My Story: Part 4 - Emotional Acceptance. Personal Growth By Navigating Through Grief

Part 4: Emotional Acceptance – Bitter truths.

 Read my previous articles:

1)     Part 1: My Story | My Initiative - Introduction

2)     Part 2: Denial – It just can’t be true!

3)     Part 3: Rational Acceptance – Keep on going!

Continue with Part 4 – Emotional Acceptance:

Dad, the only moments I can see your comforting smile, is in my dreams. In those I can clearly see you. I can see you practicing how to walk:

I walk down the nursing home corridor. I stop in front of your room. The door is slightly open. There you are, your arm wrapped around a therapist who gives you advice. Slowly you are taking one step at a time. With every step you take, your smile gets wider and wider. My heart starts pumping heavily in excitement. I am standing there tears running down my cheeks, but a smile on my lips. Just when I start sobbing you are noticing me standing in doorway. Your cheering smile invites me to come in. We hug each other tightly and I feel so relieved.

Yet, when I finally wake up from my own sobbing, it all fades away into the distant space of my memory.

Your physical abilities have barely increased. Your body is still mostly paralyzed, but your tracheal cannula has been removed. The speech therapist and caregivers tell me that you are able to talk a little. But you haven’t spoken to me - yet.

Why?

Why won’t you talk to me? I am your daughter! Talk to me! Tell me that all this has been a very bad joke. Tell me that everything will be okay! Until now you have refused to do so.      

It has been a while since I have visited you. All I do for the past few days is crying. I wander around in the apartment not knowing where to go. I stare out of the window not knowing what to do. Sometimes I also find myself randomly staring at the wall.

I don’t quite know how I feel. Dad, I am falling into pieces. Everything is hurting. Do you even care? Do you care about me? Everything feels so unnecessary, unimportant and useless. I was running. I tried to outrun the pain and the hurt you caused. Maybe if I would be brave enough just a little bit longer it would turn out to be just a big misunderstanding. I tried to make it all better. I failed. I failed badly. 

You took everything. You took my time, my energy, my money, my dreams and my hopes. In the end you took my confidence and my trust. You took everything and threw it away. How could you do that to me?

I sit down. My hands are shaking. I hold on tightly to my pillow. I start sobbing again unable to hold back my tears. Slowly it is creeping up inside of me: Dad, you are irreplaceable, but you are not the man you used to be anymore. You have left. You left us behind. You left me behind. You betrayed me.

 What happened

There I was, a 29 years old woman in midst of a life crisis. It has been one and a half years ago since my father’s stroke. I had tried desperately to belief he would recover properly to be able to manage his own life again by himself. I couldn’t outrun my life. At some point in time I had to face my reality and its bitter truths:

My lost time

In the beginning, instead of going out with friends on Saturday nights, I had spent my weekends driving to his apartment, sorting out his belongings. I have been looking through his letters in the search of insurances or anything that could help. I didn’t find anything. We had cleaned out his apartment by giving away things, but most things we simply had to throw out. 

Later on, I spent my time trying to visit him as much I could in the hospital and nursing home. I took the train on Friday nights after work or very early morning on Saturdays. I would return on Sunday nights. Each route took approximately 4 hours, if everything went smoothly. This was rarely the case. Sometimes there has been fire aside of the train track or someone trespassing the way or storms that had thrown trees upon the train track. Sometimes, my trains were being redirected, not knowing where you would end up. A single trip could easily end up to last at least 6 hours. So it wasn’t unusual to spend up to 12 or 13 hours on a train on a single weekend.

My lost energy

Being on the train sometimes relief treat. I wasn’t responsible for the train ride. I couldn’t influence how fast the train would go nor where I was heading. I simply let it happen. It sometimes helped to let go of some of the stress by watching the changing landscape outside of the window. Still, being on the train didn’t allow proper sleep.

After a few months considering my working hours and the amount of traveling I could only manage to go for a visit every two to three weeks as it got too exhausting. I was exhausted.

My lost money

My father had a life of his own before his stroke. He was a biologist and used to be a dedicated cancer researcher. He founded his own healthcare start-up. He wanted to revolutionize the cancer research industry. It failed - his money was gone – he was left with debts.

He wanted to improve people’s health. He reevaluated his abilities and started to work as an alternative practitioner. When I used to visit him back then, it was great to see how patients had gotten good friends with him. Every one of them had their own healing story of how my dad had helped them.

Still, he had his debts (from the failed start-up) he had to pay back. Even back then I sometimes financially supported him, but I never knew the actual amount. Just after his stroke, receiving his letters and bills, I knew. Overwhelmed by the events and still hoping for his quick recovery at the very beginning, I wanted to help him clear his debts. All these years that must have been a burden for him. I hoped if there wasn’t this burden anymore for him it would help his spirits to improve quicker. I started negotiating with the banks that previously had given him his start-up loans. I negotiated low settlement amounts. I wanted him to have it as easily as possible to recover and come back. Eventually, I was the one clearing his debts. .

My lost dreams

I can remember that I never really had a specific job title in mind when I was a kid or teenager, but I always knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to help people to understand their motivation and interactions. I still have this picture in mind standing in front of an audience giving a speech, discussing and debating about various topics. Even my mom remembers me telling her about my dreams when I was a kid. .

Another big dream of mine was to travel to world. I wanted to see all possible spots and sights. I wanted to make my own experiences - globetrotting. The feeling of stepping into an airplane in one city and getting out of the plane somewhere else always filled with tremendous excitement. The sizzling feeling during take-off and when the wheels finally hit new and yet (for me) undiscovered ground somewhere else in the world. That’s the best thing for me.

I planned to have a job which includes traveling or at least one that helps me to save money. I dreamt to take a break after some years of work without worrying about money. I wanted to pack my backpack and  take-off into a year full of adventures around the globe.

Here I was - I had become a consultant in an international company. My work included traveling, supporting people to understand their motivation and interactions and also (within conducting training session) I found myself standing in front of an “audience” explaining, discussing and debating about various topics. I also had been able to save money. I was on track!

However, after my father’s stroke - my savings were decreasing – costly train rides, my father’s debts settlements and his nursing home costs. My savings got smaller until the last was gone. We have never been able to really celebrate my success nor was I able to take my planned break to travel the world.

My lost hopes

Talking about my father’s condition usually makes people trying to find words of support and encouragement. They say that he is still young (today 65 years old) for a health condition like this. Too young to have had a stroke and everything that came along with it and that we would recover soon. I kept hearing stories about someone who came back recovered after a couple of months and with proper physical training. Yes, of course this does happen, but sometimes it just does NOT happen. Welcome to reality. Of course, being optimistic is important and I wanted to believe so too, but sometimes this is just not the case. I think sometimes these statements of well-meant encouragement make it even worse and fuel unrealistic expectations. They make it very hard to confront yourself with what is happening in the “here and now”. So you keep on sitting next to the nursing home bed, you keep on waiting and waiting, you keep on spending your money and time. In the end you just get disappointed over and over again, because the person doesn’t recover well,… not well enough, … not even close to how they had been before. Being constantly confronted with “these hopes and well-wishes” made me feel bad and heartless as I started to feel differently – I didn’t believe anymore that he would ever improve significantly. Accepting this situation felt like I would say ‘I don’t love my father’. It felt like I would give up on him.

My lost confidence

I felt silly for believing in what so many were saying about his recovery. I felt ashamed for what had happened to him and what had happen to us. We were good people. Weren’t we? We wanted to help, but failed so badly. I was unsure what to think about all of this. On the one hand I was living the career of my dreams and on the other hand I wasn’t able to help us out of this mess. I was so overwhelmed by the amount of additional responsibilities and duties. I felt insecure. How did other people handle this? How were they able to cope with this? How can anybody do this? I thought I was strong and I used to be able to manage myself through the toughest challenges, but this made me feel like I’m drowning. I felt so small. Would I have been able to avoid all of that, if I had done something differently? Should I have been pushier to find out how high my father’s debts were? Should I have been more supportive? Was I to na?ve? If just had known better ….

I started to doubt my intuition, my thoughts and all of my choices.

My lost trust

Throughout the years my father always supported us as good as possible. He always encourages my brother and me to be smart and brave. We should go out into the world and should make our own experiences. I still remember me being a kid and sitting with him talking and debating about various things. As a kid there have probably been other things that were more interesting, so sometimes of course I hated it. Nevertheless, he wanted us to use our brain, to have our own mind, to be able to switch perspectives and to think ahead.  

He did what he could to prepare us for adulthood and our own independent lives. Little did we know then, how he must had struggled with his own life and career paths. Still, I wished that he would have confided in us and that he would have listened to us. I wished he had listened to us to take better care of his own physical health condition. He didn’t.

 If my father wasn’t able to trust us even as adults, if I wasn’t able to trust him because of this; and if I wasn’t able to even trust myself anymore – how was anybody else supposed to trust me?

What I have learned:

“You are in the driver’s seat of your life and you can be anybody who you want to be - go wherever you want to go”. No, sometimes we are NOT. We are not responsible for every single event that happens in our lives. Lives are interconnected and a decision and action of someone else does interfere with our own life. Sometimes it is not about who we want to be and where we want to go. Sometimes it is rather about accepting who we are and where we currently stand in life. Of course we could take the burden of thinking we are ultimately responsible for all these horrible and difficult events and their bitter outcomes. We can keep on questioning ourselves for the rest of our lives. We could debate about the “if I just had done, if I would have, if I had known etc.”, but it still wouldn’t change the past. The past is already done, it is history. To turn around the downward spiral, is about accepting what we did and accepting our past motives. With this understanding we have the chance to behave differently in the future.

I used to be very cautious about differentiating my private and business life. I don’t think it was really bad, I just think it is not necessary to spill all private details at my workplace. At work I wanted to focus and ongoing projects, my career development and improvement.  I always felt very much defined by what I was doing. My work and my work ethic meant a lot to me. Not reaching my own standards and expectations was not acceptable for me, but disappointing others was more than unacceptable to me.

However, I have learned that if your private life takes such a turn it consumes a lot of your energy to cope with. It inevitably impacts your performance at work. You mental condition has an effect on your physical health. If you get carried away by sadness, your body starts showing you that your energy is declining. I got sick more frequent than usually, whether it was hidden sadness as having a cold one too many times or heavy stomach aches. The harder I worked to avoid feeling sad, the more I felt drained and my life seemed to slip out of my hands. I was exhausted.

My father had worked hard all his life and it was sad to see him like this unable to take care of himself anymore. He did all he could to provide us with what was necessary to start independently into adulthood. As kids we look up to our parents. They always seem prepared. They know what to say, to take your sorrows away and motivate you. They seem like super heroes, but suddenly we realize - there are just human, too. They also fail from time to time. Their wisdom comes from experiences.

Though we might not be responsible for everything that happens, we still can decide how we want to approach those difficult situations. We can decide to be honest and kind with ourselves and others. We can decide not run away. We can decide not hide away and not to ignore everything around us. We can decide to be here and to help one another.

Acceptance is hard, but I have learned that it is okay to not know it all. I have learned that struggles are part of our life journey. I have learned to accept to sometimes feeling low, helpless or sad. That doesn’t mean I am overall incapable, but rather that I am human, too. I have learned that it is okay to give myself the time and space to cope with my feelings and my emotions.

 Most of all, I have learned to accept my vulnerability.

Thank you for your time and stay tuned for the next article:

Part 5 – Experimentation

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Cathérine Ngoli

[This article reflects my personal or private experiences and thoughts.]