One half of the teens who have lost a parent says that they find no “okay way of mourning” the death during the six months that follow and many of them mention that they experience grief that continues to unresolved years later.
The words that stick in the mind of Gabbi Fernandez are not a speech, a long good-bye, it is a sentence that was written to her by her father whose body could no longer manage what was inside his mind and what he wanted to say. Fernandez had a 17-year-old father, Terry Donohue, who got seriously ill in 2016. His post dinner difficulty in breathing after coming home, a case of hospital visit which might have been his precaution, turned out to be pneumonia, followed by Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDs). He was placed on one month in intensive care, as doctors attempted to lower the amount of fluid in his lungs, and his family was staying within the type of waiting that alters time.
Donohue was already intubated the night prior to his being put into a coma. He had no more chance to talk, and picked up a whiteboard. Fernandez was about to go to New York and live with other family members; her father did not wish to see her looking like that. It was in that small window, when he was awake and tired and conscious that he wrote what will be his last first message to her: Seeing you was the best thing in the world, don’t tell mom.
It is a sentence that simultaneously possesses two realities, tenderness and privacy, love and a small request that made it feel like one of the things that could be carried only by a daughter. The following day he had gone into a coma. His state did not get better and his organs started failing. His death came two weeks before Fernandez entered her senior year in high school.
Adolescence is already accompanied by sense of identity in flux and death of a parent may shatter the patterns that otherwise keep the teenagers stable. Teen advice can begin with a very basic fact: grieving is individual. Emotions may come in frighteningly rapid and disorienting successions of sadness and numbness, anger and guilt, relief and fear without falling into any order or arriving at any foreseeable time. Lots of adolescents find out that family members mourn in other languages that may distance them at the time of maximum need.
Fernandez kept the message of her father as a secret to herself over the years. The only person who knew was her uncle, the brother of Donohue. Many reasons may lead to silence following a death such as protectiveness, the fear of hurting a surviving parent or mere difficulty in locating the appropriate words. Nevertheless, the grief literature on youths is always keen on stressing the fact that grieving is the open and expressed articulation of thoughts and feelings and that over time it can also help to make grief manageable even when it does not eliminate it.
The note was later published by Fernandez on Tik Tok when she re-evaluated her sorrow with a new lens the experience of being a mother herself. The sentence had a different meaning. What previously seemed to be a wound started to sound as a timeless statement of love, rooted in a moment when her father employed the only weapon he could find to get in touch with her.
It also concerned the reaction of her mother. Fernandez stated that her mom was encouraging the revelation as a sort of bless and glad that her daughter was capable of discussing him more freely. The way out in most families involves an aspect of both clinging and releasing: clinging to memories and phrases and tiny artifacts of contact, releasing the obligation to grieve properly or privately. The last message of a parent cannot resolve the loss, but it may prove to be a stable standpoint upon which a teenager can develop around it, particularly when the family allows the story to be told aloud.
