The Place My Grief Has Come to Know

Earlier this month, I made a trip to a tiny churchyard in rural Alberta, Canada for the third time in seven years. The first was to bury my grandma, the second to bury my dad, and this most recent trip was to bury my uncle along with the ashes of my cousin who died in 1985, the year I was born. Each visit has been roughly in the summer, ranging from May to August. But this trip, in the middle of July, corresponded with canola blooms so bright yellow, my heart ached with the beauty of the place.

I remember being in this churchyard sometime in my teens, about an hour from where my grandma lived. At that time, the location was even more obscure, before smartphones and GPS on every device. My dad was born and raised in Alberta, but left after medical school, and my brother and I were raised in the US. As kids, we spent parts of many summers on long stretches of road between Montana, Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, and Washington. That particular summer, we visited the churchyard with my dad and my aunt, my dad’s older sister. With a dad as stoic as mine, it was one of the rare times I saw him cry as we stood under a tree beside the grave of my grandfather, who died at the age of 50, when my dad was 15. It was a loss that sat at the foundation of my growing up, understanding there was a pillar of my family who I would never know. And, at my most self-aware, trying to imagine how that loss must have affected everything about my dad’s life. 

It was a significant milestone when my dad reached and passed age 50, living longer than his dad had. My dad was an emergency physician and spent his life and career learning everything he could about how the human body functions and how to treat acute illness and injury. He was diagnosed with cancer less than a year after he retired and died at home five and a half years later, in October 2020, at the age of 67. My son, my first child, had just turned a year old. I had been experiencing grief since my dad’s diagnosis, and experienced it differently at each stage. There was the grief of the initial news, the grief of each scan that came back with difficult results, the grief of acknowledging a few years in that this was likely not going to get any better, the grief of watching my dad’s own grief, the grief of video calls in lieu of in-person visits due to the risks of COVID transmission at the height of the pandemic (before rapid tests and vaccines existed), and the grief as those video calls turned into brief phone calls of me sharing the new things my infant son was doing while my dad could only listen. In the weeks and days before he died, I was able to sit by my dad’s side, hold his arm, and recite the names of all the people who loved him. After he died, I stayed with him until the funeral home came to take him.

Because of the pandemic, another painful truth we faced, like many of those who lost loved ones at that time, was that we were unable to safely gather and lay him to rest until almost two years after he died. My dad lived and traveled all over the world, and he chose this tiny churchyard in Alberta, near his parents, as his final resting place. When we gathered in 2022, with his family and closest friends, I was pregnant with my daughter, just as I had been pregnant with my son when we were last there to bury my grandma in 2019. 

As we gathered again recently to lay my uncle and cousin to rest, I couldn’t shake this generational hand-me-down I’ve felt for years. Now it’s me, crying for my dad in this tiny churchyard, as my kids look up at me, only able to imagine this grandfather they will never know. I think sometimes about whether they will come to wonder about the ways this has affected everything about my life. And I hope, for their sake and mine, that I’ll have years in my life beyond the span of my dad’s life, just as he had years beyond his own dad’s.

Intricately woven into this grief, too, is the fact that we left for this trip a year to the day since our dog Wiley suddenly and unexpectedly died last summer, due to complications from a hemorrhagic stroke. My husband and I adopted Wiley when he was nine weeks old. He was the joy of our lives, and our love for him only grew as we had our kids. It was about 30 hours from the time we had any inclination he was sick until he died at the emergency vet, when the vet called us just past midnight to tell us they had initiated CPR that ultimately was not successful. I drove in the darkness of the night to lay with our sweet boy one last time while his body was still warm. He was only 7 years old. I am still stunned by the suddenness, the inability to say goodbye in a way fitting for the beautiful, cherished being he was. The pain of that loss was searing in a way that was different from the pain I felt when I lost my dad and the grief is intertwined as I continue to move through the world without them.

My kids have grown accustomed to looking up at me when they hear my voice start to tremble. I’m trying to teach them that death is not something to be scared of talking about, that it’s human to grieve. I want them to know their grandpa would be so delighted to see them now, and that it’s hard for me that he can’t. I want them to understand what Wiley’s life showed us about how quickly our time together can come and go. That life is joy and life is sorrow. And that the most honest thing you can do is to allow yourself to experience all of it.