One Year

Dad died one year ago today, and if this were 2010, at this moment he'd have about another hour and forty-some minutes left in him. 

I know what I will be doing in an hour; I will be calling absent students, trying to get them to come to school. (Who wants to pay $2,000 to sit on their own couch?  You can do that for free!)  At this time last year I was in this room, probably doing approximately what I'm doing now.  The sun hasn't set yet.  When the nurse called last year and asked how far I was from the hospital, it was dark out.  I immediately began cleaning the lab, desperate for it not to be such a dire situation.  Anything, anything... I could've spitshined the room and it would've gleamed.  It was almost over.

I am thinking about Naomi tonight.  She was already there when I arrived at the hospital.  I wonder what she's doing tonight?  I should call. 

T and I went to the cemetary this morning and visited.  Ironically there was a funeral going on at the end of the row, one up.  I will never forget that -- feeling our wistfulness, but reflecting on exactly what they were doing.  At first we thought they were doing it in the rows behind Dad and we wouldn't be able to go over there.  But, alas.. we watched from a distance.  They did everything we did last year, including looking around at other graves.  They did not toss roses in like we did, though.  That funeral was near its end and the entire party sat on benches under the trees watching the workers dump the dirt.  Dirt dumping is very final but I found it cathartic.  T said his rose stuck in the middle, also.  Down the lawn today, apparently there were some children in their group, who ran around playing after the burial.  I liked that.  It was a reminder that life continues. 

While we were talking, I told T that I was often comforted by the parachutists that used the nearby airport for their landings.  My dad had wanted to be a paratrooper in the military, but was too short or something.  T said he often looks at the sun hitting the mountains in the distance.  I do the same.  He said he'd never seen the jumpers, then about six of them appeared before long in the sky.  It was neat to see them; I thought at least one was going to miss the airport and land in the cemetary.  Then as we were watching that, a huge monarch butterfly fluttered right near us.  I was amazed to see that.  It was brown and black and utterly beautiful.  The symbolism was not lost on me and I told T about it.  He sat, musing.  We talked about the probability of a butterfly in a cemetary in the middle of the desert.  T said they were attracted to the lawn and the trees probably, but I said, "Look around you... we're surrounded by desert on all sides."  BC does have more grass probably than our valley, but still it was timing.  T also told me he comes out to the cemetary sometimes late at night, and one time the lights on the runway came on randomly and no plane came to land.  (He waited fifteen minutes.)  Streetlights frequently came on or shut off in my dad's presence.  Funny little things.  I felt he was there with us.  We miss him so much.

The Pain of April

We are almost at a year since All The Trouble In the World began in earnest.  I am feeling moody already, on schedule, on cue, as expected.  I am heartbroken, both because we are now just into April and because soon enough, we will be dealing with the house issue, and none of it sits well.  I feel unsettled, uncomfortable.. ish.  I have been tracking how often I feel anxiety and about what, and I realize that I need a counselor. Like, now.  Fuck trying to get T to go.  He'll go, or he won't.  I have to go regardless.  I feel like spinning in circles, and too much spinning means... I am going to fall.  I can't afford a fall.

I watched a movie tonight, Tarnation, ostensibly about a mother with schizophrenia.  It was really more about her son and his feelings of alienation from her, emotional disturbance in youth.  Precious little was about her.  I was somewhat disappointed in how much was about him, with little connection to her.  I understood his longing for her though, and his attempts to make sense of her life pre- and post-diagnosis.  I did cry a lot, but it was more one-eye crying.  He seems to have come out all right as an adult.  The verdict is still out on us.

I will be going to the cemetary April 8 & 9.  It beats hanging around Desert Springs, maybe the lobby.  If I never have to go to DS ever again.... my heart is in that building.  If I could talk to the me of one year ago, I'd say, Hang In There.. The Road is Very Bumpy, and This Road Trip Is No Fun At All, But Your Heart and Your Effort Are True and Good and All Will Be Tolerable Eventually.

We have to love ourselves through the darkest days and remember that God is here.  I did write there, but there is here.  Oh, how I miss my dad.  .......

Sara..

I still have not been able to answer Sara's email.  I just.. can't.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to see your parent waste away for over twenty years.  Sara's dad has Parkinson's and has been in a nursing home for ages.  Her mother's house has stairs and she cannot physically manage his needs.  It must be breathtakingly painful for all of them.  Whenever I think about it, it makes me so sad.  I think about what we expected as a much-shortened life expectancy for my dad, maybe eight years tops.  (He had been diagnosed with dementia, thought to be Alzh.)  I can't imagine that dragged out over so many more years.  It just about breaks me in two.  Sara said her dad is a very different person now compared to when she was young.  I believe it.  She said he has no quality of life in the nursing home.  I absolutely believe that also.  I so desperately wanted to keep my dad out of a nursing home for that reason.  Fate came along and made sure he stayed out. ... Grrrr, fate... separating us... grrrr.  Enough of that.  It just nauseates me to think of their family situation with him.  A slow death is a cruel one.  That's why we're almost glad our dad went so damn fast.  It didn't have time to rob him of everything.  We didn't have to watch it after all.

Now that we are in mid-January, I am as expected having to confront the issues of last year at this time.  I feel my mind spinning, remembering how I was trying to get in front of the problem, my heart searching for alternative reasons for his fogginess.  I had forgotten about the conversation at DS with the electrical heart doc/technician, who said emphatically that his fogginess had nothing whatsoever to do with the cardiac arrthymia (sp?).  Irregular heartbeat + delirium would not not NOT warrant that kind of disorientation.  Delirium causes all kinds of chaos in elderly patients, but not to the degree we saw with him.  Dementia was underneath it.

Bottom line: we did the damned best we could with what we had.  He died of kidney failure post op, not from the dementia.  We HAD to do the surgery, otherwise he would have died most likely of the infection.  We had no choice.  We did the best for our patient that we could.  His kidneys crapped out and that was the fact.  Like Elizabeth Kubler Ross writes in On Grief and Grieving, getting him to the hospital sooner would not necessarily have changed the outcome.

Of course, I just miss him and wrestle with it. 

Fleeting Guilt

Today as I approached the tunnel, I had a fleeting feeling of guilt.  How could I have authorized that surgery?  How could I do that, make that decision for another human being?  I felt terrible.  I did not have the follow up thought that he may still be alive if I hadn't. 

I did not kill him by authorizing the surgery.  The kidneys failed post-op.  The dialysis failed him; his body was too weak to handle it.

I did the best I could with what I had.  The kidney failure greatly reduced his life expectancy.  I didn't pull the plug, nature did.

Last night I changed the wallpaper on my phone.  It had been a photo of us laughing together on the couch, when I was about 2, to a picture of the forest in Rhode Island last fall.  This morning I changed it back.  I like seeing his smiling face too much every day.

Baby steps.

Purpose

It's December 2, 2010.  It is two days short of two months since my dad's funeral.  I am okay with the fourth of any month, but not the twenty-second.  The twenty-second makes me feel panicky and sad.

I am dealing okay, I guess.  I'm working, and so grateful to both have a job and a predictable schedule.  Life has shaken itself out to be somewhat tolerable.  The funeral was planned for a week-and-a-half after the death, time I took off of work that was enormously beneficial.  I crossed paths with an old friend who was so very kind to let me lean on him; now that he has kind of receded back into his own life, I ponder the concept of a healer.  They sure do come out of unexpected places sometimes.  God bless him.

In lieu of yet seeking a bereavement group, or a counselor, I'm going to try a reflective grief journal for a while.  We'll see how it goes.