--- title: How I Handled the Death of My Father description: Discover the words that helped Kelly Corrigan understand death. canonical: https://time.com/5108172/kelly-corrigan-understanding-death/ author: Kelly Corrigan article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-01-18T18:19:46.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:42:06.693Z article:section: Ideas og:title: These Three Words Helped Me Understand My Father’s Death og:description: I spoke them at his bedside og:url: https://time.com/5108172/kelly-corrigan-understanding-death/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: These Three Words Helped Me Understand My Father’s Death twitter:description: I spoke them at his bedside twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # These Three Words Helped Me Understand My Father’s Death > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: Sheryl Sandberg on Helping Her Kids Cope With Losing Their Dad [Watch (HLS stream): Sheryl Sandberg on Helping Her Kids Cope With Losing Their Dad](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/jtrVFiuI.m3u8) (4:50)  _Published 2017-04-24. "I’m heartbroken that I was not able to give my children the stability of growing up with two parents," the Facebook COO told TIME in an interview about her new book, Option B, written after the sudden death of her husband_ by [Kelly Corrigan](https://time.com/author/kelly-corrigan/) ## Kelly Corrigan Jan 18, 2018 6:19 PM UTC by [Kelly Corrigan](https://time.com/author/kelly-corrigan/) ## Kelly Corrigan Jan 18, 2018 6:19 PM UTC It was a [goldfish named Freddy](http://entertainment.time.com/2011/10/18/finding-peace-when-pets-die-qa-with-author-and-animal-expert-jon-katz/). I overfed him. He hung on best he could but in the end, he ate so much he stopped moving. My mother told me the shocking trifecta of news; that this stillness is called death and that everything dies, even people, even people we know. You could say this is how I came to understand death. But it would be more true to say this is how my understanding of death began, with an experience that was decoded and framed by my mother. It was sad and confusing, but then I started playing Clue with my friend down the street and people died every 15 minutes. Poor Mrs. Peacock or Professor Plum, bludgeoned to death by a candlestick or strangled with a rope. In biology class, we learned that people are considered dead when the electrical activity in their brains cease. The teacher explained _humans expire_ because their systems — circulatory, respiratory — collapse. So that was a way of understanding — knowing a thing by its physical properties, defined for you by a teacher with a glossary of terms and diagrams on the overhead. When I understand [death in biological terms](http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1842627,00.html), I feel nothing. It’s like studying electricity. It is true and accurate and it never makes me cry. To feel death, in the absence of experience, we have art. A poem by Pablo Neruda or painting of Gustav Klimt’s or an afternoon listening to [_Les Miserables_](http://time.com/4060242/1985-les-mis/), where they all die, even the kid in the hat. I could call up [Eric Clapton’s](http://time.com/5101654/eric-clapton-going-deaf/) _Tears in Heaven_ or Biggie Smalls’ _Ready to Die_. If you can call _General Hospital_ art, trust me when I tell you I understood death in new ways when Robert Scorpio died going over the falls in South America and then turned up a year later at his “widow’s” wedding. After college, my grandmother died. There was an open casket and after drinking three Bud Lights and smoking a Merit with my cousin Tray, I made myself go over and look in. Her hands were crossed over her Mrs. Claus chest, her skin fine and papery. When I got up from the body, my father wiped his eyes and pulled me in and I understood that death made the living more important. Religions have something to say about death. The religion of my childhood suggested that with death might come a whole new life, when God looks me up and down and maybe opens a door to a place where every good person I ever loved would be waiting for me, a place where I would get to be forever if I only would stop using the Lord’s name in vain, cool it with the shoplifting and keep my pants on. I found this way of understanding life, death and whatever might be beyond alternately comforting and inconvenient. Eventually, I found myself in the room with death. Greenie, my dad and most special person, went into the hospital on a Sunday morning in February and died that Tuesday night around 8 p.m.  My mother and brothers, three separate priests, five nurses and now and then a doctor rotated through, making him comfortable. It took four people to move him an inch. He was only 133 pounds but everything hurt and the protocol of comfort first meant that we adjusted him by lifting the sheets beneath him. It was embarrassing to Greenie, how many people he was troubling. But spending time in the palliative care unit, I understood something new: “They’re all going to be here, Greenie. Sooner or later, we’re all going to be here.” “I guess you’re right, Lovey.” Around 10 a.m. that Tuesday morning, he pursed his lips so I would kiss him and then he closed his eyes and he never opened them again. The day was long. Nothing seemed to be happening. Eventually my mom went home with my brothers. Some time after 7:30 that evening, Aunt Mary, my dad’s bossy little sister, texted me as I sat at his bedside. She wrote, _Did you tell him he can go?_ I said, _My mother did._ She texted back: _It has to be you._ I had wondered. I’m the baby of our family, literally and in every other way. And I am my father’s only daughter. But how could it matter, what I say? It had been almost 10 hours since his eyes were open, since he spoke. I had pleaded and squeezed his hand over and over and when no one else was in the room, I had lifted his eyelids to try to wake him up. What would a whisper do? I shook off Aunt Mary and rested my cheek on his hand that I was holding with both of mine. I looked up at him and said, _I will miss you so terribly Greenie, but I will be okay._ I said: _You can go_. I wished I hadn’t because right then, with those tiny words — only eight letters in all — still vibrating in the air between us, there was the slightest change in his being, the stillness that is called death, and the world was as quiet as it had ever been. I was alone for the first time in my life and I understood that everything dies, even people, even people we know. ## Transcript They were a couple that appeared to be living the dream. Facebook, COO Cheryl Sanders remembers her late husband Dave Goldberg laid to rest today after his sudden death. About a year after Dave died I was at a dinner with close friends and everyone went around and did what couples do, they all talked about how they met. And when they got to me, they skipped me, because it seems really cruel to ask someone who's lost their husband, how'd you meet Dave? I was so upset that night. And later I realized, no one's ever going to ask me again how I met Dave. And I'm not suggesting we walk up to someone who's lost a spouse every minute and say, how'd you meet? [ MUSIC ] [ AUDIBLE ] But I am suggesting that. There are times that I want to tell someone how I met Dave. Dave just changes me in very profound ways. I learned about the depths of sadness and the brutality of loss. But I also learned that when life sucks you under You can kick against the bottom, find the surface and breathe again. [ APPLAUSE ] When I got home from Mexico and I sat down on the couch with my mom and my dad and my sister and my kids and it there are so many worst moments in this but it's up there. [ MUSIC ] I told Domino, you're not going to see your father again and he died. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] The screaming, the crying, there's mine. But maybe an hour into it my son looked at me and said, thank you mommy for being here with us to tell us. And that night when I was putting my daughter to bed she said, I'm not just sad for us. I'm sad for Gramma Paula and Uncle Rob because they lost him too. And in the midst of literally the biggest heartache that I think a child, in many ways, could face, or at least one of them, my kids had the capacity to think about other people. [ MUSIC ] My son's basketball team, just a few weeks ago, they lost the playoffs. And a lot of the other little boy's were really upset. And so I looked at my son and I said, are you okay? And he just looked at me and said, mom, this is sixth grade basketball, I'm fine. We've been through a lot. So many times we lose perspective. And definitely living through Dave's death has given me all kinds of perspective. The small stuff is small. I talk about Dave all the time, and I try to talk about him honestly. Friends who had lost parents when they were young said that one of the issues is no one talked about their parent. And one of the other issues is that when people talked about their parent they were idealized versions. It was brilliant and generous and funny and giving and stood up for the right things. When my son stands up for someone else at school, I will say to him, just like your dad. Dave was also pretty clumsy. He spilled things all of the time and he would always be shocked. He'd spilled the glass, like Dave. You did that last night, you're gonna do it tomorrow night. My kids spill things too, and I say, just like your daddy. Being a single mother was a new thing for me. And I recognized that I'm a very fortunate single mother. We do not give single mothers the support they need financially. And I thought back to some of the things I wrote in Lean In. I wrote a whole chapter on make your partner a real partner. And last Mother's Day, I posted on that and said, I'm sorry, I didn't get it. I dread Father's Day, I dread it to this day, I have to get my kids through it, and myself through it. I know what it is when the school has the father daughter dance. And I just don't even know what to do to get my daughter through that. One of the things that happens when you lose a spouse is people judge you, particularly women, much more women than men, pretty harshly. And it's not just permission to date we need, it's actually just permission to feel okay. Four months after Dave died, four months. I went to a bar mitzvah and a childhood friend took me on the dance floor to dance to a song I had loved in high school, and it was great. And then a minute in, I literally collapsed and collapsed very publicly. I had to be taken out to the balcony and When I thought about what was wrong, I realized, my God, I felt happy for one minute four months later, and then I felt so much guilt. My brother- in- law Rob, he said, " All Dave ever wanted was for you and your children to be happy. Don't take that away from him in death And I think all of us [ MUSIC ] [ AUDIBLE ] live some form of option being no one's life is perfect. 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