My Yahrzeit Trailer.
How Grief Manifested Into Frustration in A Pandemic Year.
By Shannon O’Neill
Author’s Note: The word ‘Yahrzeit’ is Yiddish and is translated to mean “time of year.” In Judaism, there is a focus on carrying on the memory of those before us from generation to generation. Based on Jewish law, the Yahrzeit is the day one year following the death of a loved one as calculated in accordance with the Hebrew calendar.
Grief is a consistently funky beast. You never know how it will hit you, or if it will at all. But grief during this strange, discombobulating pandemic year can warp even the most normal reactions to things.
Today is my Father’s Yahrzeit.
A year ago on this day, in the midst of our very own Plague Year, after a 6-hour ride to Delaware from Upstate New York with a wonderful cousin I had never met before, I had to sit with my Father in a small, silent hospital room and say goodbye to him. He lay dreaming morphine dreams from a sleep he would never wake from after a series of COPD-related recurring respiratory issues he’d been battling for years. He was 76.
Because my Dad did not leave a will, his mobile home has been tied up in probate for the past year. No one wants it because he was a hoarder and left it in an abominable condition. He clung to it and resented anyone commenting on what a health hazard he had allowed it to become even BEFORE he got seriously ill. Now I have no choice but to have it demolished. I don’t live in Delaware. I will never live there. It is not sellable. I got so sick from being inside the trailer for just a few hours (I’m asthmatic) when helping my relatives look for important paperwork in it after he passed away that I needed Prednisone for two weeks afterwards.
Even when just visiting my Dad, I’d have a tough time breathing afterwards. He’d want to sit and talk for hours inside of the dark, musty home; not wanting to acknowledge it was not healthy or safe for anyone, let alone his asthmatic daughter (or himself with COPD). It was tough for my husband as well; I am anosmic, so the smell didn’t get to me as badly; but my husband would have to frequently duck outside for fresh air.
Dad desperately wished to be able to die in his home and he wasn’t able to, while I was wracked with worry for years that he would be left to die all alone in that den of filth. I hated that he lived there. I hated that for him. He couldn’t even sleep in his own bedroom, it was so filled with junk; he slept on a shitty little daybed in the living room area.
Dad was a maddeningly difficult person, and while we were very close, it was not an easy relationship. He had clear mental health issues he refused to acknowledge, he had grown up in a dysfunctional family, and he fought multiple addiction issues throughout his life (some more successfully than others). This could make him be ornery, prickly, and highly obstinate. He would often resort to getting seriously nasty to get people to back off and keep from calling him out on his shit. That often worked. He could also be incredibly funny, intelligent, caring, and one of the most literate people I’ve ever met; but that doesn’t negate that throughout our relationship he was so tough to deal with, especially as he got older. I often had to battle the frustration of wanting to be there for him with the dread of how unbelievably draining our visits would be, and how painful it was because of seeing the conditions he insisted on living in. There was a constant feeling I was being a neglectful daughter. I know *rationally* that I did all I could for him, but that doesn’t make the guilt lessen any. Guilt is often an irrational emotion and will have its way with you no matter what you do. In spite of how much of a pain in the ass as he was, it ultimately didn’t matter to me when it came to trying to help him live a happier life. I loved him and I didn’t want him to suffer, even if that suffering was very much a cage of his own making. In the last ten years, it would break my heart every time I saw him.
When I went into his trailer with my relatives for the first time after he died, I completely broke down. I wasn’t even angry, I was just wracked with guilt for not pushing him harder to live in an Assisted Living place, or hiring one of those Trash-Removal companies to help make his trailer more livable. We certainly offered to help pay for it and offered to help him navigate finding another home (we found out after he passed away that he had the money to do this, he just refused to). We also offered to help him get an electronic scooter/wheelchair when his breathing got worse and his mobility suffered as a result. Despite all these efforts, while my Dad clearly was not always in a good relationship with reality, he was still lucid and stubborn as a mountain goat. He was staying put! He didn’t need some goddamn scooter! He had no interest in leaving that place or in elevating his quality of life one iota, no matter how untenable living this way became. He had this deep need to believe and present himself as if he was destitute; and so he lived as if he was, even though reality did not support this delusion.
Now on his yahrzeit, which as a Jewish convert, I observe; I am flooded with so many feelings of remorse, guilt, anger, and frustration with him for leaving me to deal with his mobile abomination and the fraught situation of what to do with it presents. During a pandemic year, I have been left to sit with the grief roiling inside me without nearly as many distractions and outreach as I would have been in a normal year. Living in a bubble compounded with the death of a parent truly makes a pretzel of my grief in ways that make me constantly try to it bat away, as if that will somehow change the situation.
This trailer has become a symbol for this grief and it is a battle to fight the guilt I have for needing to tear down the home my Dad fought so hard to stay in. His entire life is in it. But trying to find any semblance of meaningful things to salvage from it is impossible at this point. It’s too dangerous to go inside, it’s too far away from where I live (and I currently do not drive) to stay and sort through, and even if you did manage to salvage anything in there, the entire home is wall-to-wall in nicotine, mold, and G-d knows what else.
I have no choice, and the fact of the matter is, he left me with no choice. Just like I had no choice but to let him live his life in a way he stubbornly chose to, which was not a happy or healthy one, but it was the way he wished to live. I hate that I have to destroy my Father’s only home, one he cherished in spite of the reality it was non-habitable by the end, and the cold truth that moving may well have extended his life. But I also hate that I am left to deal with a mess he knew I would inherit and chose not to make it easier on our family before he passed.
Lately I have been having dreams about being inside his trailer, now my albatross of grief. I can hear his voice admonishing me for not sorting through more of it, not donning a hazmat suit and saving the torn rags that had been his life’s quilt. I have woken up crying more than once. But today on my Dad’s yahrzeit, I realize that it is just the grief working its way through me, the way we have all had to work through the pandemic and the tremendous loss it has caused, the way I have had to work through the probate, and now the way I have to work through the ocean of sorrow I still have for what my Dad went through. Yahrzeits are meant to help with grief, but they are also to help you remember that the grief is there because you loved the person who is now gone.
In spite of that bloody trailer still managing to wreak havoc on my heart a year after my Dad’s death, even if I only have a handful of things left remaining from the remnants of his life, even when the lot where his trailer sat is finally clear of any proof he had ever been there, I will still love him, still miss him, and still picture him sitting on that daybed; my albatross of love.
