Grief and Guilt

I’ll come clean. On the night David died, while he lay dying, I was engrossed in a Humphrey Bogart movie. It was gripping and intense.

At a crucial point in the movie, Matt said something about David. We stopped the movie and went over to his hospital bed. He wasn’t breathing.

Our family room, where the tv and couches are, adjoins the dining room, where David’s hospital bed and medical supplies had taken over. It has 1895-era pocket doors: fine doors of dark wood that slide into the walls and create a large doorway, six feet wide. A friend remarked, when I was admitting my guilty secret, “You were in the room when David died.”

In her March 30, 2020, Dear Therapist column for Atlantic.com, Lori Gottlieb tells of her father’s recent death. He died of complications after years of congestive heart disease, during the covid-19 outbreak. She states, “I was there to kiss his cheeks and massage his forehead, to hold his hand and say goodbye. I was at his bedside when he took his last breath.”. I’m attuned to such statements in all their nuance. She paints a vivid picture. Well, she doesn’t SAY she wasn’t watching Bogart, but at least she was holding her dad’s hand.

But Gottlieb continues her narrative. Five days before he died, she developed a cough and decided to stop visiting. They spoke every day, except Saturday, when she was busy gathering supplies for the lockdown. The next day he could barely talk and just said, “I love you,” before losing consciousness. The next day, he died.

Gottlieb was wracked with guilt. Had she been in denial, even though they had talked about his impending death? Had she failed him?

A few days ago, early in the morning. I read her column.. I lie in bed, scrolling down on my phone, tears streaming down my temples onto the pillow as I squeezed my eyes shut to clear my vision. Jim woke up and I handed him the phone to read. He observed that we all focus on what we regret, what we didn't do. She had spent every day with her dying father and was protecting him from the infection she had, even if it wasn’t covid-19. Had she donned a mask and gown and visited, and he’d gotten sick, she’d feel bad. Perhaps there was no way not to feel bad.

In her book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, she asks, Is it ever enough? No, it’s not. Can we make it enough? I hope so.

I’m tired of keeping this secret. Perhaps someone out there also feels guilty for not orchestrating the perfect death scene. Death isn’t pretty, picturesque, or neat. It’s ugly; it’s brutal; it’s gut-wrenching.

That evening, I took a walk with R’el. Once a week, as she is leaving work (she’s a psychiatrist at Bellevue in Manhattan), she phones and we walk together, 210 miles apart. She remarked that David was a very private person. It might have comforted me to sit by his side and hold his hand as he breathed his last. It would not have pleased him.

Thanks, R’el.