A Grief Endured

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” ~ Psalm 116:15

I have, for more than a decade now, wanted to write about the loss of my mother and my father.

Whenever I have attempted to do so, which has been often, I would make notes of what I wanted to say and try to put them in some finished form. Then I would read what I had written, write more, then recoil, then stop my writing, then try, again, and, finally, become quite morose. I would then put this project to one side, then reconsider, then repeat the cycle, again, and again, for many years now.

The experience of losing my parents, even with the passing of the years, remains both extraordinarily painful and personal. I am, by nature, a private person, most comfortable discussing any matter other than me. Some people enjoy baring their life’s inner sanctum to strangers while others, most emphatically, do not. I am deeply entrenched in the latter camp. I have found writing this reflection to be very hard. More importantly, losing my parents was and remains the source of the greatest sadness to me. I find it, even now, so hard to think back, and then to write about their passing.

Yet all of us now live in this age of death.

On one view, death, even amid tragedies and pandemics, should be kept in some perspective. Death was and is, after all, always occurring and someone is, after all, always grieving, tragically. “Such is life”, as the saying goes.

But the scale of the death and tragedy inflicted over the last year on so many across the world, and the hideous cruelties that it has imposed, all so swiftly, on the already sick, the now dying, and those they will leave behind — especially through the denial to the dying and their loved ones of precious last moments together — is something each of us cannot be other than horrified to observe.

This era of sudden and premature death will leave deep scars on all those now afflicted — and these scars will never heal.

Even absent this season of death, though, I have, for some time, wanted to return to my notes and write this most uncomfortable reflection for the benefit of anyone — especially any younger people — whose misery at the illness and loss of a parent or both parents feels so overwhelming.

I write, especially, for those watching their loved ones now enter the shadows of life, as well as for those newly grieving. While I find it very hard to open myself up, and to bare my feelings in this way, if I help one grief-stricken person, especially a younger person, to feel understood and ‘seen’, then I will feel my duty has been done.

When my mother and then my father were each gravely ill and passing away, I possessed a Christian’s faith but no human wisdom that helped me to make any immediate sense of what was happening. Perhaps, really, nothing can?

After all, my parents were supposed to be around, not get sick and slowly die, at least not yet, when they and I still had so much time to spend together, and, especially, they had so much wise advice to impart to me, and I had so many accomplishments to show them, so as to justify all of their efforts. That, at least, they deserved, fully. That, at the very least, I owed my parents. But pass away, they did.

Yet, as both of my parents’ ravenous illnesses led inexorably to their inevitable passings, I found myself in the most lonely of predicaments. Pretty much everyone I knew then — and know now — have both of their parents. So who could I speak to? Does anyone really understand? Or is this a cross sent for me to bear? And, really, only I knew what it was like to stand by my parents’ open graves.

So, when it becomes your time to mourn, which starts, actually, well before your loved ones pass from this life, you will find, depending on your age and circumstances, that your sadness and your pain are made only worse by the fact that no one else knows what you are going through. This is, in every sense, your tragedy.

Therefore, I decided that — as no one, even now, wants to discuss death, loss, mourning, and grief — then I would write my own account, however painful this composition has been.

So I write as we are all now in this terrible season of death and loss. I write as I fear that so many are so alone and so lost in their unutterable sadness. I write because while those who mourn may, indeed, be blessed, all too rarely, if ever, are they comforted. I write because we all need to realise that many who grieve are barely holding their lives together.

As importantly, to the degree that I can give assurance to any other person, I want those who now mourn and grieve — especially those who feel so incapacitated by their loss — to know that there is nothing — absolutely nothing — wrong with their profound feelings of loss and of pain, now or even many years later.

There is nothing wrong with the looking off, with moist eyes, into a far distance, or with the shedding of tears, or, frankly, with just completely breaking down.

The price of our love for another is our profound grief when they pass away.

It is, always, okay to not be okay.

My own account is deeply personal and unapologetically sentimental. But I will always love my parents, deeply, and, even with the passage of so many years, now, I miss them, each day, so much, and I always will.

So, then, this is my story.

I was born the youngest of my late parents’ four children in Sydney, Australia. My parents were older parents for their and, perhaps, even for our era. My late mother had endured the polio epidemic of the post-war era as a young girl, and it was, as I learned later, something of a miracle that I was born, given her medical history and my three older siblings’ births. My age gap with my older siblings always suggested to me that I may have not been entirely planned, but my parents never said this to me. Moreover, as my late parents were devout Catholics, I was welcomed by them.

Growing up around older parents as a youngest child meant that I always saw my mother and father very differently from my older siblings: my stories are different, my experiences with my parents were different, and my responsibilities to them were, always, different. I noticed that, compared to my school friends, especially, that my parents were, indeed, older, and, as I grew up, I learned that, however wealthy and well ‘kept’ my parents were, they would need more of their youngest son’s help with a myriad of odd jobs and, especially, what I would call ‘companionly’ tasks. Being the youngest meant, also, that I got to see all of my older siblings successively grow up and then leave the Connolly home, and, as the saying goes, ‘get on with their lives’. I did, of course, wish all my older siblings well and that they enjoy great success (which success each of my older siblings has achieved). My older siblings’ departures meant, however, that our family ‘home’ reduced in time to, well, my parents and me. To be clear, I, too, got on with my life, and I, too, periodically left home. But, as the youngest, I always knew that, if illness or trouble struck, that, not unreasonably, my older siblings had their own families, and/or lived and worked overseas, and, so, realistically, I knew it was my duty to look after our mother and father. Honestly, I never imagined a future where I was not helping my parents in some way. Indeed, every youngest that I have ever met knows, instinctively, of their fourth commandment duty.

To be sure, I would, too, be away from home, at times. I lived with my parents through my school and university years but did then serve as a naval officer, and was, periodically, far from home, at sea, and in various operations and some wars. But I always kept my home, though, especially my official ‘Home’ for all governmental purposes, where my parents were in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. So for the purposes of the Royal Australian Navy and the Department of Defence, I ensured that the home address and next-of-kin for young Sub-Lieutenant Connolly was always the Connollys of Bowral, a practice I maintained as I was promoted and got older, as a signal to my mother and father that, as their youngest, come what may, and wherever I actually was in the world, they were my real ‘home’ — and that, if trouble struck, I would look after them. My father had endured his own health challenges, arising from his very stressful profession. My mother’s health had, as I said, never been hardy. But they were having a happy life together, of work and travel, and gave me little cause for worry, even as they both started to slow, very slowly, down. In many respects, vocationally, I thought I should ‘do what I can, while I can’ to advance my career.

So, carrying on our family’s military tradition, I served, including in the more ‘troubled’ parts of the world. My parents were always most supportive of me. My late mother was a constant sender of ‘care packages’ to wherever the Navy posted me, which boosted the morale of not only me but, also, everyone I served with at sea or deployed with ashore. Sadly, though, I did not learn until well after my parents had passed away just what an emotional toll my wars had inflicted on them, especially when I served in the Iraq War. My mother suffered great anxiety owing to the war’s casualties and relentlessly grim news. My mother never told me any of this — she always said she was very proud of me, as did my father, which was for a son, especially a youngest son, all I ever wanted to hear.

Eventually, I returned home from war. I had some health challenges resulting from serving ‘over there’, especially difficulties with my hearing and my sleep. My parents were always very good, while their periodically insomniac youngest son struggled to make sense of what people were saying, loudly and slowly, to him. One of my nightmares, then, was that I would, actually, become a younger burden on my older parents. Over time, I learned to cope, and my problems, thankfully, became somewhat manageable.

By mid-2008, my wars were over and my life had gone in a new direction. I still had some health challenges but I persevered, as my parents had always taught me to do, and I completed my bar exams and relevant courses, and became a Barrister in Sydney. I treasure this photograph of my parents and I from this very happy time. Unbeknownst to me, this would be one of our last photographs together.

At this time, I thought the worst was behind me, especially war, and that only good days and new trails for me to blaze lay ahead, where I would make my parents so proud of me.

I was, catastrophically, wrong.

Within a very short time, my mother would become quite sick and, having fought valiantly, pass away, and, as we mourned her, then my father, his life’s companion no longer with him, would suffer repeated illnesses, and he, too, would, within a few unhappy years, also pass away. Whatever future I had imagined for my parents only mere years before, instead, now ended in my standing by their graves, as a lone piper played, “Amazing Grace”.

I do not want to go, too much, into the decline and then passing of either of my parents, except to say I was with both of them in their final years, months, and days, and, indeed, their final hours.

The worst aspect of my own parents’ decline and passing — next to witnessing their slipping away before my eyes — was that there was, for once, nothing that I could do to help them.

I was my parents’ youngest son and we had spent a great deal of time together. In particular, I had always prided myself on being able to solve all of their technical and logistical problems, whatever they were, and that I could always fix what seemed, to them, unfixable. Even before I could drive, I was running my parents’ errands and doing their odd jobs. Once I had my driver’s licence, I was even more useful. When home from university and the Navy, I would play chauffeur to get them to and collect them from all manner of office towers, hotels, functions, airports, restaurants, houses of worship, and, in my mother’s case, her bridge clubs and art galleries. I had, especially, always taken my parents to their doctors and to hospitals, for problems minor and then major, to the degree that I think I knew every medical centre and hospital waiting area, cafeteria, or nearby café, from the Sydney central business district down to Canberra. My utility extended, even, to helping my parents master the basics of information technology, such that my mother became most proficient at email, sending frequent emails to me, especially when I was deployed overseas — and which I received then with great joy and treasure now like gold.

Yet, despite all this, as my parents commenced their dying, it dawned on me, with an ever more crushing reality, that my usefulness to them in this life was coming to its end. For all my pride in being their always helpful and ever devoted youngest son, I was reduced to being a mere attendant to, and eventually a spectator of, their decline and passing. The sheer awfulness of seeing my parents suffer was made worse by my complete uselessness except as, yes, a companion and a hand to hold. Even before they had passed, I was, alternatively, breaking down, and then angry, and then prone to an almost debilitating self-doubt, as to whether there was anything more that I could, possibly, have done for them. These remain the very worst of my times.

My mother fought her illness, tenaciously, before succumbing. My father, his beloved wife having already departed, fought, really, not at all. I was, as I said, with both of my parents for all of this ‘end time’. They had both received the Last Rites of our Church and both passed from this life with a supernatural degree of saintly serenity and calm. Fittingly for such devout Catholics, both of my parents passed away in the very early hours of a cold Friday morning.

After my mother and then my father had passed away, on their respective Fridays, I stayed at our family home in Bowral, which was now, successively, minus the parents that had, always, been ‘living’ there. It is hard to find the words to describe what this experience is like but grasping unsuccessfully for words is the daily lot of the newly parentless.

Coming home, alone, my parents’ artefacts were everywhere — but now they were not — and they would never be again. My late mother’s diaries, so assiduously kept in life, would have no further entries. I saw, immediately, the reading glasses that will never be worn, their old fountain pens that had written so many letters to me that will never write in their hands again, the piles of letters that will never be answered, the blankets, still covered in our hound’s fur, that will never again be thrown over the sofa in front of the fireplace, as we discussed all the world’s affairs. All of our family photographs lining the walls and hallways that I had once looked at with them, reminiscing about our wonderful times past, now stared back at me, accusingly, as if I could, somehow, explain where my mother and my father had gone. Our once warm family home was on these two cold Fridays reduced to an arctic museum of the two lives most precious to me, now departed.

In particular, I can remember the afternoon after my father’s passing, like it was yesterday. In the late morning, I was at the hospital where my father had passed away only hours earlier to collect his personal effects. I then went to Mass. I then went to thank the Chaplain who had given my father his Last Rites the night before. Keeping very busy, I then went to my mother’s grave, to look at where my father would soon be buried, too, and to speak to the cemetery’s keeper. I then bought some groceries and, finally, I arrived ‘home’, alone. I was so tired but I could not sleep. I went to our kitchen to brew some tea in our now dark and eerily empty family house. The only sound I heard was a very cold wind that kept blowing outside. I went to sit in my now late father’s cavernous home office that adjoined our house, to try and work out what to do next. Mercifully, only my older siblings knew, and so I could have a moment of peace to get myself together. The silence of the moment was pierced only by wind and my periodic stirring of an old teaspoon in my favourite, weathered, large, NAVY mug — a mug I had kept at ‘home’ for my regular visits to my parents. I sat in my father’s well-worn chair and looked around my father’s study, which looked, strangely, as if he would return, imminently. My father’s new books ‘to be read’ were all piled up on his desk, next to his quirky collection of bookmarks, with his favourite cardigan left on his coffee table, as if my father would be coming in soon to don it as the sun went down and the temperature fell even further. The study’s walls were full of my father’s testamurs and awards, and photographs of what was now his mourning family. This was my father’s den, the ultimate Connolly safe space. And, there, as I looked around and finally up, looking down on my father’s desk in his study, was, as always, his portrait of my late beloved mother, which he had painted when they were first engaged. And looking at my late mother’s portrait in my late father’s study…that was it. I lost it. I cried, uncontrollably, for the better part of an hour. I cried and cried. And cried. I have never felt more bereft than at that time when it had really sunk in that my beloved parents had departed this life, forever.

In my life, I have been around a good deal of death — especially horrific, wartime death. Yet, despite all that, there is nothing to prepare you, even when they are dying, for the dreadfulness of your own parents’ passing away. It is not just that the two people who knew everything about you have gone, and that the guiding lights of your young life have gone out, but that what was a sun — with all its warmth and gravitational pull — had forever set.

As that cold Friday afternoon became an even colder and later Friday afternoon, and I could do nothing but weep, I put on my favourite old ‘Paddington Bear’ duffel coat (itself a gift from my parents) and went for a very long walk through old Bowral and to our local war memorial, on my own, my only memory of which is that I walked there simply because I used to go there with my parents for ANZAC Day and Remembrance Day. All I remember is walking to the memorial, then walking through the nearby gardens, and then continuing on, aimlessly, in a cold wind, tearfully pondering that my parents, who had walked these same paths with me only recently, had now both passed away. Eventually, as darkness had fallen, I turned and rambled onwards for home. When I did, finally, return, near-frozen, to our family’s home, I found missed calls from all sorts of unusual numbers. The calls missed were, I learned, people who had found out, by some means, that my father had passed away and gone to join my mother. Distraught as I was, these calls had to be returned, one after the other, for hours. My profound grief had now to be put on hold as it was time for me to be strong for everyone else.

No one tells you this part, but, even as your most loved ones pass and you are, inside, convulsing, there is, also, a simply endless number of practical matters for you to attend to in your parents’ passing, just as there was in their living. The sheer volume of these mean you are too focused on the rituals and organisational demands of mourning to think, at all, of yourself. So, for instance, in order to have your loved one’s remains prepared for burial, their death certificates are required (the bureaucratic state is both perpetual and without any feelings), and you have to contact funeral homes and undertakers. There are also their headstones to be devised, there are graves to be dug, as well as pastors to be spoken to about the funeral service. You, for a period of time, cease your grieving to, instead, ponder curious questions of both form and substance, which in my case, for each of my parents’ Requiems, were, among others:

“What Scriptures did they most like?”

“What Hymns did they like?”

“Do I give the Eulogy (again)?”

“Which family tartan do we put on the booklet?”

“We need a piper for the burial.”

As hard as all this is, through all this immediate aftermath, you will find that your friends and, really, everyone else in your family’s orbit will be very supportive. People — well, almost all people — are at their best at these times. There are endless offers of help. Food is brought around to you and, even, muddy chocolate cakes are made for you. The emptied family house is filled, sadly only temporarily, with friends old and new — people who knew my parents in another time — who come by to pass on their condolences, offer help, and promise to attend the funeral (and they all do, touchingly). As the chief mourner hosting the other mourners, you serve gallons of tea and coffee, and whole patisseries are devoured, as endless stories are told about your mother and father. You learn things about your parents in their passing that you never knew in their lifetimes. Their old friends tell you, above all, about your parents before you.

I prepared both my parents’ eulogies, with my older siblings’ help, which was an unexpectedly cathartic experience. I delivered a lengthy eulogy for my mother and, then, a few years later, a similarly long eulogy for my father, so as to render to each of my late parents their deserved tributes. In this respect, I would urge everyone who can speak to do this: to give a well-prepared eulogy and to seek the opportunity to speak, well and fully, of the loved one who has passed. Do not have any regrets that you did not speak up. Do not farewell those you love without offering their lives a fitting encomium.

However, for all these uplifting moments in this awful time, very sadly, the celebrations of your parents’ lives will, too, soon come to an end. Within a few weeks, the funeral will have been celebrated and the burial done, the wakes held, the farewells made, and, soon, you will be left, alone, again. It will be you who will stand (hopefully with family) before the marble slab that covers over the parental grave, closing that very final chapter of the lives of the two people who knew everything about you.

What makes your grief so uniquely dreadful is that, while you are in the midst of this emotional maelstrom, the world just continues, remorselessly, to turn, without any pity for you. Your loss is gargantuan — but it is, again, your loss.

So, if I can be entirely open, here, for those readers now enduring the worst and wondering whether their tribulations are unique, rest assured this was and is a simply dreadful time. For my part, my own early years as a parentless son were spent trying to discharge the duties of my own profession, as well as carry out my late parents’ affairs — and, all the while, mired in, on most days, an abyssal sadness.

Given this, for well over a decade, I have tried to do what Catholics do whenever there is suffering and loss, and that is to keep the Faith and accept one’s tragedies as, “God’s Will”. After all, did not Jesus, also, mourn and, famously, weep at the death of Lazarus? For all my sincere attempts at understanding the work of Providence, all that kept me going, at times, was what one of my late parents’ close friends said to me at each of their funerals: “Remember, you are always their son.”

Yet, looking back, I really wish I had known what to do and who to speak to, but, sadly, I did not. I just tried, each day, to make my own way, to tough it out, to grit my way through it, and I did all this, almost always, quite badly. I even found myself, at all manner of times of day, going for long walks, alone, with no real destination other than reaching some place to escape what I could not, actually, escape. So the days of trudging on became weeks, and then the weeks became months, and then the months have become years.

As important as Christmas and Easter are to all Christians, they became times I now endured much more than celebrated. I did find it touching when my close friends would, as Mother’s Day or Father’s Day approached, call me and see how I was faring. But try as I did to wear a mask in public of the bravest face, it always slipped, and I was engulfed, in private, by what was a most lonely and, sometimes, almost unbearable grief. For so many years now, and, indeed, the rest of my life, my late parents’ respective birthdays have been and are commemorated by going not to our family home, but, instead, by going to Church and then visiting their graves.

Indeed, despite this, as year after year — after year — went by, my sadness would, at times, be replaced by an almost enraged jealousy, which would get the better of even my very dour self. I simply envied anyone with parents. I envied anyone with their mother and father — whether both, or even just one, it did not matter. My envy of those with parents often overwhelmed me. I can remember once, rather loudly reprimanding a very dear colleague who had let their mother’s phone call go unanswered, resentful they did not appreciate their enormous blessing. I think I ruined a Christmas lunch by querying, loudly, the character of a colleague who was happy his parents would be overseas for the festive season. I realise that none of this reflects well on me but these and like incidents do reflect how I (and I suspect others) have felt.

So, for me, the major events in my life at which both my parents should have been present — and, I kept noting, everyone else’s parents were — were endured. The important news that I desperately wanted to share with my mother and my father went unshared. What should have been was, simply, not. And so, instead, I spent the last decade-plus trying to fight through this misery, on my own. The constant brave faces were continually put on for year after year to assure everyone that, really, I was okay. After all, I had been a naval officer, I had been in wars, and I was, by now, an experienced lawyer. Throughout my life, I had always been the executor of various important duties, as well as a trustee and advocate for other people’s interests. I was someone who had always ‘hacked it’ and who had endured all of life’s hardships. And yet, even so, private person that I am, I am compelled to admit here that I have found this time to be so very hard.

Part of why I would write and then stop writing this account is I simply find it so hard to share my feelings on so personal a subject: the misery caused by the loss of two people that I have loved so deeply all my life and whose absence I have mourned every day since they left.

My parents were so loved by me, and so important to me, that I will never forget them, especially not the most precious memories I have of them. For all this pain of loss, I actually love talking about my wonderful parents and all that we shared together. I do not want, ever, to ‘move on’ from remembering them. I do not, ever, want ‘closure’, either. And no one who mourns their loved ones ever has ‘closure’ or ‘moves on’ — and nor should they. If our idea of the Divine is of a love that surpasses all our understanding, then like the Divine, our own most loved ones are never closed to us, nor do we ever move on from them.

For my own part, I have, often, sensed that my parents remain very close to me. It is a feeling both comforting and hard to express in words — an encounter with my very own sept of the “communion of the saints”. I have had this recurring and unchanging dream for some years now that my late parents and I are separated but looking at each other, silently, as if through a glass, but not darkly, awaiting that time when we meet, again, face to face. They were the best of parents, and their absence is as painful for me, today, as it was when they passed. I have, simply, missed them, so much, for year after year now.

With time, the wounds of loss do not heal but I have grown to be more reflective, more empathetic, and even more grateful, for the great blessing of being my parents’ youngest son.

I think of my mother and my father every day. As a very sentimental person, I often go through my many boxes of the letters and cards they sent to me. I use one of my parents’ many fountain pens every day, and I am using one now to help write and edit the, literally, endless drafts of this reflection, as their portraits look down on me, hopefully proudly, as I reflect on my grief for their passing, here, all these many years later. I visit my parents’ grave regularly, which provides me with some solace, and some sense that even as they have passed away, my visiting the site of their interment brings me as close to them as I still can be in this life. I, also, though, on some days, still feel their loss with a deep if always private sadness.

True it is that the price we pay for love is, ultimately, this desolation at our loved ones’ passing, and their absence from us in this life. It is, always, okay to not be okay.

In terms of what wisdom, I have, bitterly, acquired, and can pass on to the mourning, and those who read my words and who now endure this very worst of times, it is that grief is a heavy cross and one that you must not try and carry on your own. Do not turn inwards, and try and play the stoic, or, especially, the martyr. Do not, in other words, do what I so stupidly did. Instead, speak to those closest to you, who know you, and who will help you — and if they are your true friends, they will take the time to listen to you. True friends help each other to bear the load, and, as in war, true friends are the good comrades who will carry their wounded from life’s battlefields to safety. Do not let the years pass you by, in a lonely and quietly resentful wretchedness, however justified and however comprehensible this may be to someone like me.

Remember, also, in your own sadness, that there are so many others — a veritable legion of the silently bereft — who are in your exact same position, so seek them out, accompany them, and help each other to keep going. You will become only stronger when you help others to bear their own crushing burdens of loss.

As for me, to get through my worst days, I have, for over a decade now, tried to think of what my parents would want me to do. Instead of missing what I had yesterday, I think of what they would say to me, today, about my tomorrow.

I suspect that if there is one message that my late parents would want me to pass on to anyone else, it is what they said to me when I was growing up: so much of life is perseverance. My parents had always encouraged me to fight good fights and to run my race, and, however long and arduous the struggle, to persevere until the very end.

I know that my parents would want me to help others — especially those reading this and who are now so deeply mired in their own sorrows — to endure what, sadly, so many others, have now, also, endured, because loving parents, as mine were, are always generous and kind, especially to those so afflicted and laid low by life’s cruelties. My parents would, in particular, say, as they did when I was young, that one must always persevere, regardless of how battered and bruised you may feel, because your perseverance will build strength — and, as my mother and St Paul would say, the strong can then help the weak.

For my own part, and from my own experience, I would say that this time of mourning and grief will give you a unique perspective on our favourite Scottish maxim, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”

You will appreciate that most people are doing their best — and that however impressive may someone’s façade appear to be, behind it will often be found the crumbling ruins that are inevitably left by so much loss and tragedy.

Hopefully, you will emerge from this bleak and truly horrid time, very slowly but surely, a more empathetic and unhurried person, with a profound sense of solidarity for anyone who is stumbling in death’s dark shadow.

The hurt of your losses never goes away. The gaps that your most loved ones leave are never filled. Our only consolation in this life is, though, that the proverb is true: no matter that your parents have passed, you are always their daughter or their son — and death cannot shatter those bonds of love which are from the Divine and are Eternal.

So, my hope, indeed, my prayer, is that God may bless and comfort all who mourn and grieve, in this and all seasons of loss, as well as throughout this earthly pilgrimage, until, finally, all our battles are fought and all our races are run, and we are all called home to be with our most loved ones, together, again.

Amen.

Gray Connolly is a Barrister and Writer in Sydney, Australia