More Notes On Grief & Grieving
Happy New Year from our family to yours!
Matthew, Sissy, Banzai and I, along with Uncle Leo have been soaking in the off season, working our way through an epic “Off Season To Do List” without the stress of also managing twice a day milking and three times a week of cheesemaking. We’re planting trees, finalizing installation on our water catchment system for the entire farm, spreading all the lime on the pastures, fixing the broken and nagging things that we’ve been making do with, and, most importantly, we’re working on LEAN’ing our farm.
“Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.” Source.
Of course we’re not there yet, but, we’re definitely working towards it (and it’s a process I will share our journey on). As a small farm especially, we know that our success hinges on being a well-oiled machine.
To that same end we’ve been focusing in our home, organizing, purging, streamlining…whatever you want to call it, making it easier to keep our small space clean. For a long time we’ve been subsidizing the work on our farm by sacrificing the order in our home and Matthew and I don’t want to do it anymore. It feels good now, at the end of a long day outside, to come into our home, and not have it look like a bomb exploded.
Matthew, Leo and I have also been throwing ourselves into our podcast, Farming with Peacocks, We’ve only published two so far (we’ve shot four, but i’m picky about what we publish) and we’re still finding our groove but I’m really enjoy the time that I get to spend with my husband and his brother in a more creative capacity.
In short…there’s really great things happening in our life and I still can’t believe we’re doing this…making a living wage as a small farm.
BUT.
(Of course there’s a but, there’s always a but).
That didn’t stop me from bawling my eyes out almost all of Christmas Day.
It started out simply enough. Most of Matthew’s family came over in the morning and we opened presents, played games, and enjoyed each other. The plan was for everyone to go see Matthew’s Grandma, who is under professional medical care as she suffers from brain damage from severe and repeated strokes. As everyone was getting dressed to go we noticed the time and decided it made more sense for me to stay and get the prime rib and Yorkshire pudding ready for Christmas Dinner. There were already more than enough people going and Grandma’s mental state almost assuredly meant she wouldn’t miss my presence.
As everyone filed out the door I was already at work prepping the prime rib. But then, almost as those the door closing and my emotions were connected, the second I heard the knob latch my hand set the knife down and I crumbled into a puddle on the kitchen floor.
Weeping.
Sobbing.
For my dad.
You see, the prime rib was always my dad’s thing. My dad’s career as a Fighter Pilot in the Air Force meant that he was gone A LOT. And gone back then meant gone. There wasn’t FaceTime or emails. When the Air Force took my dad away we were a three person household, my mom, my brother, and me. In First Grade I drew a family portrait and my dad didn’t make the page…not because I didn’t love him, he just wasn’t a part of my daily existence. As I got older my dad moved from flying a fighter to flying a desk which means we saw more of him and he became one of the most influential people in my life.
But throughout my entire life, Christmas and New Years, especially, my dad was there. And so when it hit me that I was making the prime rib because my dad was dead, I collapsed.
I cried for a good half an hour on that kitchen floor. I thought about calling my mom, but she was in London visiting my brother for Christmas. After my dad died she sold her house in Oregon and bought the lot next to the farm to build her new house. While her house is being built she lives in a trailer on the farm so we see her every single day and it only made sense for her to “hop across the pond” to celebrate with her other Grandkids. But that meant my meltdown happened in the middle of the night for her.
Eventually I ran out of tears and remembered I was a McIntosh, something my dad instilled in us, and McIntosh’s don’t quit.
So I kept making the dinner.
My best friend called me a little bit later and, as it turns out I wasn’t done crying. She and her husband were over in about 10 minutes with a big bottle of sparkling rose (my favorite) and hugs for my soul.
I wiped my tears (again) poured a glass, and got to work on the Yorkshire pudding.
By the time my family got home I had dinner almost done and was feeling a little bit more chipper. I changed into my Christmas dress (a 1700 Historical Victorian Dress that Matthew found for me in a flea market downtown, which is a perfect example of why I love this man) and prepared to celebrate Christmas in a cheerful way.
Except that’s not what happened either.
I sat down to dinner and, through a gross miscalculation of how many tears I cried, which equated to how much fluid I lost, which translated to dehydration, which reacted with the sparkling rose…I was a little drunk.
And turns out I was still sad.
I may or may not have cried through the entire dinner. And all of White Elephant. And then a little bit more later after I put my babies to bed. And in case you’re wondering, I had the Victorian dress on the entire time, complete with bustle to make it extra pouffy. It really added to my “hysteria” vibe I’m sure.
Grief, you guys.
It doesn’t play by any sort of rules. And, even though I’m a McIntosh, I wasn’t able to shove my grief into a tidy little box to ignore.
I couldn’t have picked a better family to lose it with. Matthew’s brother and sister and mom are all about feeling and emotions and I think it was slightly therapeutic for them to watch my complete loss of emotional control. There is a running joke in his family that I’m a bit of an android and tend to not feel or express emotions beyond happiness. And on some level I think it was good for Sissy and Banzai to see Mommy cry because she missed her dad so much. They deal with a lot of death and loss on this farm but rarely do we have emotions that last longer than a few moments around it.
As Matthew and I prepped for New Years I was more cognizant of my emotions, and the underlying sadness I felt in celebrating without him. As an Asian family, New Years is one of the most important holidays we enjoy, and without my dad and Obachan (my grandmother who passed away in our home last year), we felt the void.
But this time I was ready for the void that I knew I would feel. and I let myself gently feel it without trying to “muscle through” my grief.
It turns out this tactic is much better for family gatherings and overall emotional health.
I had, quite ignorantly, thought that because my dad has been gone for over two years now that I wouldn’t have any tears left.
Wiser, more emotional Rachael knows different.
I will likely never stop feeling the sadness over losing my father.
And also.
Tears are a therapeutic and beautiful thing that shouldn’t be held back.
And finally.
Witnessing grief is a powerful thing for children because it’s an inevitable reality that they will have to face. Watching people they love process the very complicated emotions of mourning shows them the strength of the human spirit and reminds them that we are not invincible…that in fact, allowing ourselves to feel our grief, instead of stifling it, makes us stronger, not weaker.
Even if you’re a McIntosh.
