It's ten to four in the morning.
I had shut my computer off and thought I would write some stuff in this notebook I snagged from my mother (this sarcastic, "happy bunny" graces the cover - I adore him)...and then after about three or four torn out pages that I threw in the garbage, I felt the need to fire up the laptop again and start typing. A lot easier that way.
This is ridiculous, I shouldn't be talking about this on a public blog. I just need to let it out because I've been thinking about it again...
My father is dead. Every now and then it hits me hard, how much that sucks. I'm not looking for sympathy by writing this, I just need to write about it. I realized I never really have.
I've looked through old diary entries, from when I actually still
wrote diaries, and I would find a sentence here and there saying what kind of state my dad was in. Usually wasn't very good. He had leukemia, and he suffered from it badly over a course of ...give or take, five years.
When I was in high school my grandmother (on my mom's side) died pretty suddenly. She had been in and out of
the hospital a lot because she had a problem with her legs, the veins were bad. Ever since I was little I remember her going in to get some sort of surgery done on them, and she always came out fine. The last time she was in she ended up getting a systemic infection that pushed her over the edge, and she ended up in a coma. She was finished. I remember very well going to the hospital with my mom and dad that night that the doctor said she was on her way out. We rushed there and got to her floor. The only thing keeping her alive, barely, were the tubes, which only a few minutes later were pulled. She died a few days after her 70th birthday. I liked her a lot - she was the only grandparent I ever knew. She was a good woman.
I sat in the waiting room with my mom and dad after her death. We were the only ones there, it was the middle of the night and everything was pretty quiet. For a few days now my dad hadn't been feeling well. We figured he had a fever or something. He was the type who wouldn't ever really go to the doctor; he never really took care of himself the way he should have. "I don't want anything to happen to you two." -- I remember saying that, right before I started to lose it. I think I knew maybe, I mean, knowing that my dad was sick and having just witnessed a death, it became both real and surreal at the same time. I couldn't let anything happen to them.
We found out my dad had cancer three days later, the day my grandmother was buried.
I remember my mom telling me to come into her room that night. I had no idea what was up because she had been at the doctor's all afternoon and evening with my dad. But of course I knew, just as you always know when someone sits you down for a talk, that something was wrong. Me being a stupid teenager immediately thought before she even said anything, "Oh God, what does have AIDS or something?" But then she said to me that he had a form of leukemia. I feel like I should remember the specifics, I always feel like I
should, but I never do. Well, needless to say, my stomach dropped...but I was unsure what that really meant. I really didn't know anything about cancer, I just knew that people died from it. That it was a very serious thing. I never knew anyone that had cancer except for great aunts or uncles that I didn't see very often.
I don't really remember anything after that, except for when it started to get bad.
The first time around, the first time it really hit him...it didn't seem to last that long. He was in and out of the hospital a bunch, and he did lose his hair. He was still smoking a lot, at least as much as he could. At that time he was still able to get around quite easily. The sickness hadn't really taken a hold of him yet, and he would make good with the nurses and sneak away outside to smoke. This baffled me. I think he said that one of the nurses told him where the stairwell was to go outside for the cigarette. Amazing. Of course there were times then when he was in pretty bad shape, during the whole...losing the hair process...they had him on some
heavy drugs, and he was getting pretty spaced out at times. He would tell my mother how he saw aliens and spaceships in the parking lot across the street from his window. (Which, okay, I had to give him that one -- there were numerous lights in the parking lot that you could see from his window, anyone on any type of drug might dream them up as something else) Then the stories got a little stranger. He told my mother how he saw She-Ra (my childhood dog) coming in to his room at night, and also how I apparently became impregnated by someone and ran off with them. Apparently he also had a tiff with one of the nurses because there was a "leak" in the ceiling above him that kept dripping water on his body. He kept telling her to get a pan for him so he could stop it. -- All these stories he laughed about with us months later. They were, afterall, pretty crazy.
So yeah, he did get weak, but like I said it seemed so short lived...after I think only a few months he went into remission, his hair grew back, and he was back on the job. (He was self-employed, a plumber, although he always preferred "drain cleaner" - I guess that was more
professional sounding) He was back to being the friendly joker he always was. I remember one time in particular he was going up the stairs of our house and halfway up turned to look back at us. "Remember when I had to do this?" He grabbed onto the railing and made fun of himself, climbing the steps as slow as a caterpillar, pulling himself up inch by inch. He laughed at himself and then bounced up to the second floor. I think he felt so lucky to be alive, so happy. Of course he loved that his hair grew back...curly and thicker than ever. It seemed strange - his hair was never curly like that before.
I really wish I could remember more from then. Those few months of him being
him again are a blur to me now, because so soon after the leukemia came back, and things started to really get serious.
I think around this time my aunt (his sister) moved in to help my mom and I out. Again, I wish I could remember more from this time...it's like one day he was fine, and the next he was using a walker to get around.
And that's how it started. The walker was the first step in that gradual decline of physical health. Scratch that, there was a cane for a little while - one he dressed up in black paint and a snake sticker. He was such a bad ass good guy. Around this time he was once again in and out of hospitals. Always seemed to be the worst in the winter. He had to get a stem cell transplant and was able to use my aunt as his donor. Neither my dad or my aunt liked the procedure; I think it was terribly painful for both of them. My aunt, God bless her, she didn't care - she would have done it 500 times if it meant her baby brother would come around and be back to normal. Apparently, there were only three people who had done this procedure at the time (it was still a very new thing then, and this was only in 2000/2001?) and none of them lived much long after, and they were much younger than my dad. He was 61 years old in 2001, and he was still hanging on pretty strong. Doctors at the hospital wanted to interview him about it and put him in some medical books, but he turned it down. My dad wasn't the type to want attention, even if he was offered a good amount of money for it. Maybe he was living in denial at the time. Maybe he thought that if his name was set in stone with the word "cancer" it would make him feel like less of a man somehow. I don't really know.
This stem cell transplant did in fact put him into remission - the leukemia never came back. But he was becoming weaker regardless, due in part to the chemo therapy treatments. And during all of this I started college, and went away to a school that was a quarter of the way across the country. I had a good time down there, for a while at least, but I regret not being able to spend more time with him while he was not yet in such a bad state.
He wrote me this letter while I was away at school:
Dearest Sarah,
I received your letter the other day. I was happy to hear from you. We all miss you, I hope you like Tennessee. Don't like it too much, you will stay! I am sleeping in your bed because it is larger. Your room is very nice - you can have it back anytime! The guinea pig is fine and so is your dog, he sleeps with mom at night. I hope you are making out ok.
I love you.
Dad
I had one full year there, freshman year, from 2001-2002, then summer break at home, back again in the fall (2002), and then I took the spring semester of 2003 off to come home and be with him. Things were not going well.
By this time his speech had somewhat started to deteriorate. His vision was not as great as it
used to be. I think he may have still been using the walker for a while, but from what I recall it wasn't long before he was in a wheelchair. Once that happened, the distance he went to do something was going from his bedroom to the dining room table. There he sat and he smoked, and smoked, and smoked. He had no life at all anymore. Every month it seemed like his speech became a little more...difficult to understand. The doctors told us he may have had an undetectable stroke at some point, which would've caused the speech problem. (If you heard Dick Clark ring in the new year for 2006, his speech was a lot like the way my dad's was for a while.)
So this went on for a long time. He would get up from his bed, use his walker to get to the dining room table (oh that's right, I remember that now) and then just sit there, staring at the wall and smoking until he was ready to go back in to his room and sleep again. He never wanted to watch television because he couldn't see well, and I think he was angry at himself (why?) so often, that he didn't want to do anything else either. Just smoke.
I went back to Tennessee for what would be my last semester of school there in fall 2003.
Things were slow but steady, everything seemed to remain the same at home, but somehow he got some strength in him and started to do a little better. I came home over Thanksgiving break for my sister's wedding. My dad was able to go to the wedding as well (which was really one of his only outings), although didn't have enough strength in him for the reception. He was skinny - probably 125 pounds at most (before getting sick he was a good 210 pound man), but he seemed determined.
When I went back to school...I remember a few days into December I talked to my mom on the phone and she said that dad had an eye surgery done, (like lasik eye surgery) and now was able to see so much better. I then talked to my dad...and I was so overcome with happiness to hear HIM happy. He sounded clearer, he sounded full of hope -- he was telling me how he could read the time on the clock. He was
so fucking happy. When I got off the phone with him I started to cry. I started to research other schools closer to home, for the fact that I needed to be with him as much as possible for whatever time he had left, and also because I just couldn't stand to be in a landlocked state anymore and wanted to be studying film in NYC. I found Brooklyn College. I applied. I was accepted. Home I happily went.
And then came the wave.
Soon after I came home I ended up getting a nasty cold. My mother had also just been sick. Knowing that my dad was very susceptible to catching cold himself, I tried to keep as much distance as I could from him. Well...apparently it wasn't enough distance, because soon after he caught pneumonia, and ended up in the hospital. To this day I blame myself for this happening. I know I shouldn't, but I do, and I hate myself for it. He was in the hospital for such a long time - over Christmas and into the new year of 2004. Things were never going to be the same again after this, and I think we all sort of knew it.
When he finally did come home, he was confined to his bed. He no longer had the strength to get up and sit at the table. He no longer had the strength to even sit up. We had a hospital bed brought in for him, so when he had to eat or sleep we could move the bed accordingly. Since he could no longer get up, he could no longer use the toilet, so instead used adult diapers. My mother and my aunt would stay up all hours of the night to watch over him. At any time he could be calling for them, asking to be changed.
I watched movies with him in the daytime. Ever since he had his eye surgery done he had been asking for the dvd of
Pearl Harbor. I bought it for him over Christmas, but he never got to watch it at the hospital because they didn't have a dvd player. In his bedroom I tried desperately to set up our dvd player, but the television set was an old one and didn't have any connection for the wires. Finally he told me to forget about it. He never did get to watch it. I could've tried harder.
So every single day from January to April he laid in this bed. He awoke, he slept. He started to have trouble breathing and we had to get an oxygen tank for him. He begged for cigarettes that we could not give him, not only because they would hurt him, but now because there was a risk of fire or explosion if the cigarette got near the oxygen tank. (And even though we knew he shouldn't be smoking, or shouldn't have ever smoked, we wanted so badly to let him have one. That was all he had left.) He became interested in little things here and there. Out of the blue he started asking us to get him a train set. My mother looked online and found one, but for some reason it took weeks for it to be delivered. When it finally did come, I set it up next to his bed but he couldn't see it on the table over the handrail of his bed. He got angry and told me to take it away.
Dad and Mom Halloween
So often he became angry. He was taking so much medication at the time, and one of them in particular took a toll on his mood. He would curse out my mother, curse out my aunt, curse out himself, even sometimes curse out me. One time when my mother was giving him his medication he bit her finger so hard that it made her bleed. As much love as we had for him, sometimes we wished it would all be over so he didn't have to suffer any longer. Sometimes he would just start talking to himself, and then five minutes later yell out my mother's name. I would sit in the living room and hear that damn oxygen tank going up and down, up and down, giving him the support he needed, but reminding us all how close to the end it had to be.
The physical deterioration was becoming quite a literal thing. His skin had become so fragile - if you were to run your nail across it he would bleed. This became a problem a few times when the ambulance came to bring him to the hospital. I think maybe two or three times within those few months he would be rushed there in the middle of the night because of breathing difficulties. The paramedics didn't really know how to handle him, and would end up tearing his skin just from lifting him up out of the bed. It was pure agony for every one of us.
In his room at night, a day and a half before he passed away, he kept staring up into the corner, near the ceiling. He wouldn't stop looking there. My mom went in and asked him numerous times, "What are you looking at? Stop.
Ed, what are you looking at?" He didn't respond, but he pointed. My mother was getting freaked out, and called me in. She said with a nervous laugh, "Tell your father to stop looking over there." Now, I am really not the most spiritual person in the world, but to this day I do believe he was looking at something, or even some
body, we could not see that perhaps told him it was almost time. Hopefully they let him know that he wouldn't have to suffer much longer.
On April 14th, 2004, he was once again rushed to the hospital. I had been babysitting all afternoon and came home to see he was having difficulty breathing again. For the first time he asked for us to call the ambulance. In the past he had constantly demanded that we wouldn't...he didn't like the idea of an ambulance showing up in front of our house - I think that
made him feel like he was losing his dignity, along with all the other bad stuff that was happening. (And besides those times when he acted out and got angry, or was a bit loony from the medication, he always knew what was going on. He may have been going through a physical deterioration, but his mind was always there, and it was always top notch.) So the ambulance came and lifted him onto the gurney. As he was being wheeled through our living room and towards the front door I said to him, trying to make him as at ease as possible, "See ya soon, dad." -- Those were the last words he ever heard me speak to him.
Because I'm a shithead I did not go to the hospital that night with him. My mother and aunt went and I stayed home. They came home later and said he was doing okay. (He had been in the hospital so many times, and always come home again...we weren't expecting that to change). I had spent the night watching crappy tv and getting slightly intoxicated on cans of beer. Fantastic. So much regret.
The next morning I woke up early, and as soon as I opened my eyes I thought to myself, and actually spoke outloud, "I'm going to see him everyday. I'm going to that damn hospital every single day to see him." In the past I wasn't very good with that.
Minutes later I think my aunt came into my room and told me to get dressed - the nurse at the hospital told her that we needed to get there as soon as possible. That's all they said. We assumed he took a turn for the worse, but that had happened before. We just wanted to be with him, so we hauled ass. I drove my mother and aunt to the hospital, neither of them wanted to drive. We were going there quickly, but I said to them, "He's going to be fine when we get there, he always is!"
When we got to the hospital and went up to his floor we headed down the hallway to his room. Suddenly a nurse stepped up to my aunt as we continued to rush to his room. She is the one that told us --- my father had passed away. We were in shock. We couldn't believe that to be true, there was no way. We wished it to not be true, even as we entered his room and saw it was. They already had the goddamn tag on his foot and didn't bother to cover that up. There he was, gone. Fucking gone, and had died by himself, all alone. --- Nobody seemed to be expecting it. He even had eaten breakfast. He ATE breakfast. And then he was gone.
And that's it.
I miss him so much sometimes, and other times it feels like...like he was never even really here. Which is a terrible thing to say, but sometimes that feels like the truth. I just hope heaven is not a fantasy in our minds and that I get to see him again one day.
_________________________
*On November 19th, 2005, my aunt who has lived with us for almost five years passed away suddenly and unexpectedly from what was apparently a heart attack. She was simply here one day, up and about and out on the town, and gone the next. She and my father were two of the most giving, selfless people I have ever seen or met in my life. There will never be another two like them that I will ever know. I thank God that I had them in my life, but I only wish they were still here.
This is really the most up close and personal I'm ever going to get on this blog. I have never written about my dad like this before, ever. I have to say, I'm not usually one for posting heavy stuff on a
blog. I usually only write about light, fun stuff going on in my life, because who wants to read depressing crap? I'm not exactly sure what even brought this on. I've just been thinking about him a lot lately, especially since my aunt's death...
It's now...2 minutes till 7 in the morning, lol. I am
such an insomniac. I do appreciate if you took the time to read this, but...as I said I'm not looking for sympathy, I just wanted to get it down - for me.
