On grieving someone who is still there

By Giovanna D. Preda Robertti

In 2022, my dad was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis after a year of struggling with what he first thought was long covid. Pulmonary fibrosis runs in my family; my grandfather and three of his siblings died from it, and my aunt is currently struggling with it as well. My grandfather lived three years under his diagnosis; his sister lived seven. But they were diagnosed in their sixties. My dad, on the other hand, was diagnosed at just forty-five—luckily during the earliest stages of the disease. This has put my family in an unbearable situation: my dad—my favorite person on this earth, my everything—is dying before our eyes. And while treatment helps, we all know our days together are numbered.

I am not a doctor, so I will not pretend to understand nor explain the specifics of his disease, yet there are a few things I can grasp. For one, there is no cure; the condition makes it so that his lung tissue dies and can’t regenerate, so the treatment only slows the inevitable and numbs the pain. I, however, do not care about that part. What I do care about is that during my late teens I have seen my dad need increasingly more help, feel increasingly more tired, and slowly become a shell of the energetic, playfully grumpy father he once was.

Everyone is too scared to admit it just yet, but we are approaching the final curve. My hands tremble as I write this; I am still too scared to say it out loud, as if pronouncing the words would summon forth the unstoppable force of the afterlife to steal away the last few years I have left with him. However, my writings are private, tangible extensions of my inner world, and as such do not hold the power of calling forth any unwanted terror—psychic or otherwise. 

My family visited me in Dublin after the New Year, and I was able to see what our four months apart did to his weary bones. He walked shorter distances before needing a break. He needed a nap more often. His hair was noticeably thinner and whiter—more salt to the salt and pepper I had known for most of my life. Time, the cruelest mistress, singled him out; aging him twice as fast as everyone else. On our last night together in Dublin, he took me out for a walk, just the two of us, and gave me the talk I had been fearing since his diagnosis. I will be in charge of things in the future, I need to take care of my brother, I need to know how to access his bank accounts, I need to know who to trust. We talked for hours, and his last words stuck with me,  “Honey, you need to know who to trust.” The rest went unsaid, but it lingered on the air like a stench you can't quite place, “[when I pass]“.  We finished the walk to their hotel in silence. I said goodbye and headed to my dorm room, the pain in my chest unshakable.

No one is ever ready to get that talk from a parent, but to get it at nineteen years old is just surreal. I am about 60% sure he will be alive to see me graduate university, but what about the rest? Will he be able to see my brother graduate, four years after me? Walk me down the aisle? Meet his grandchildren? He is retiring this year after dedicating so much of his life to law—a career he loves, which he pursued to make our country better. He is retiring because he can’t anymore; he wants to spend more time with the family, and the workload would only make things worse.

I am happy my brother will get to spend more time with him, but a part of me feels like he should have retired when I was still in Paraguay. Why did he not spend more time with me? Why does Bruno get all this time I don’t? It feels wrong: too selfish and egotistical, to be thinking about this when, after all, he is still alive and able to do most things he once did. It’s his health on the line; my happiness is not as important as his life. This juxtaposition of feeling is, in a way, both insignificant and all-consuming: Schrödinger's lament. But when we talk on the phone, I can’t shake this feeling that we are living on borrowed time, and I can’t help but grieve my dad all the way across the Atlantic. Grieve our time, grieve our memories, grieve our future.

“I could go back home, take a gap year and come back to Trinity after making enough memories with him” says a little voice in my head, but I know I will not do that. I will not do it because I know my dad, and sacrificing a year of my future for him would be the worst thing I could do. Yes, I grieve that my dad will probably never meet the person I will marry, and I am consumed by sadness when I remember that I will talk to my children about their grandpa the same way my dad talked to me about mine; the greatest dad and person that ever lived, taken away far too early. But my dad’s greatest goal in life is for my brother and I to fulfill our ambitions, whatever they may be. I know a part of me will always regret not staying in Paraguay with my dad for a bit longer, but I love him too much to do it. My dad’s biggest wish right now is seeing me graduate university with a degree I love, and I will do everything in my power to grant him that.

Grief is a part of our journey through life I am not unfamiliar with. It is gut-wrenching, yet I am a strong believer in using it as a motor for greater things, lest it sinks you down. However, in the darkest hours of the night, when nothing exists beyond my mind and the cold air of the Irish winter, I scream inside like a desperate, cantic prayer to anything, anyone, who could read my thoughts and change things. Why me? Why us? Why is our time cut too short? I negotiate, I ask the breeze for more time like a cosmic debtor for whom nothing else matters. Because, in that moment, nothing else does. In the darkest hours, laying in my double bed in a dorm room in Dublin, the only thing I want is to feel my dad’s arms wrapped around me in the warmth of the Asunción Spring, telling me this suffering is momentary and that I have a great future ahead of me, like he always did. My greatest fan, my hero, my talking buddy, my counselor, my rock, the being I love the most in this world. I grieve you every second we are apart, but I pledge to the stars that I will do everything I can to make you proud. And I know that, wherever life takes me, I will carry your love forwards, like a patina from the first soulmate the universe gave me.