Death Of A Loved One: Grief, Relief, and Shame Converge

All week I’ve been avoiding my answering machine.  Something just told me nothing good would come from the phone lines this week, which may be why I let two of my cordless phones’ batteries go dead far from their chargers.   Every evening I came home and glanced at the harbinger of doom out of the corner of my eye feeling just a little plunge of my stomach if the telltale red light was blinking.

By Wednesday afternoon, things appeared to be normal, I’d only gotten a reminder call from the dentist and, despite being on the no-call list, some one trying to sell me lawn-seeding wanted to make sure I got on the list early.

Thursday night I decided to sit down and do my taxes because my father, the CPA who does them for half of the South (sometimes for free), thinks I should know how to do my own taxes.  About an hour into TaxCut, I noticed some things in the “Credits” section that I had a question about.  So, I called my parents house.  I should have known immediately something was up because my father answered the phone — actually a silent alarm went off in my brain but I just plowed ahead anyway and said, “Hey, I have a tax question.”

Right then he just said, “O.K., but just so you know, your grandmother passed away about an hour ago.”  Just like that.  The palliative nurse was arriving to call the time so he asked to call me back.

After I put the phone down, I said a prayer for my grandmother’s soul and I thanked God that her suffering is over.  There was a mixture of sadness and relief; there still is.

For some reason, every time I dream of my grandmother, she is always feeding Pugly. The last time I went to visit her, she was more excited to see him than me.

But as I sat there in the quiet of my apartment, I am ashamed to admit that I began to think about how her death will affect me.  I don’t mean, emotionally or spiritually.  I’m not talking about any kind of will either — I’m not in it; it’s easier to know and accept that long before.

No, I started to worry about the timing of her funeral and the negative impact it will have on my employment.  After all, the economy is not doing well and since the beginning of the year, I have had certain detractors, who can’t seem to find anything wrong with my work so they find other annoying things to complain about — like what time I come to work (no one seems to notice how late I leave), whether I smile enough in meetings, or if I have killed enough trees this week printing an almost replica of last week’s meeting paperwork.  I started to think about how I am the Integration Specialist on the two top priority projects; one is doing a partial go-live on Monday morning, which everyone is far more anxious about than they should be; and the other is a week away from starting systems testing but I haven’t begun setting up what I need to because every time I wanted to work on it to get ahead, my priorities were reshifted to the other project.

So, I feel a lot of pressure and angst about upsetting the indelicate balance that exists, particularly as the department re-org goes into effect starting this coming Monday.

And I feel ashamed that any of this has crossed my mind when my grandmother has passed away.

Tagged as: death, family, funeral, grief, photography, TaxCut, taxes, work