109: SOLO MINI episode: No one wants pianos anymore

Navigating Midlife Grief: A Personal Journey

In this deeply emotional and personal video, host Ann Marie McQueen  shares her experience of navigating midlife grief and loss, specifically focusing on the recent death of her father. 

An audio essay about grief, loss, Boomers and their stuff.

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Transcript

0:00

Hi. Okay. I'm going to try not to. Cry. This is about what's been happening. And where I've been. And where I know a lot of you are. This is my personal take on the inevitability of midlife grief and loss. And. Stuff. It was the worst sound I have ever heard. Worse than all the other terrible things I've heard in my work in life, up until now. Things like two vehicles hitting each other or microphone feedback or anything? The band. Yes. Ever produced or someone vomiting or a poorly played tuba. The door closing behind someone I loved who was never coming back. Two mothers sobbing on either side of a courtroom, one for the loss of her murder daughter. The other. At the conviction of her killer son. The sound of my own two shoulders dislocating at the same time in a yoga class. The crackling of flames and golfing someones house. My niece or nephew screaming when they were little and got heard. Or my younger brother's panicked voice on the other end of an international call. Delivering terrible. Life-changing news. Those are terrible things I've heard in my life and work. But a few months ago. Standing in my parents' almost empty house. The house, my brother and I came home to from the hospital. The worst sound I've ever heard. Was there a family piano being dropped into the back of a truck. Alongside the deep thud of the weight of it hitting the bottom. Came dozens of jarring discordant notes struck all at once. Followed by an uneasy reverberation. Anderson Cooper talks about these moments. So aptly on the beautiful grief permission podcast of his all there is. He's still perseverating over what to do with his mom's socks. Five years after she died. My dad didn't move so much as a sweater of my mom's for a year after we lost her in 1997. I have friends who didn't touch their parent's houses for more than a year and others who years later, like Anderson Cooper with a basement full of boxes of their parents' stuff that they forced themselves to open and deal with one at a time. On February 24th, my normally healthy, strong savvy stubborn, smart, successful. Big hearted. Rabid reader. Golfer. Best grandfather ever. A man who knew how to show up. Died. Eight days earlier, he fell off his stairs sometime after he woke up in the morning. My brother found him early that evening. At the bottom of the stairs. After he and the kids grew concerned that their texts and calls hadn't been answered. My dad always answered. I called to that day because he'd been sick. And when I left a message on his machine, I had the thought that I always do. I wonder if he's okay. Because when you have an aging parent, you always wonder that. The last any of us heard from him was when my brother called to check the night before. My dad was cheerful and said he was sitting in bed drinking some electrolytes. My brother had given an a care package and that he was doing just fine. It turns out that he had influenced a and maybe he was dizzy. We don't know. A slipper. My brother found on the third step from the top, let us know how far and hard he fell onto that concrete basement floor. The next morning. Still in his PJ's. For a few days, it seemed like he might overcome the brain leads and the broken ribs and lumbar spine. The doctors said it could literally go either way. But then it didn't. And on the morning of what would be the last day of his life. As people who are dying often do. My dad came around for a magical few minutes, as we gathered around his bed. And even though he couldn't talk much, he let us know. He knew exactly what had happened. Where he was that we were all there. And what he wanted, which was to go. A few hours after that, with my left hand on his chest and my right hand in his. And not much of a fuss at all. Just like him. He took his very last breath. My parents bought her house 54 years ago in March, 1972 months away from when I was born. People didn't spend money. They didn't have them. As a, my mom often reminded me, my parents hung sheets on the windows and ate and a card table until they could afford more furnishings. I don't know when that piano appeared. I just know that it was the center piece of our home. And that for me and my brother. It had just always been there. When we were little, my mum wrote the major notes on each key in purple marker. As we struggled to learn the basics. We both took lessons. I was bad at it. I'm not talented. My brother is. And. When my mum was happy, she would play mostly by year and she would fill our small three bedroom ranch style house with music. When we were cleaning out the house, I lifted up the piano bench and found a pile of old music books and sheet music. A lot of it dating back to the 1950s. And pasted to the inside lid of the piano bench. Obviously for my mom was align from a poem by William Wordsworth. Called the solitary Reaper. The music in my heart. I bore. Long after it was heard no more. It took my brother and I about. Three four weeks to empty out the family home. My parents moved into. We were on borrowed time. He has challenges in his life and I live overseas and had to get back to a new job. And I think mostly we couldn't bear to think of it sitting there. And we had nowhere else to focus our grief. If you ever want to see things, get done, hand it to a couple of overfunctioning gen X-ers. Children of the seventies. I have made this joke to a lot of people have a, most of them didn't get it. So I guess the trauma messaging that floods Tik TOK isn't really that mainstream after all. My brother was an efficiency machine. He was selling things and going to the dump. I tried to do everything some justice, including my mom's things. After that year, when he didn't touch her stuff. When she died, he had packed the important things. He couldn't decide about up in boxes and put them alongside what she herself had labeled and backed away. Her nursing cap, her wedding dress, her jewelry and other treasures. And I'm quoting her some antiques and some not. Which he wrote on the boxes containing them. She actually wrote treasures. I guess she did all that in the three months between, when she found out she had stage four pancreatic cancer. And when she died from it, But I really can't. No. I thought of all the times I've come to my dad's house over the years. Going down to the basement to organize the things I'd stored there. I'm in my fifties and I still stored stuff at my dad's house. He'd often come down while I was sifting through and say something like, do you want to go through a box of your mom's while you were at home? And I'd always come up with an excuse and he'd shrug gently. And as he turned around and was walking away, he'd say, well, you're going to have to do it eventually. You really cannot imagine what it's like to sift through stuff from another person who's not here anymore until you do it. It changes you from the inside out. No one wants a lot of stuff. Boomers considered treasures that they saved for and splashed out on. Not their prized collection of beautiful China tea cops or their giant eighties style sound systems. Their whole in one trophies. Or maybe there is someone who does, but a grief stricken adult child panicking about it all doesn't have the energy or the will, or the time to search for that person as much as we want to. No one wants our parents' stuff now, because there's just so much of it. And so much more coming. Because they're all leaving us. My brother told me after checking out Facebook marketplace. No one wants pianos. And I believed him. All of this seems like a terrible a front when you know how much those things meant. When you yourself have spent your life looking at them. And when you were forced to make snap decisions or you're forcing yourself to make them literally, because you don't know what else to do. We lost track of the amount of times my brother. And I said, sorry, as we throw out our parents' stuff. What I kept is such an odd assortment from my dad. His glasses snapped in half in the fall, the tiny digital clock that was on his bedside table and is now in mine. Which is also kind of broken. Uh, bookmark from a 2019 church sale that I have no idea why he has. Had. A straw hat. That the straw is falling off of. And one white t-shirt that I like to sleep in now a lot. In the end. Running out of time, you don't know what to do with the piano and you end up calling a, take my junk truck. You have to pay for hundreds of dollars. And feeling like an absolute asshole for throwing away a priceless piece of your family history. And then you sell the house. She came home to. All those years. And you take the numbers off and you save your dad's bottles of Dubin and you make a little shrine in your garage. Like my brother did. You go out into the backyard and you look at the big, beautiful Lord of the rings tree. And you open and close the mailbox. Just to hear it one last time. And you take a walk around the empty place that held you and protected you. When was always just there. Memories flood through your mind, like a movie montage. And then you leave. A full adult now with a fully broken heart. With the terrible knowledge that you can never, ever. Come home again. When I left my hometown after five weeks of the mayhem of losing my dad, I said goodbye to my brother and my niece and nephew and his family and March. And I crawled up into this ridiculously expensive, giant black SUV. I had hired. To get back to the Toronto airport from my hometown of London, Ontario, it was ridiculous. Blacked out windows, something a celebrity would ride in. But my dad had always insisted on fetching me and dropping me off for almost all of my trips home. In the last 16 years, the airport is the last place I saw him. I will never not land. I am always going to be sad when I don't see his face. In the airport arrivals section. So I booked this ridiculous SUV. The car hadn't even pulled away. When my brother sent me an audio clip. He'd go into the house early that day. And played on our piano. One last time. Here it is. As I listened to the magic of his foresight. His thoughtfulness. The stark evidence of his big, beautiful heart, all conveyed through a chord progression, played on an out of tune instrument. That's maybe as old as I am, maybe older. I somehow knew through all that hurt. That, although nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing ever will be the same again. We are also going to be okay. This is what happens now in midlife, this grief is woven into the fabric of this time. The things we always knew were going to happen start happening. And there was no way to escape it. If you were feeling it, my wounded heart is connected to yours. If you haven't, if you weren't. You will. And it will be among the hardest things you will ever experience. And you won't be able to believe that other people have gone through this. And survived. I don't care. Who else surrounds you? Or who doesn't losing your last parent makes you feel more alone than you ever have in your entire life. I'm sorry to tell you all this, but try not to think about it too much either. Because what's the point of that? You were never going to be ready and there is never enough time. I might as well soak up what you've got. Right here. Right now. I know you think you won't be able to handle it when this stuff happens? But four months later. Now that it's been a little bit of time. That's passed after saying goodbye to my dad in that hospital room. After hearing that terrible sound of that piano. And my brother's sweet. Sweet recording. I am just a tiny bit less lost. And I can promise that you will.