So my last post was a few months ago–my father was starting to turn around, things were looking lighter. Too bad the light went out.
My dad died two days later, on March 20th. I got a call from my brother on the 19th saying that my father’s health off the ventilator was going south. Because he had a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, we didn’t take any heroic actions to keep him alive. Instead, the doctors taped a magnet over his defibrillator, took him off all medication except a few painkillers that eased his suffering. They kept him off the ventilator, made him comfortable, and we waited for the inevitable.
It was strange, watching my dad slip away. He had gone from the stern, quiet Scots-Irishman that I knew to a frail, shaking impersonation of my father. Still, when they took him off of the vent and all the other drugs, we saw glimmers of the old Dad. At one point, he shakily pulled my sister and me down to his level and whispered as loud as he could “Where did you guys find this joint?” It was as if he thought we had hoodwinked him into going to some seedy bar! Later on, when my mom, my aunt and uncle and my brother and his wife were sitting around talking in the hospice room about how my parents met and became engaged, my father woke up just in time to remind everyone exactly how much my mother’s engagement ring cost. It may have been the last time he was conscious.
I wasn’t there when he passed–it was at night, after I had taken the kids back to my parents’ house to sleep. My mother, my father’s brother and his wife, and my brother and his wife were all there. They said it was peaceful. I was there, however, for the following days of preparation, planning and grieving. It’s weird–I think the biggest emotion I felt the entire time was anger. Anger that my daughter would have to have her fifth birthday the day before her grandpa’s funeral, anger that I was so sick that I couldn’t sleep for all the coughing, angry at certain family members for letting my dad go on in his condition without considering his wishes. I was just a big seething bucket of pissiness. Tears didn’t really come until a lot later.
Really, the whole thing was surreal. Planning the funeral at the funeral home, finding out the different options for burial/cremation, having to go through all his old photos to find just the right ones to display at the wake (and it was a dry wake… damn Lutherans!). There are so many ways to spend money on a dead person and not many of them make much sense!
The viewing was, in a word, interesting. I’m not a fan of open caskets. With as frail as my father had been, combined with the wait for the viewing, it was something that will stay with me much longer than I’ll ever want. All I can say is that when I die I want music, booze and a box of my ashes spread over the Wicklow mountains, far from some sorry, lily scented funeral home. I want memories to be happy.
So why am I writing this over two months later? Many reasons, most of them don’t make sense. The biggest one is because I couldn’t put anything into words until now. There are so many things that have happened in the past few months, and so many more that are rendered sad now. The first Father’s Day without my dad, my daughter’s fifth birthday–the first one my father wasn’t there for. I called his cell phone to hear his voice one last time, only to be disappointed because the service had already been turned off. Good news is a little less so because there’s one less person to share it with. I measure things in how my dad would look at them. I see him in my son’s face every morning when he wakes up. I hear him laughing at my little family’s antics and I cry a little, then laugh a lot.