It all started in August 2020, my father had died in May, along with being very sad I was experiencing something very strange. I was mad, I was angry. When I finally expressed my feelings to someone they said: ‘I’m sure if you look up ” stages of grief” you will find anger there!.😠😢
The second I understood that maybe this was part of grieving I felt better. But 3 months went by and I was still angry. It was a very strange uncomfortable feeling. I thought about my Mom’s death she passed away very quickly after learning she had cancer the doctors had said 3-6 months, but she took her final blow within a month, on my father’s birthday nonetheless. but it was one month that I was able to come to terms with the fact that she was leaving, and as she said to my daughter, ” I had a good life, its ok to say goodbye!” she informed everyone she knew and people came from far and wide to say good-bye, I found this very amusing. It was also very sociable. And slowly yet fast every day something else within her frail body stopped working. We had hospice service thus Mom was home, in August we took turns to be at the house to help her but by September, my brother and sister who have kids at school were not able to share this task with me anymore. so I decided that I’d move home and look after my Mom, the Dr said 3-6 months but I knew it would be more like 3 months.
Well, it was 4 days, only 4 days and out of those 4, it was 2 days before she was just in a semi-unconscious state. So many people came to the funeral, to the “Shiva” it was truly heartwarming, with the family all together.
My Dad was in the hospital for 2 weeks, it was Sunday around 17.00 pm that I came to visit and was told that he is being released. That took another two hours. he was on oxygen and the effort getting into the car caused his level of oxygen saturation to drop, his lips went purple and he was gasping for air. I ran upstairs got the doctor with oxygen and we raced to the entrance where the car was parked, they adjusted the oxygen and we waited for him to regain his breath and oxygen level to stabilize. The doctor said that we need to get an ambulance with oxygen to take him home, and there wasn’t one available, only the next day. My dad started shouting at me, to get in the car to go home. ” get in the fucken car lets go home”
I took the oxygen balloon back upstairs told the doctor that my son would meet us halfway with oxygen. As I stepped in the car I said ” don’t you fucken die in my car”. And we drove home in silence. It took time once home to quickly get the oxygen and he sat in the car until he felt strong enough to get out with the help of my son and the foreign worker. It took time to get him into bed, and once comfy in his bed he literally fell asleep immediately. I stroked his head and told the worker that Id be back in the morning as I didn’t have clothes with me and thought of staying over for a few days.
My dad died in his sleep that night. He always wanted to die like that and would make jokes about waking up every morning… I’m still here!!
We were in Corona times with a small funeral and an even smaller “shiva”. Which was also cut short due to a Jewish holiday, and you don’t sit Shiva on holidays. I found myself sitting alone with my son outside, no one coming to visit anymore, I wanted to scream and cry and go crazy, so I just sat there.
From that point I was a walking time bomb, well not really, I learned that I’m passive-aggressive, I knew that too, but I’ve never felt angry day after day, after day for months. I journaled everything I wrote him a letter, good and bad, I cried and still felt very angry.
By August I called My cousin Mike Fisher, an expert in the field of anger management. I told him what I was feeling, and did the Anger management Course, after that, I continued to study with him as he opened his first Anger Academy on zoom, which made it all possible.
I learned that Id been harboring a lot of anger for many years. I had an advantage that as a student I got to do the course again, and every time I learned something new about myself.
I learned that anger is a normal feeling, and in my case, I learned how to express it and not bottle it up. so I’m not an explosive type, but that is what makes it worse for us passive-aggressive folks we end up doing all the damage to ourselves when we don’t express it in a clean clear manner without hurting the other party involved.