There’s a Bad Mood on the Rise
Everyone grieves differently.
Over two months of stress-related headaches and acid reflux are an indication that I am not fully in touch with my emotions when it comes to the fact of my father’s death on January 3rd of this year. I realized what I was feeling when my fiance offered me a cocktail as a way to deal with the stress headache, and a six ounce glass of diet coke and vodka later, I was fully in touch with my emotion, and it was one of anger.
This anger, while a natural reaction, is a less socially understood one than the grief I’d felt so often on, and after that fateful day in September 2012 when my father told me on the telephone that he’d been told he only had three months left to live. He lived until January – we had him for five months more – but it’s been so hard, and I cried so hard in the days after I was given this sad news that I almost felt as though all of my tears were depleted, and the sense that I had been punched in the chest and left breathless seemed like it would never leave.
But now it has left, only to be replaced by feelings of anxiety and anger.
I guess I feel angry because my father didn’t get diagnosed on time. I did an interview with him, which I posted right here, talking about how UCSF didn’t diagnose his liver cancer, even though he was complaining of liver pain when he got diagnosed for lung cancer – and that he had the liver cancer when they were treating his lung cancer, but they didn’t look at his liver, and they could have found it a year earlier and…
could have…
should have…
Didn’t. So this is the part of the grieving process where I am angry about what didn’t happen to save my daddy’s life. Here’s the interview:
Sumiko Saulson 