for a corporate winemaking position, I find myself comparing it to R Winery—and sabotaging the interview before it even begins. Until the session with my coach, I hadn’t realized that what I was feeling about R Winery was grief. It had never occurred to me that I could grieve a workplace or a job. It’s been seven years since I left, and I am just now starting to process that loss. I’m starting by organizing a reunion with my R Winery co-workers, some of whom have moved away and will be difficult to track down. And some don’t have cell phones—so there’s that. I’ll keep you posted.

Does that mean it will take another seven or eight years until I get around to mourning my dad’s death?

I sure hope not.

Until recently, I had only ever linked grief to the death of a human. I hadn’t realized that other parts of my life also needed grieving. As a result, those unacknowledged losses compounded, preventing me from—or at least delaying—processing them. My memoir is about to enter the pre-publishing phase. After four drafts over the past year and a half, I hope to have worked through much of the shame, guilt, and grief from losing my marriage. I believe swapping stories of the past and the present with my beloved co-workers from R Winery will be a big step in healing that particular heartbreak.

Will more layers of compounded grief show up? Maybe.

But for now, I’ll focus on what is present, tending to the losses I can see, and opening myself to the grief of losing my dad when it arrives. When it does, I’ll be ready.