How I Dealt With My Father’s Death

And How Strongly I Feel the Need to Be There for My Mother

Chad J. Shaffer
10 min readJul 12, 2022
Source: Unsplash

I can’t stop.

I can’t.

I cannot stop crying. I’ve never bawled like this before in my life.

I was forwarding an email to my mother’s email address and all of a sudden I began to cry. She had changed her address recently, so I had to type it in. Contained within it, was her name and how many years she was married to my father before he passed away from esophageal cancer 3 years ago.

A Delayed Response

It was quite strange. I suddenly felt this rush of neurotransmitters flood my brain. Within about 5 seconds, tears were rolling down my cheeks and sounds of mourning were echoing through the hall.

I had been painfully mourning my father’s passing since he was stolen from us by the shell game of life. But I never really focused on how it has affected my mother enough over all this time. It is the 3rd anniversary of his death sometime in November. I didn’t go to the cemetery on the day of his funeral, numbing myself on anything I could get my hands on to completely block out the entire event. Perhaps my subconscious is aware that my parent’s 51st wedding anniversary would have been today and typing in the amount of years my parents…

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