Love and Loss: How Focusing Helped Me Grieve My Father.

On 10th June, 2024 my father died. 

I’d like to share how Focusing helped me process the pain of losing him.

I sat with him every day in the week leading up to his death. A farmer all his life, I’d been used to him being tall, strong and father-like. 

Now, after months of hospitalisation, he was like a little bird in the bed, alive, but tiny and helpless. Skin sagged from his stick-like limbs, his body was lost amongst the pillows and his mouth gasped loudly for breath. He couldn’t speak, and looked consumed by pain, although the nurses said he was comfortable. 

He was eighty-one and had severe dementia for years. Dying would be a release for him, I knew that. But as I sat beside him, my own pain kicked up fiercely inside me. I’d never been on this earth without him, and any hour now he would be gone.

Never again would I feel his arms around me, welcoming me home, or hear him laugh at my banalities when I called him for a chat. He had been a sensitive, kind man, who liked to love and be loved. Now, I felt like I had not appreciated his regard for me, but had come to expect it like some kind of movie star. I was filled with remorse.

A part of me wanted to flee the enormity of the loss that was coming. David Whyte in his essay Solace asks - “...how will you bear the inevitable that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years?”  

I did not know how I would endure it. In my pre-Focusing life, I had done what most people do when pain feels unbearable - I unconsciously cordoned it off inside, and tried to think positively. But I'd seen how those painful places only became sealed-off, frozen in a point in time, forever calling to be experienced. 

This time, at least, I knew it was better to feel the pain - if I could. 

We were so lucky to have a private room, in a quiet part of the hospital. My mother sat with him for nearly ten hours a day for over three months. He very rarely became irritable with us, even though he was in grueling pain due to a spinal fracture and had no understanding of what was happening. He was forever trying to climb out of bed and get back to the farmyard. It had been a full-time job trying to stop his escape.  

But now he had got an infection and wasn't responding to the antibiotics. It was clear he hadn't long.   A terrible swirling sensation began inside me, and it felt that - if I weren’t careful - at any moment I could become engulfed by it. 

Something habitual in me began to try to avoid, deny, reassure… (I saw now how often I had sought refuge in what John Keane calls ‘process skipping’). But thanks to all the years of Focusing, I was able somehow to step into the centre and feel it, now, before it all got sealed away. 

I wept a lot in the weeks leading up to Dad’s death. It was a relief to be able to cry so freely - I could not do that in my pre-Focusing years. I regretted all the moments I had rejected him  - the times I had perceived him as ‘weak’, or inconsistent, or too keen to please. How I wished I could have appreciated him a little more, just as he was, instead of thinking he should be a little different. As I cried by his bedside, he no longer knew day from night. But he wiped the tears from my face with a blanket from his bed. 

After it was all over, and Dad was finally free of his suffering, I did not experience the exhaustion that seems to be the norm after a funeral. Instead, I felt more alive. Alive to who he really was, and to my family and to myself as we are now. I think something happened as I sat with him, something special, that left me changed.