Three Months Without You

I've never known a pain like this.

July 25, 2024

Dad,

I wouldn’t expect things like the anniversary of your death in months to affect me much. Just another day without you, I assumed. Instead, I fell into a sinkhole yesterday, which marked three months. First, my body protected me, and I slept till 6 pm. But then I was up most of the night, so I did a deep dive in Reddit on cardiac arrest, on what it feels like right before you pass out. I have obsessed over your last minutes, memorized every moment Mom told me about it, and went over my conversations with the doctor in my head, but still, it doesn’t make sense to me! How can you have been so stable that they put you in a hallway bed before realizing, hours later, that you needed your own room? It’s fucking preposterous. You were in the ER with chest pain. If you’d gotten to that cath lab before you died, five minutes away from it, you might be alive right now.

I lived 458 months of my life with you in it; 3 doesn’t seem so hard of a number to process, but it is. I have spent a quarter of a year without you here. Our memories are fading—not overwhelmingly so, not yet, but they will. Three months without you is something I never wanted to face. Now I am, and it’s worse than I ever imagined it could be.

I found this Instagram post I wrote ten years ago this week: July 25, 2014. It’s pictured here: Sadie riding a skateboard pushed between you, Dad, and me. The caption was: “Love this shot of my dad and Sadie. She loves him so damn much, and he is the happiest and most involved grandfather I have known. She skated back and forth between the two of us, nervous but trusting, having only known what it is like to be wholly and completely loved.” And I was right to credit you while you were still alive, to make note of your extraordinary presence as a Pop Pop because it never waffled. No matter what was going on in our adult lives, you were there and present and on the floor playing with all the kids. We’d only had Sadie when I wrote the caption, but you were just as good with Adelaide and Leo as you were with their big sister.

We spent a few days in Newport this past month, and I’d like to tell you so much about it. Instead, I told the guide on my solo lighthouse boat tour about you; she sat and listened, and I told her about my health and rare disease, and we toasted you, and she asked for my first name and said she’d put mine on her Dana Farber fundraising tee. I want to tell everyone about you. I wanted to tell the guide that you could’ve probably narrated the tour yourself. You’d have at least gotten us closer so I could snap a better damn picture than the one I’ve got.

This is going to sound dark, but I remember once telling my friend Janet that the only good thing about having such a life-limiting disease was that I didn’t have to watch you and Mom decline and die. But that proved to be a false, jokey moment of hope. I watched you decline this past year; the joy was sucked out of you by my health failure and everything that happened at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and then my near-death by low blood sugar the day after I came home. I think Mom had come into the house, screaming that she couldn’t wake me, and the combination of those two events sucked the life out of you. Mom told me yesterday you’d planned my fucking funeral. I can’t imagine having to plan the funeral of the kids. I pray to God I never have to.

I’m glad you didn’t have to watch me die. I came close last summer twice, but then I came back. You are ashes and dust on top of an armoire, so I know, even in my wildest dreams, where I bring your long-dead body to the ER and demand they restart your heart, you really can’t come back. But I need to figure out a way to see you every day, whether it be via a song we love, a cardinal, or something the kids say. This is too large of a gap, and I need you to fill it. I’m a mouthful of broken teeth, and I need you to step in and fix my smile. I hope it brings you peace if you know I have outlived you. I’m so sorry for all the pain I put you through. I’m sorry for the Amazon boxes and the Instacart orders. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. 

I love you.

Kelly

August 8, 2024

Dad,

Claire’s book Conscious Grieving noted that the 3-6 month period was the hardest wave of grief, and until this past week, I didn’t believe anything would be worse than the shock and awe of the first three months. But it’s settling in now, and the four of us have all agreed things are much worse now than they were a week or two after when we were still in deep denial and survival mode. I think most people think that once the shock wears off, you start to put your life back together. And this is what society expects of us. Wake up, Bergin; the bereavement period has come to an end, and it’s time to get your shit together. And in some ways, I have. I’ve picked up babysitting for a family I truly adore. I love the kids and the parents and the extra money. I’ve also… well, shit. I think that’s the only way I’ve gotten it together in the last three months. All the bad habits I already had before you died have worsened or continued; instead of my body seeing your early and unexpected death as a flashing, neon sign reminding us to seize the day, my body has taken it to mean:  “Seize the daytime hours and turn them into sleep time hours.” Thereby ruining my social life and summer! 

Three months have come and gone, but the discomfort of grief settling into my bones keeps me up at night. My body cannot contain the pain, and so it cries out via a mouthful of sores and broken teeth and knee joints so swollen I can hardly walk to the bathroom. I am an expert in pain, but there are usually peaks and valleys of bodily discomfort throughout the day. Now, three months into my grief, there are no valleys. My mouth is a wide-open sore, and I can’t eat a damn thing. I make ice with Gatorade to stay hydrated, but a meal is nearly impossible. The dog is thrilled with this; he gets what I can't eat. He doesn’t care if it’s just carrots that I am too weak to chew; his canine teeth cut through the vegetable swiftly, and his joy is evident as he wags his tail and then comes in for a snuggle after finishing off my Thai food. But it’s so easy to sleep. My pain is so bad at night and in the early morning. So when I wake up in the worst pain of the day, I just fall back asleep in order not to experience it. It’s always been this way. And now I am facing great emotional pain; why do anything else except sleep through it? Why? Because there are people to see and things to do at the beach club, and I am trying to swim at least three days a week. I am not achieving this goal with all the sleep I get during my waking hours. This week, it’s going to storm every day. I demanded that we take the kids to the movies, so I promised myself that I would wake up on time and get there before they watched Inside Out 2. And I fulfilled it!

We are facing things that we have to face soon but have yet to. On Sunday, the 3 of your kids, grandchildren, and Cliff piled into our respective vehicles and headed into the Lincroft, the town we were raised in, the home of so many memories and so much joy. We hiked the mile-long loop in Thompson Park, and I saw parts of this town that I knew so well that I had never seen before. Adelaide steered the dog along the rocky trail, and Leo picked up every cool stick he saw. Then, it was over, and we exited the forest into the deepest humidity I have ever felt. I could not believe the hike we’d just done, which reminded me of the ones that Matt, Maddy, and I used to take in the Angeles National Forest. Yet here we were in New Jersey, twenty minutes from the Atlantic Ocean. What a beautiful place to grow up. Even if we never did this hike (or many, if any!), we had a grand time at the playgrounds at this park. I remember my dad took us one day when my mom was sleeping off the graveyard shift. And he was the only parent engaged in our activities, whatever made-up game we’d played. He always stepped into our lives, whether we wanted him to or not.

After we did the hike and everyone took off in their separate cars, Pete and I went to see the old house. The home my parents had worked for and owned for twenty years; the place that became not just a house with bedrooms and bathrooms and a kitchen, but a multi-purpose building made for hosting holidays and the Sunday family dinners and Super Bowls and the occasional wildly convincing and brilliant play by the cousins outlining how a sleepover would be to the benefit of all. We were deluded but often got what we wanted. Because that home had a little bit of magic in it, settled on a busy road but with nearly an acre of land. The backyard is large enough for a baseball field and fences. Rachel would hit balls way over the fence, and I’d stew with jealousy and bitterness. I’d make her, the star hitter of our team, go fetch the balls from the house next door. We had so many good memories that I can’t even begin to list them all. It was a childhood filled with a lot of joy in Lincroft. And I’m glad we went.

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If you were here, Dad, you’d be dragging my ass out of bed in the kindest, simplest ways. Just a conversation, just a few suggestions. And you’d be right. Life outside my bed is so much better than life inside it.

I sure do see it now. I promise to make a better effort in your name, Dad. Three months is just about killing me, but I love and miss you desperately.

Love,

Your firstborn