Story of Dad - Part 3

(WARNING to family and anyone else: Some of this is kind of ugly.)

Whew.
Okay. This is the hard part to get out, I guess. I've been delaying this part for over a year.

Where was I...
Story of Dad - Part 1
Story of Dad - Part 2
_____________________________________________________
...Back in Eric's room we'd watch Undressed. That felt normal. When my laundry was done, I'd fold it. That was normal. When the phone would ring and I'd retreat into the darkened kitchen--not normal.

Many hours passed like this. From about 1am, or whenever I figured I must have gotten the call, to I think around 6am. If that can be right. My Uncle Rich and Aunt Kathy drove my family home to McHenry from the hospital in Chicago, then downstate to pick me up in Urbana. Anyhow, it was really late at night and not even that early in the morning when we drove back up north. Wait. What am I leaving out.

I remember Rich and Kathy being on the front porch. I think Rich said something to Eric, thanking him for, you know, essentially babysitting me. Staying up with me. Being with me.

And then I remember being in the car. Rich's van. I'm not sure what I felt. Sort of a shaking inside. But at the same time still very calm. Shock, mostly, I suppose. I don't remember how it came up, but I remember Kathy talking about how my dad had been a priest in her church and had, I think, introduced her to Rich. Had encouraged her to write to him when he had been in Vietnam during the war. Stories, memories, impressions...soon I would collect these like they were the most precious of stones. Tell me something, anything, that I don't know about him, that I forgot about him. Remind me. Don't let me forget. Round him out as a person. Keep him alive.

But I digress.

I don't remember much else about the drive. Rich was speeding. Which was noteworthy because on the very same roads my dad had always been so sedate in his driving.

And then getting home. Man. This sucked. It was starting to become real. I knew it was going to be real soon. Anne was sitting on the couch with our cousin Jennifer. Matt. Matt. Where was Matt. He was going to go to school that day to participate in the Mock United Nations. My mom's friend Diane was going to go to keep and eye on him and be a support if he needed it. I remember being impressed by my mom taking people up on their offers of help. You know how often people will offer help in times of need? I think before, I had only witnessed people saying, oh, no, I'll be fine. It stood out in my mind at the time that things were really bad when you start taking people up on their offers.

I wanted to go to the hospital to see my dad. His body. My sister didn't want to go back. My brother was going to school, had already gone to school. My mom was coming with us. Rich and Kathy were driving. I feel like someone else may have been in Rich's van, but I can't imagine who it would have been. In the car, what stands out the most was my mom saying, incessantly, like a crazy person, "oh man, oh man, oh man, oh man, oh man..." Real fast-like. It made me feel uncomfortable. Like, shit! My mom's crazy. What do I do?! She would also talk about how she should have been there, how...

This is the story as I know it, remember it being told to me. He had gone into the hospital for a new round of chemo. He'd had a stint put in the first day there to facilitate the giving of the chemo. This was a tube on his chest that went into his body. After this operation, he was doing well enough that my mom went home that night. He had eaten more than he'd eaten in awhile and it looked like he had more energy. So she went home. The next morning, when she got into the hospital, all the doctors were around his bed. They were giving him chemo, but the *numbers* weren't making sense. My mom spent most of the day with him. She said that he would talk crazy, nonsensical talk when it was just the two of them, but when she'd call in the doctor, he'd become more coherent. The doctors were alternately concerned about *the numbers* and not. One doctor said he thought he'd seen a response to chemo like this before. My dad complained of pains in his legs and body. My mom attributed this to him being a former athlete and now not being active--the ache of atrophying muscles. My mom was reading Readers' Digest when a man came in to take some x-rays. She left the room. She read one article. And then another. She went back into the room. My dad, sitting in the hospital bed, was twisting around, reaching down, or something. She called, "Ray, Ray--" He turned back around to face her. His eyes rolled back in his head.

And that was it.

She called for the nurse.

The nurse called Code whatever-it-is-when-someone-is-dead/dying.

Then they "worked on him" for 45 minutes before pronouncing him dead at 12:35am, February 2, 2001.

No one knew it was coming.

And that's the part that sucks. For me. I don't like the idea of death sneaking up on you. Taking you when you don't know it. When you aren't in your mind to accept it. I suppose birth comes to you in that way. But I have this idea that I would very much like to say good-bye to myself. My ego. My identity that I have lived as for x number of years. Not everyone wants this, I know. (And you see how now I am intellectualizing my feelings??) Some people want to be taken swiftly off to their graves from their slumber, unbeknownst to them. But no, I want to say a farewell to the world, to myself. And I want that same opportunity for my dad. I don't know if he wanted it or not. I'm not sure of his final thoughts on death. Deaths, I understand, can be pretty unpleasant. And in the end, it doesn't matter. But it hurts me behind my eyes. Under my cheekbones. In my teeth. I feel acid in my mouth.

But in the car, my mom was consumed with guilt. She felt she should have been with him. That she had stayed away too long. That she hadn't said one last "I love you." That she hadn't apologized for being a "bitch." "Oh man, oh man, oh man..." I'm not sure what I said, what any of us said. Probably that he knew you loved him, that you were sorry for whatever, it wasn't your fault, no one knew... No one knew.

We got to the hospital. Was Grandpa Raven there now? Was Uncle Danny there? Maybe they were there together? I can't quite remember. I feel like they might have been. "Hello, Mary Beth..." Yea, I think they were. Riding in the elevator. Meeting up with the docs. They had his body in a room set a side for this very purpose. For family to see the dead body. It was a very small room. Like a closet. Big enough only for the hospital bed and a chair next to it. The lighting was appropriate, if I remember correctly. There was a lamp. I think then there was an end table next to the hospital bed to hold the lamp.

He was swollen in his body. His belly inflated, under cover of a blanket. From all the juice they pumped into him when they were working on him. And from the bacterial infection and the ensuing sepsis and hemolysis that is what actually killed him. His hair was cut much shorter than I had last seen it. My brother had buzzed it off for him, since he was expected to loose it from this chemo treatment.

His lips and eyelids were purple. He had been bleeding, or leaking fluid, from his ears and nose and they had tried to clean him up for me to see. His face didn't look anything like him. It was bloated and discolored. Everything about him was bloated. And he was still. Without breath. Dead. Yes. Dead. Indeed--dead. The only thing that was familiar about him was his feet. They were hidden under the blanket. But the shape of them was totally distinct. My dad had very flat feet (yes, he had also been an ultra-marathon runner) and he had really bad Morten's foot structure, which you can google if you don't know what that is, which gave the outline of his toes a particular triangular shape. And the particular angle they took when he was laying down, this was very familiar to me.

I touched his feet. Through the blanket. But it was the only thing that was him. Him. There was something about this that was humorous to me. About me feeling connected to his feet. Feeling only connected to his feet. The absurdity of him being dead. The gravity of knowing that my life, as I had known it, was changing. I found a bit of comfort in thinking that it had been just hours ago that he had been alive. That line between life and death was not so far away. Had I never been called, I would still not have known at this point. It would have not yet effected how I lived my life. I would not yet have missed him. He was not yet so far away.

As he is now, seven years later, he is quite far away.

I don't know how much time I spent in there with his body. When I left the room, I remember his doctor and nurse, or maybe just the nurse, being out there. Susan. Or something. Was her name. My family spoke with her for a short time. I don't know what was said. I think she said nice things about him.

And then we left the way we came. Across the hard, glossy tile floor. Down the elevator. I remember Danny acting more urgent, now that we were leaving. I remember wanting to drag my feet. Ever step away being a step away form Him. Not him in the physical. But him in time. I was very aware of time.

Time.

That next year, for one year, was a presence in my life. Ask me, when is my birthday? I can tell you without blinking. Without thinking. Without pausing to reflect upon the question for even a moment. I just know. Ask me, in that year, how long ago did your dad die. And in the same way, without hesitation: 9 hours, 21 minutes.

3 days, 16 hours, 56 minutes.

8 months, 1 week, 13 hours, 2 minutes.

In the same way, I knew. All the time. Exactly how far away. In time. He was. Like a ticking time bomb, but in reverse. I watched the minutes pass and add up to hours and weeks and months. It was the strangest thing. Strange in part because I've never heard of anyone talk about this before or since.

But we made our way to the car. And now I don't remember anything. Next thing I remember was being back at home. I know people started coming over. Was that this first day? I forget. I think Greg P, one of my dad's best friends, came over and cooked Italian food. He's Italian. I remember not eating. I didn't really eat for 4 days or so. Except for fruit. Fruit. The only thing I could bare to push through my lips, tolerate in my mouth without gaging. I remember my Aunt Marjean giving me a massage in my old bedroom. I remember there being lots of people in the house. Feeling alternately overwhelmed by all their bodies and comforted, to not feel alone. I remember there was lots of food, people brought lots of food. Which wasn't to feed me, but to feed all the people in the house.

I remember. My mom having a very difficult time with her last moment. My sister having a difficult time with her last moment. I remember saying that last moments shouldn't detract from a lifetime of good moments. But I also recognize that we always now say good-bye and "I love you" when we get off the phone, of being hyper aware now that, that any moment can be a last moment. And that they do matter. Last moments do matter, just not as much as the lifetimes of moments. And my mom was talking about his face. And the look on his face when he died/was dying. And I remember taking out the picture albums and saying, look, Mom, remember this moment? This was a good moment. And this one. And look at this one. Until the dining room table was covered in photographs and we were laughing at a lifetime of good moments. And I felt like, finally I knew how to contribute something. To help in some way. To aid the coping of some grieving. And I found what I needed for myself.

Each night, I assembled one photograph board. I was a perfectionist about it, spending hours on each. Coming up with themes, finding the best photographs of him to tell a story of sorts of who he was. What was important. Who was important. How he had lived. This was my therapy. My earliest attempt at processing my grief, my feelings, coming to terms with who he was, who he was to me, looking back over everything and finding a certain peace in it all.

I remember the nights before his memorial service and burial passing very differently than the days. These nights were peaceful to me. Introspective. I had, if not the downstairs to myself, at least the illusion of solitude. But the days...

I remember being at the funeral home. Deciding what to do with his remains. Rich and Kathy were there. With my mom and sister and I. My sister and I were very much in favor of cremating him without there being any display in a casket. Embalming rather grosses me out and seems very unnatural. Cremating seemed right. Dad had had no preference, he couldn't bare to think about it. And my mom had always before talked like she would've been in favor of cremation. But when it came to it, she wanted him embalmed. I remember crying with my sister on the stairs of the funeral home. I remember saying to her something to the affect of that if this is what mom felt like she needed, we'd have to accept this. We described to Mark, the funeral director, how he had been very bloated. Mark said he had once got someone from a size 16 to a size 10, that he was very good at what he did. Later that day though, Mark called. He had received Dad's body and, "he was beyond my level of skill." So there was to be no open casket. So no embalming. Direct to cremation. I felt much more at peace about this. I suppose I see fire as a purifier. I like the idea of returning to dust. We picked out a nice cherry-colored box. I liked the wood. I like good quality wood. It makes me me feel good and warm inside.

In that week, I remember driving my sister over to a friend's house. Matt came along for the ride. It was my dad's birthday that was the code to open the garage door and when we typed it in, we were all standing together. We looked at each other. Like he didn't want us to forget him? His car had his initials on the plate. I don't know if we laughed or cried or did both. In the car, my sister realized that dad had taught me and Matt how to drive, but he would not also teach her. Throughout that week, painful realizations like these happened a lot. Dad wouldn't be there when we graduated, got married... Wouldn't be there to quiz us on vocabulary words, foreign language words. And who would you go to when you wanted to know the Latin root of something? Who would you reference with your questions of philosophy? Theology? Questions about anything? Dad seemed to know something about everything. Martial arts anything...techniques and forms and I'd never see him do his nunchaku forms again. Unconditional love and support. Regular reports on the weather, when the lake first would freeze over, when the leaves would drop from the trees, when weird holes would appear in the yard... In every way that he had been useful to me in life, in every way that he had brought meaning to my life, I felt sort of robbed, cheated, at a loss about how to proceed.

A few days passed. I don't now remember much more than I have already mentioned. I don't remember where I slept. Maybe with my mom? Maybe on the couch? Oh, I remember Merc, my mom's next oldest sister, flew out to stay with us for a week. She was there to help with all the financial and paperwork stuff that comes when someone dies. I was impressed by this. I'm impressed by people knowing what to do in a moment of crisis. When people know instinctively how they are most useful and they do that thing. She came out to be a support to my mom, and I think she was very much so. I remember her tying up the trash when the bag wasn't all the way full and I was very bothered by this. Dad had been incredibly anal retentive about filling these trash bags to maximum capacity. I remember thinking, "Mary, this isn't a big deal. You're response is coming from your grief. Let it go."

The memorial service. I always felt like my family, my nuclear family, had an odd relationship with organized religion. I'm sure it was bound to be somewhat unconventional giving the relationships my parents had with the Catholic Church. When my dad's mom had died a few years prior, my Aunt Kathy, who is or was a Catholic liturgist by profession, had organized a ceremony in the funeral home. I don't know or understand my grandparent's relationship with Catholicism, or why exactly this decision was made, but it turned me on to this very personal style of service tailored to fit the life of the deceased. And so when my dad died, my mom and sister and I, if I remember correctly (not sure about my brother), all wanted Kathy to organize the service for my dad. It would not have made sense for it to be in a church. Neither he nor we had much of a relationship with any particular church. Considering my own death now, I could only imagine something happening in the Unitarian Church in Woodstock, but my dad had never attended anything there. Anyhow, so Kathy agreed to organize a service for him. It was important to me that not all the reading come from biblical scripture. I remember giving her a book I had given to him that had pictures from the Hubble Telescope and quotes from various physicists and authors about...well, the big questions. Those answers and questions that blur the boundaries of science and god, that explore the mystery of creation, that don't necessary take sides in matters of belief but will stand in awe of the magnificence of the universe. I don't have the book with me, it must be at my mom's house, else I'd find the part she had used.

That morning. No. Backing up, the day before.

Was the visitation. What a fantastic day! Really. I was happy and upbeat and I felt full of life and impassioned. What was not to enjoy, really, I saw so many people that were important to me, important to my dad from all throughout his life. People flew in from all over the country. They told me stories about my dad I'd never heard before. They talked about how great of a person he was. Integrity. Integrity. That was the buzzword about my dad. He had more integrity than... And funny stories I'd heard before, about him practicing Latin while hanging upside down from a branch in a tree, thinking that the increase in blood flow would increase his brain functioning. And funny stories I'd not heard before, like he'd had a speech impediment (or something) when he was a kid and had introduced himself as "pee-wee puddy." I'm not sure how this is possible, to get from his name to pee-wee puddy, but it makes me chuckle. People liked the picture boards...now I've observed that they are quite common at visitations and memorial services (but mine were really good. I know, I'm not modest.)...but I really enjoyed how people looked them over, how they stimulated people's memories and conversations. How they brought him into the room. There wasn't a casket. Just the cherry wood box. With two pictures, one on either side, I had blown up of him to 8" by 10". Interestingly, they were both pictures I had taken of him, one being the first photograph I had ever taken. We had been camping. The leaves here changing colors and blurred in the background. He was wearing a red shirt that had faded almost to pink. The other was of him holding onto a slender tree with the lake in the background. He was wearing a red and black plaid shirt, if I remember now corectly. It made me happy we used my photographs.

My sister and brother hung out with their friends in what was supposed to be a break room or snack room for the family. I understood it to be common that younger kids would take it over with their friends so they could mingle with their friends and grieve in their own way. I think my mom may have wanted them to be upfront more, but maybe not. I understood their needing to be with their friends more than with all the people who were visiting. I think my mom wanted me to be standing with her more, but she had her posse of sisters to tend to her needs and I was talking with a lot of people on my own. I remember speaking with Micheal, my dad's best friend from college, about death. He said something about how could he exist and then not exist if matter cannot be created or destroyed...or something. I didn't agree with what he said, but I didn't feel like arguing for the non-existence of my father so I let whatever it was he said sit. I remember the martial arts Masters show up, it was my job to talk with him, I think my mom told me that directly...which was intimidating as hell! Many of those people I held in incredibly high esteem and I felt very awkward. But also flattered by their presence and their words. I remember our long-time family friends and the very good friends of my dad's, looking pale, their grief evident by the tightened expressions on their faces, wanting to console them. Much of my time that day, I felt like I was there for other people who were processing their grief. We shared our stories. They felt closer to him by talking with me, and me to him through them. But I settled into a routine of being upbeat and talkative and "on" and present for other people. I laughed a lot that day. I had a good time.

At the end of the day, I felt very relaxed. At peace. Like I'd had a really really good meal and was just going to sit happily and digest it for awhile.

The next day was the memorial service. I remember 10am being a number. I vaguely remember the dress I wore. It may have been black with five inch wide white flowers, but maybe not. I don't have it anymore. I don't like floral patterns. That day, that morning, I woke up, still in the happy upbeat place I'd been the night before. And it felt wrong to me. I wanted to return to that more introspective place. A more reticent self. I wanted to grieve today. Today was not about me being "on" for other people, I was not going to put on a facade. But I had to find another part of myself.

I remember being in my old bedroom. I suppose this is where I was sleeping then? I don't remember if there was a bed in there or not. And contemplating how I was going to get back into myself. I remember... The last thing my dad had given me was a piece of paper that said, "Success. Meaning in life is found in what you do, what and who you appreciate, and the attitude you bring. Adapted from Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl" He had given me a few copies, each with the wording slightly differently, but this was his final draft. It was time to go, I think someone was beginning to call me from the downstairs, but I wasn't ready to go yet. I hadn't gotten back into myself. I really wanted to be able to cry that day. I wanted to be in my own being, being aware of whatever I was really feeling. I wanted this day to be about me and Dad and reflecting in that painful way about him dying. I wanted to feel what was painful and not be afraid of it. I had to reconnect with him. I took out one of the copies of this meaning of life quote, turned it over, and wrote something to him. What, I am not sure. I didn't make two copies. And it went with the cherry wood box into a fiberglass box that was glued shut and buried underground. But I remember it starting something like, "Hey dad, you know I don't believe in an afterlife or anything, but if I'm wrong, and such a thing does exist in some way and you get this..." And then, I don't know, I probably told him I loved him. Thanked him for many a thoughtful canoe ride where we experienced many a sunset together. For being a source of unconditional love and support. For being the best dad that any girl could ever want.

On the way to the funeral home, my siblings and mother also wrote on the back of this. I may have put it in an envelope. I felt resigned. Perhaps. Very inside of myself.

We walked into the funeral home together. I forget if it hit me then. I think it did. Sort of a BAM feeling. No, that's not right. It was more of a...the air is being sucked out of the room but also the pressure is increasing. And I didn't want to look anyone in the eyes. Whew. Deep breath. I was afraid of making contact with people and pulling on a facade I didn't feel like wearing. People had already assembled, were sitting in rows of chairs from the front to the back for the long room. I was glad I didn't have to interact very much with people. I only wanted to be with people I didn't have to speak with, be phony at all with. My brother and sister and I made our way to the front of the room and took seats on a couch that was front and center. It was nice to have a couch. I was between the two of them, if I remember correctly. My brother to my right, my sister, my left. I have a sense my mom was next to my sister, but I could be wrong. There were Kleenex boxes nearby. I think the couch had a floral print. I don't like floral prints. But I suppose it's fitting in a funeral home. I remember being both hyperaware and underaware of my surroundings, of the people around me, of both wanting this thing to get started and also wanting it never to have happened. Part of me really enjoyed the realness of the whole experience of this thing called death. Life seemed, and does still seem, very real when you are close to death. There's a beauty to this, however perverse.

Writing this, now, I'm aware of just how much I value having siblings. I can't imagine life without them. Or, rather, I don't really want to. Thanks, guys, for being here. Maybe you'll read this. Mom has said that the hard thing about loosing Dad, well, one of the hard things, is that she lost her co-parent. No one else loves us the way they did. No one shares the joy in our successes or feels the pain of our misfortunes in the same way as they did together. No one else gets us the way they understood us together, and it is hard for her to not have someone to share that with anymore. Inversely, I'm aware I share a something with my siblings with regards to our relationships with our parents, and with each other, that I can't share with anyone else. And this is special.

Aunt Kathy moved to the front of the room, behind the podium. I forget the order of things. But I remember that Danny talked for a time about growing up with Dad. He told some funny stories. Some, I'd heard before, some I had not. He started to cry at some point. Michael spoke for a time about dad at Seminary? I forget. I forget if Dave talked or not. I rather think not...I remember him looking surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, grief-stricken. I don't think he would've been able to speak. What for being a teacher, someone who is "on" a lot, and often the life of a party, he is a very private person, I am realizing. I remember Bonnie talked about doing martial arts and teaching with him for many years. She told a few stories that were very amusing and complimentary. I always got such a kick out of what a tough-sort of guy he was. :) And then Greg P, and Brent, and Joe, and...Melinda? Someone else from work got up and talked and told some stories about Dad at work. All honoring my dad, alternately amusing and heart wrenching... I remember wishing that we were video-taping this. Then thinking how inappropriate I am for wanting such a thing, no one does this. Kathy did some readings, some of the traditional Catholic variety, for the people who need those things to be said, and others of the more...whatever variety, for people like me who needed something more philosophical and spiritual and less religious.

And then. I don't remember. There was probably some sort of final good-bye sort of thing. But I next remember being in the back of a limo or hearse or some sort of vehicle like that. Holding dad's remains in the cherry box. Being in the front car in the string of funeral cars. Was I in this car? Or was that only mom and I was in a different car? I don't, I guess, remember. I think we were together though, because I remember Mark, the funeral director, driving. Talking about how it was a short distance to the cemetery. About how, when you had a longer journey, there was a big concern for loosing cars, the train breaking. But I could be making this up, I make things up sometimes. But shortly, we arrived at the cemetery.

Acquiring this site had been one of the things we'd done in the days between death and memorial service. We wanted a gravesite by a tree. There was only one remaining and it was next to a dying oak tree. This was amusing to us and absolutely perfect, considering the saga of my dad and his own dying oak tree. It was replaced by an elm, I think.

It was February. There was snow on the ground. Maybe about an inch or two. I remember it being more crunchy than soft. It must have been at least a few days old. The ground must have been frozen. We drove around the cemetery, to the back near where the site was. There were a few chairs assembled on some Astroturf-like blanket. Those were for us, the immediate family. There may have been some sort of overhead protection set up. This isn't clear in my memory. I think I was crying a lot. I had been crying a lot. All through the service, I had been crying. Leaning into my brother, hugging my sister to me. I think we all were crying. My sister, as do I, I suppose, turns various shades of red when she cries. And now, sitting at the gravesite. I forget if it was covered or was just a big whole. It probably was covered. I don't remember.

There were bagpipes. Played by a man in a Scottish kilt. This was some Law Enforcement thing, to have bagpipes at funeral. Greg P had arranged for him to be there. I loved the bag pipes. There's something really emotional about them, they trigger something deep within me. Maybe the reedy quality of them? Maybe the sheer magnitude of their sound.

Sometimes I think of the Auden poem about death. I always loved that poem. Though it wasn't my experience at all. Maybe because he wasn't my partner, he was my father, but...I still like it. Here it is if you aren't familiar:

W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The sounds of these words and their rhythm feels really good to me. And so. The bagpipes played. Some words were said. What, I'm not sure. I'm not sure by whom. We placed the cherry wood box with his cremation remains into the fiberglass box. Tucked our letter to him underneath it. Mark applied some adhesive to the edges of the fiberglass box, pushed down on the top, uncovered the hole in the ground and placed it into the earth. We probably threw in some dirt and roses, because that is what you do. I vaguely remember doing this. We were all crying, I imagine. I cried a lot that day.

There was a meal afterwards that I don't really remember. And then. I don't know. Time started passing. I observed it. Somehow, I went back to Urbana. I forget who brought me back. No. I think it was my mom and my Aunt Nancy. I think they made the drive.

My friends and roommates and made me a "Welcome back, Mary" banner, which was awesome and fun and unexpected. Danielle gave me most of a box of the Hazelnut wafer cookies we were both totally hooked on. I forget what else, but they were great. I was touched that they thought to give me a "welcome home."

That very next weekend, I had National Guard. It was the first of my responsibilities I was to return to. I showed up with my rank on my lapel upside down. What a fool. I'd never done anything like that before or since. And the First Sergeant and some other people in my Chain of Command, were like, "Raven, maybe you shouldn't be here. Do you need to leave?" "No, no, I need to be here." I had to learn to function again. I re-pinned my rank right side up.

A few days or weeks later Kristel called me. We hadn't spoken...since the awful fight we'd had however many years ago. Her parents had sent her my dad's obituary. She was living in C-U in fact. She'd lost contact with Liz. I was never so glad to hear from anyone. Nor so surprised. It probably was a very hard call for her to make.

I have a few distinct memories that following semester that were significant to me.

I remember sitting in my Spanish class, which I was struggling at horribly but needed to pass to graduate, and my teacher commented on what a beautiful day it was. But he didn't say, "this is a beautiful day," he had made some specific comment about the weather outside. The window was wide open. It was sunny and warm and peaceful and perfect in that way that, when you're coming out of a winter in the midwest, the last place you want to be is indoors. And I thought about all the observations my dad had made about the weather in letters to me over the years...and I started to cry. Right there in my Spanish grammar class. I felt foolish. I looked down. Hid behind my book. Odd things like that, like someone commenting benignly on the weather, could trigger extreme emotional responses me in when I was unprepared to deal with them. Atmospheric observations, writing about people and their experience of nature, has always since resonated with me. Interestingly, I had never made the connection before, that this is perhaps something I either got from my dad, or that I have picked up since he died, perhaps to feel closer to him and how he experienced much of the world.

Also, I participated in a grieving group at school that semester. I think we met only 5 times or so, but it was very much needed. To feel like I wasn't the only person going through something like this. So needed. There were a few people that came only once or twice, but there were three of us that came every week. Each of us, our dad's had died. Our dad's had all been 59 years old. They had all died in the last year. We had each been a "daddy's girl." One girl was Thai. Buddhist. Her dad had also had cancer. I forget now if she was wearing black or gray, but it was customary for her to wear black for a long time and then gray. And I envied her this coping mechanism. Perhaps, I'll take that on next time I experience extreme grief. Her dad had been a Thai Buddhist Monk. In sounded like that in Thailand, most men were trained in meditation and had spent some of their lives as monks. She had pushed the button or flipped the switch to have him cremated. There was something about a string being tied to her or two him, around her finger. I forget. But I enjoyed hearing the rituals of her culture and how she and her family coped with and processed grief. The other girl, she was student teaching little kids. Her dad died of a heart attack. She was really cute in that central-Illinois-cute-white-girl-grade-school-teacher-in-overalls kind of way. Not someone I would normally feel I had anything in common with, but we shared this huge bond. So it was intellectually interesting and spiritually satisfying, to feel connected to two girls who were very different from me in some ways, but not different at all in others.

Hmm.

I'm not sure what else to say. I remember spending a lot of time hanging out with Eric and my house mates, discussing food and ethics and morality and the military. I remember being determined to graduate and get out of C-U, to escape that inner emotional hell that had haunted me for much of my time there. Taking Taiji and ice skating. And I had a huge crush on my teacher...Taka. :) He was Japanese. And athletic. Becki would always go, "TakaTakaTakaTaka..." harassing me. I remember making plans with Becki to move to Chicago. Going for some late night walk with her, staying up until dawn, bonding...thinking to myself, I hadn't let myself do that, to not get any sleep in AGES. I'd been so careful to not disrupt my sleep patterns, trying to keep crazy manic-Mary at bay.

And now. I'm at the end. Sort of. I have been saying, to myself, and to a select few confidants, that I've been hung up and blocked by this, by my dad's illness, by his death. It's been 13 years now since he was diagnosed. Thirteen years. What a number. And to remember that from my eyes now, I was such a kid. It's taken me over a year to write this stuff. It's not good writing. Not good reading. It's totally personal. I'm not sure anyone would want to read it or if posting it on a public blog is the thing to do. But I have felt the need to get it out of me and out there. Somewhere else. And now. And now. It's time to begin.

Story of Dad - Part 2

So, now, it's been a year since I wrote "Story of Dad - Part 1." A lot has happened in the last year. But, also, a lot has not happened. Perhaps this part, the real part, has proven itself difficult to get out, but I wonder still if it needs to come out. Like it's an invisible and intangible but very present plug in my throat that's preventing me from saying and expressing something important.

_____________________________________

Eric knocked on my bedroom door... It was our senior year in college, we lived with 3 other people in a Vegetarian Co-op we had called Figrund, a name derived from the digits of our phone number. I had painted a big sign that hung on the front porch that read, "Figrund Vegetarian Co-op." We had house meals every Wednesday, rotating who would be doing the cooking, and we'd each invite a guest to come to dinner. It was fun. He and another housemate lived downstairs, I and two other housemates live upstairs. It was a goofy house; though it had two kitchens, there wasn't much community space, so we ended up hanging out in Eric's room a lot. He had a big TV and good sound system. Plus, he was fun and often up til the late hours of the night.

There was an Undressed marathon going on at the time. Undressed was a TV show on MTV or some similar station. It really was a bad show, but we loved it. On any episode there were always three story lines going on, one taking place in high school, one in college, and one among 20-somethings. The story would follow the characters until they got "undressed," the significance of which varied a bit depending on their age. We rationalized that it was an okay show to watch because there were gay couples, unattractive couples, etc. You know, they weren't all just attractive straight couples. The producers were trying to be open-minded, or probably just trying to avoid criticism.

It was late, probably one o'clock or so in the morning, maybe even a little later, and I had gone upstairs to my room. I don't recall what I was doing. Perhaps I was wasting time on my computer, perhaps I was getting ready for bed, or perhaps I was even watching QVC or more Undressed on my little TV with the purple spot in the corner. I do have the vague sensation though of being in my bed when Eric knocked on the door so I vote for watching television. I had never had a TV in my bedroom before; it was quite a novelty.

"Dude, your uncle is on the phone." Or maybe it was, "Dude, the phone is for you. It's your uncle."

Perhaps my first thought was of surprise that my uncle was calling.

Perhaps my first thought was, "which uncle?"

Perhaps it wasn't a thought at all but a feeling that I already knew.

Except I didn't know. Thought I knew, I know, that I have a flare for the dramatic so...I might have known but had discarded it as me being dramactic. But there wasn't much time to have had many questions.

I took the portable phone from Eric. I shut the door. He presumably went downstairs. I probably said hello to my uncle. I do remember sitting down on my twin sized bed that was positioned on the floor against the far wall. I very much valued having my beds on floors in those days. It made me feel grounded.

My uncle started talking. He said some stuff about...well, I guess I don't remember. Something about my dad's health, and something had happened, and the doctors had tried this or that. It was exactly the sort of thing that you know, that you just know as soon as the person starts talking, what it is that they are trying to say. Like if you have a loved one overseas at a war and a military uniform shows up on your doorstep. You know as soon as they are there and the words start appearing out of their minds what it is that they are preparing you to hear. They are stalling, working up the nerve for themselves, or perhaps giving you some acclimation time. This is going to be bad. Are you sitting down? I'm sorry I'm about to change your life forever.

So my uncle, my dad's youngest living brother, must have said some stuff about his health and the doctors. Probably something about they did everything they could do. And I said, "so he's dead?"

"Yes."

"Okay, what does this mean? What do I do?"

I had a sense of what a hurricane must feel like in the eye of itself. Knowing pain and chaos had already happened, knowing that awful times where to come, but possessing a sense of serenity and peace that can only ever really exist in the now, but also seems to exist when one goes into shock.

"Let me put your Aunt Kathy on the phone..."

Okay.

What do I do? I should come home. Should I take the train? How long will I be gone? How much clothing should I pack? How long will I be gone for?

That was the biggest question on my mind, how much clothing, how long would I be gone?

She suggested I plan on being gone a week. This meant that I had to do laundry (though I am realizing just now that I could easily have done laundry at my mom's house), but I did have to do laundry. She had Uncle Rich were going to drive down to Urbana to pick me up after they took my family home from the hospital.

The next hours passed.

I remember I called Dave, my ex-boyfriend, but still someone I felt very close to. But he refused to come over. (Well, that cemented the extent of our friendship.)

I took two loads of laundry downstairs to the basement to do.

I emailed all of my professors emails that read something like:

"To x:

"My dad just died. I'm going to be going home for at least a week. Please let me know what I need to do to makeup the work/lectures I'm missing."

Something like that.

I remember feeling really powerful and in control. There was a clarity of mind at some points about what I had to do to get what I had to do done.

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. After I got off the phone with my uncle, I think I called Dave right away. When he refused to come over, I left my room. Ruxandra's light was on, she was presumably awake, but I didn't want to disturb her, or something, maybe I didn't want to talk to her about this. I went downstairs.

I don't remember what I said to Eric. Probably, "my dad died," or something equally direct.

I'm not sure what he said, if he said anything at all. It probably would have been weird if he had said nothing, but I know he didn't say anything stupid like, "I'm so sorry to hear that" or whatever. Maybe he said, "shit, dude." Or, "how?" or... I don't know. But I remember him being present. He didn't hug me. He didn't try to get me to talk about it. He didn't give me any advice. He was just there.

He said he was working on some thing so he'd be up anyhow, I don't know if that was true or not. Probably not. Much of the next few hours I spent sitting on his futon watching the Undressed marathon. Sometimes the phone would ring and I'd go into the dark kitchen, sit on the floor, and cry with whichever family member was on the other line.

My mother. I remember crying with her. My siblings? I forget if we spoke. I heard the story of them going to the hospital and not knowing what was happening until the elevator doors opening onto his floor and Anne seeing mom crying. And Anne collapsing in the elevator. I felt bad, guilty perhaps, that I had not been there. But also jealous that I had not been there. Angry that I was so far away when something so important to me and my family was happening.

Back in Eric's room we'd watch Undressed. That felt normal. When my laundry was done, I'd fold it. That was normal. When the phone would ring and I'd retreat into the darkened kitchen--not normal.


I guess I'm going to need a Part 3.

Goodbye to Indy

Today was a challenging day. So was yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that. And the day before that. That makes February a challenging month.

Feb 1st. The seventh year anniversary of the night that Dad died.
Feb 2nd. The seventh year anniversary of the early morning that Dad died. Groundhog Day.
Feb 3rd. The day before I was taking Indy to the vet and deciding how to approach this.
Feb 4th. The day I took Indy to the vet, made an appointment to have him put down, told my fam that this is what I was going to do.
Feb 5th. I took Indy back to the vet, put him down, told my mom and bro about it.

The 1st. Damn. It was really hard, actually, after Joey left after hanging out for the day deep cleaning my apartment and after I got off the phone with my uncle. I was fine up until then. And then, standing in the middle of my living room, I felt my.........that thing some might call my chi or energy or soul or heart.........drop through the floor. And I sort of fell, sort of sank down to the floor and laid my forehead down. Damn. Dad. Damn. I got out his box of letters and laid on the floor for awhile reading them. I always come away knowing he loved me absolutely unconditionally. I'm grateful for the time I spent away so that now I have more letters than I can read in one sitting. I wrote in my journal to him. After he died, I started a journal with the understanding that everything in it was a letter to him. With the idea that, if somehow possible, he's receiving these letters. So I wrote to him. I cried a lot of tears. Big ones that rolled off my cheek and splashed. It's nice when they roll and they don't get lodged in your throat. It felt cathartic and therapeutic. I felt really lonely. No, not lonely. Just really alone. And I didn't want to be alone. I got Becki on the phone and we talked for awhile until I got into bed and it was time to sleep. I don't generally feel lonely, and don't generally mind being alone, but sometimes it feels really nice to feel present with someone. To be present with someone.

The 2nd. Groundhog Day. Dad's day. Eric and I went for our run. Not so bad really, the hard part was the night before.

The 3rd. I worked. I went to Eric's for his superbowl party and left a bit before halftime. I gained some clarity about Indy. It was my decision to make, because it really was about what was best for him, not best for my fam, or what they wanted. This made all the difference and made the next two days much easier to cope with.

The 4th. I took Indy to the vet and she and I discussed his health situation, deciding that it was best he be put down. I called my mom, bro, and sis and told them this is what had been decided. This was the right way to do it, I know. If left, as I've been saying, to committee, a decision would never have been made and he would have suffered longer. Maybe it's not a bad thing I can be "autocratic." (sort of kidding)

When talking to my brother, he thanked me more sincerely than anyone has ever thanked me for anything. I was very grateful for this. I think I tend to think of apologies and forgiveness-es as being powerful. But really thanking someone is a very powerful thing. I'm not sure I can explain it. But I had been feeling very resentful and somewhat angry before that about the situation, but when he thanked me, it all changed. I could say "you're welcome" and feel somehow empowered. Now I could just feel sad and grieve and I had more love to give Indy. Maybe I've never so needed to be thanked before so I never really paid attention to a sincere thanking. This gives me something to think about.

The 5th. Today sucks. Last night I made Indy sleep with me. He slept up near my pillow after we agreed it wasn't good for him to be on my chest anymore. We cuddled in the morning for an hour or so. He licked my hand. Then he continued to cuddle up with "Mr. Whale," the stuffed animal that Dave gave me 10 years ago or so that somehow I've kept all these years. He, Mr. Whale, seems to reappear from a box when something traumatic happens and comforting needs to be had. Indy curled around him last night and this morning.

I went to work.

I voted.

I came home.

Indy and I spent some time together. He'd been sitting on the bookshelf in the hall closet so he wasn't feeling too bad, I think. I was glad that this wasn't the worst of his days. Then it was 5:30 and I had a 5:30 appointment, so there was no more putting it off. I picked him up and put him in his travel carrier. He didn't resist that much and only complained a little. We listened to Elvis sing "Love Me" on the short drive to the vet. We checked into the vet at 5:40 and we were right away ushered into Room 4. Before we'd always been in Room 3.

I took Indy out of his carrier, sat down on the bench in Room 4 and drapped him over my chest so that his head was right by mine. I leaned back so his body was inclined, so he wouldn't slip off me. I gave him love. He purred. I cried. Some minutes passed like this.

A very kind woman named Liz came in and asked me to sign the Euthanasia Consent form. We discussed what would happen to his body and agreed they would hold onto it until after I talked with my family. She took my payment and brought me a "Dog prayer" in a frame that would apply just as well to cat's, she said. I appreciated her gesture of comfort. It was written in the voice of the animal, basically thanking the human for taking care and doing what's best for them. She touched my arm, gave Indy some love. She said, don't feel bad about crying. We all cry. I appreciated this too. She asked me if I knew about the "rainbow bridge" where humans are apparently reunited with all of their companion animals. I felt comfortable crying in front of her, so this was nice. She asked me if I wanted to be here for it. I said, yes, of course.

She explained to me that it was two injection process. That I'd have time with him to "say my last good-byes" after the first injection. She said she hated that expression, but that's what it is... She left.

I gave Indy more love. He still purred. I still cried. I wondered if this was the hardest thing I've ever done. It felt like it. And nothing else could come to mind.

Dr. Lindsay Miller came in with her assistant. I forget his name. Maybe David. She gave me a hug, she gave Indy some love. She talked to him in that lispy voice people sometimes use with animals. I liked that. She explained the process to me. I told her about Dad, about how Dad had really bonded with this little guy, and that everyone said that Dad was Indy's favorite. I told her the story is that Indy liked Dad's barrel chest and deep slow breathing. That Indy had memories of Dad, even if we couldn't tap into them, and that I thought this made this whole thing with Indy extra hard for everyone. That this weekend was Dad's anniversary so it was espeically difficult for everyone. She said that Dad would be waiting for him "up there," that Dad would be the first person he'd run to. Part of me wanted to reject this kind of talk. But I thought of "Dogma," the movie. I thought that these are nice ideas. One doesn't have to believe or disbelieve them. They're nice. There's nothing wrong with that.

I cried. Indy purred.

She gave Indy some love. We talked about why this was best for him. She mentioned that it's one of the blessings of her profession and unfortunate we don't extend this compassion to humans. Yes. I thought of Craig Ewert. She sent David out of the room to go get a towel for Indy to lay on. It was light blue in color. Before I picked him up to lay him down on the table, he did his characteristic head nuzzle. He tucked his nosed into his neck and rubbed his forehead back and forth into the crook of my elbow. Nuzzling me. Oh, Indy. It's the thing he does that melts everyone's heart. It melts my heart. He hadn't done this recently and I was so grateful for this show of his personality. One last nuzzle.

She may have asked if I was ready. I shrugged. No. But it's time.

I laid him on the table. Dr. Miller and David administered the first injection. This was to make him very relaxed and drowsy. Maybe like you would get if you were at the dentist when you're sort of awake, but very relaxed and not caring too much about what was going on. I picked him up again, sat down, and held him in my lap. He stopped purring. His head rested on my left forearm. His paws were on either side of his face. She told me to not be alarmed when he went limp. It would take a few minutes. She and David left the room.

I cried. When I found a voice, I sang to him "Pretty Indy," adapted from Dad's rendition of Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Pretty Mary" since that is the song I always think of when I seek comfort or seek to comfort. I told him I love him, and Anne and Matt and Mom and Dad loves him. I told him I was sorry. I told him he would be okay. I sang to him and gave him love. He was limp. His eyes were still wide open.

Dr. Miller and David knocked and came back in. It was after six o'clock, when the clinic closes. Any animal noises in the hallway had ceased. Human voices were at a minimum. We laid him back on the blue towel on the table. She asked me if I wanted any of his fur. I said, sure, maybe my sister would like that. Is there a particular part? A place where you like to pet him or a color? We chose the base of his neck between his shoulder blades and a bit from one of his dark front paws. Since he is two-toned. Is this weird? To take some of their fur? She told me she still had fur from her first dog.

He was on his left side. His head was at the end of the table and I kneeled in front of him. I positioned him so that he could see me. I picked out his eye buggers (he probably didn't like that) and a hair off his nose. I pet his head. I gave him love. We watched each other. She inserted a mini catheter needle into an artery in his back leg. She gave him the injection. Essentially it's an overdose of anestesia and would take about 30 seconds or so. His eyes closed a little, though they were still open a bit. I said so. Yes, she said. She listened to his heart. I had my right hand on his head, my left on his chest. I felt a shift. His eyes went dark. He's gone, she said. Yes, I said.

She said, I'll give you some time. Yes. I cried. I thought about Dad. About Indy. About grieving. About our family. Time passed. She knocked and came back inside. Can I have more time. I'll be out in the hall working on charts, just stick your head out when you're ready. Okay, thank you. More time passed. I cried. I pet him. I cried. I wondered if it was weird that I was petting him. Because he was dead. He was gone. I guess I was really petting him for me, not for him. I felt sad. I told myself, it is okay to feel sad. It's good I feel sad. It's right to feel sad. So I felt sad. I was glad I spent so much time studying grief and practicing grieving and I could coach myself through a process. I sank to my knees in a prayer position. I think now, some people like to say that when you are praying to a God, you are on your knees so that you feel vulnerable, so that God can rule over you, in a sense. Maybe that it true sometimes, but I don't really believe it anymore. Because standing, bending over Indy's dead body wasn't as comforting as was kneeling before him with my hands pressed over my heart, or at my mouth, or on his body. It was comforting to me emotionally to kneel. Maybe it is a surrender of some sort, but it is a pleasant surrender.

I was not there when Dad died, or when any of my grandparents died. I'm glad I was there with Indy. And it was nice to be alone. Alone with him. I felt like it was a good-bye to Dad too that I'd never had before. It also all makes me want to get a kitten or kittens. If I was in a relationship, yes, maybe I'd be feeling the baby urge. :) Something about someone dying stimulates, perhaps, that desire for young life and the urge to carry on and witness the cycle of death, rebirth, life, death, rebirth. He was a wonderful kitty and he was very well loved. I'll miss him.

Considering Indiana

Do you ever wish there were more colors? What color feels good? I'm in a bit of an ornery mood tonight. And I can't sleep.

I'm frustrated. Angry. Resentful. Yet somewhat resigned to the way the world is. Tonight it is January 31st, but technically it is already Feb 1st. And tomorrow is Groundhog Day. (Oops. My dumb computer decided to publish this already.) Maybe that has something to do with my mood today. I'm not sure. I suppose when I do the math it makes sense that it would, but I wasn't cognizant of it until now.

What is present in my mind is that I have a cat living with me who is sick with kidney disease and thyroid disease and will eventually will die of these things. He's living with me, and has been since mid-November, but he is not my cat. Though I love him, I am not particularly bonded with him. My sister and brother and mother are much more bonded with him. I never really lived with him. I'm starting to wonder if I don't attach to animals. Do I attach to people? They seem to come and go. When they leave, there's a terrible ripping feeling, a rupturing of the fabric of my universe, so to speak, and yet time passes. And whatever happens happens. And I become accustomed to them being gone.

There's a cat living with me who is not my cat. I've never really known Indy when he was well. When I took a semester off from school, and he had an infected face from some puncture wounds he'd acquired from a street fight, it was my responsibility to hold a warm compress to his face to get the puss to ooze out. But other than that, I'd had very little interaction with him. My family got him after I went to college and I never lived at home after that except for that one semester. In the last few years, I'd never seen him because I always had the dogs with me and he always hid from them. He is my sister and brother's cat in the heart. My mom (begrudingly??) pays his medical bills. My bro and sis don't want to take care of him (they say it's because their respective apartments don't allow pets. But Indy is so harmless and my sister is so good at getting what she wants, I can't help but think she doesn't really want him with her). So I feel a certain responsibility to love this cat since it seems no one else wants to. But I have some weird ideas about death and suffering and companion animals and medical treatments in general.

I have a cat who is sick and dying. My mom pays the medical bills. I think she wants to put him down. My sister resents that my childhood cat lived to be 21 or 22 or so. Perhaps like she resents that I had 8 more years with Dad since I am 8 years older. I don't fault her for it, but it seems somewhat unfair to me as well.

Indy's been putting up such a fight against his subcutaenous drip (a.k.a. juice) that in the last two weeks, I've only gotten about 150cc into him. But there have been days when I've stuck him 3 times, but he does that thing a little kid does when they don't want to be held. He throws his weight around and screams in a way that makes me feel so guilty for sticking him with a needle and then he jumps off the needle. And then I feel guilty that he didn't get more juice. Because I know it's dehydration that has him feeling sick. When I give him a pill to stimulate his appetite, he looks at me and I feel like he's saying, "why are you torturing me!?" And I wonder if he wonders where my siblings are, and who am I anyhow? Who am I to this cat?

I resent that I'm always feeling guilty regarding Indy.

And I think about how weird it is to have animals living at our mercy. It feels like some sort of weird slavery sort of thing, they give us love or whatever it is we want from them, and we give them food and shelter. It's a peculiar arrangment. With many of them, we've breed them, both over time and sometimes in the case of their particular generation, for our own purposes. And we spend lots of money prolonging their lives, putting off their deaths; it's so strange to me. I mean, if you really love a thing and don't want to let it go, I guess you try and keep it going on. But what is life, afterall? We have bizarre and perhaps inexplicable attachments to our egos and the mirage of a universe we've constructed. Is that why death is so challenging to people? Because it is evidence that all of this is an illusion? Or is it challenging because people don't want to see it as an illusion and in the struggle to see it as something real, you suffer? Or have we been taught fear of death so that we keep our elbows off the table and so we stop at red lights when no one is watching.

And what is the life of this cat? Indy. He's a very charming animal--when he's not being sickly. But does he exist for his own sake? Do we keep him living with the assistance of western medicine because it is what he wishes? Is this in his best interest? Does he have the same attachment to ego as humans do? "May all beings be free from suffering." What does this mean?

We say humans have a right to refuse medical treatment. Does a cat?

When I took him to the vet I was struck by all the other animals there. No kidding, right? All the other animals. And their human companions. And I speculate about how many of those human companions eat the flesh of other animals. Here they spend lots of money to care for one animal, which may indicate much love for that animal, and yet they pay 99 cents for the government subsidized flesh of another and eat it un-mindfully while driving a car which is killing the earth and our very selves while they're rushing somewhere un-mindfully... And they eat the fruits of raped and enslaved female animals and think nothing of it. Sometimes it's really frustrating that feminism doesn't imply veganism. Since one may want to shoot the large wild buck who has had a grand time out in the woods, but keep the egg-laying hen in abominable conditions before slaughtering her ruthlessly after her 3 years of egg-laying are up. Which brings me back to Indy, now that I sort of positioned myself on the other side of things. Do he owe him a long decline and expensive medical care because we owe him for the years of loyal service he gave to us?

How is it we see some animals as relative equals and some as machinery that produce us food?

So what is particularly sticky about this, and why I resent the whole situation I find myself in is that it's not my decision to make. It's neither my money nor my heart (as much as it is my fams) nor my relationship and karma to complete. I'm not really involved here except I'm feeling guilty cause I'm torturing him (or so it seems to him) or I'm feeling guilty because I'm not doing a good enough job (of torturing him) in order to extend his life.

Story of Dad - Part 1

This is the story of how my dad died. Or, rather, my experience of it. I feel the need to state the reason why I am writing about this and posting it. I feel like I've processed my grief. I've been to grieving groups, done writing exercises specifically geared towards processing grief, and spent enough time in reflection of it all to feel complete about the whole thing. Yet, when I think about doing anything creative I get stuck on this. My dad, my relationship with him, his getting sick, and his dying has somehow stopped up my creative flow. I feel a need to get it out of me and out there.

______________________________________________

So I'll begin.

I was thinking I could begin the story with...

Eric knocked on my bedroom door... It was our senior year in college, we lived with 3 other people in a Vegetarian Co-op we had called Figrund, a name derived from the digits of our phone number. I had painted a big sign that hung on the front porch that read, "Figrund Vegetarian Co-op." We had house meals every Wednesday, rotating who would be doing the cooking, and we'd each invite a guest to come to dinner. It was fun. He and another housemate lived downstairs, I and two other housemates live upstairs. It was a goofy house; though it had two kitchens, there wasn't much community space, so we ended up hanging out in Eric's room a lot. He had a big TV and good sound system. Plus, he was fun and often up til the late hours of the night.

There was an Undressed marathon going on at the time. Undressed was a TV show on MTV or some similar station. It really was a bad show, but we loved it. On any episode there were always three story lines going on, one taking place in high school, one in college, and one 20-somethings. The story would follow the characters until they got "undressed," the significance of which varied a bit depending on their age. We rationalized that it was an okay show to watch because there were gay couples, unattractive couples, etc. You know, they weren't all just attractive straight couples. The producers were trying to be open-minded, or probably just trying to avoid criticism.

It was late, probably one o'clock or so in the morning, maybe even a little later, and I had gone upstairs to my room. I don't recall what I was doing. Perhaps I was wasting time on my computer, perhaps I was getting ready for bed, or perhaps I was even watching QVC or more Undressed on my little TV with the purple spot in the corner. I do have the vague sensation though of being in my bed when Eric knocked on the door so I vote for watching television. I had never had a TV in my bedroom before, it was quite a novelty.

"Dude, your uncle is on the phone." Or maybe it was, "Dude, the phone is for you. It's your uncle."

But this would make for a story that wouldn't leave me feeling complete. So I'll back up.

Without referencing old emails and letters from my dad, the earliest memory I have of him being on chemotherapy was while I was away at military training in Maryland. It was in July or August, the summer of 2000. I recall speaking with him on the phone when I was on break, in the breakroom, at school. The breakroom had four walls of floor to ceiling windows, so that the instructors and drill sergeants could keep an eye on us privates and specialists without being in the room. There were rows and rows of benches suitable for perhaps sixty people to sit on closely together. But there weren't 60 people in there right then. There were just a couple of classes in there, so perhaps 15 or 20 people. More and more people were coming in though as it was the end of the day.

If I recall correctly, my dad was telling me about the vacation that he, my mom, and my siblings had taken. They had gone perhaps to Michigan, and he was telling me it had just been awful and they'd come back early. He was so tired. From the chemo. And it was scary because you know your immune system is down. So no fruits that you can't peel with your hands, because germs live on the skins. And even cutting off the skin would push the germs into the flesh of the fruit. He could still eat his daily banana. Dad was a daily banana eater. But he had been so tired from the chemo they came home early. It sounded like everyone had a rotten time.

I still don't think it was real for me though. Afterall, I was learning to fix guns while wearing uniform--totally out of touch with the reality of my homefront.

I went home very briefly after training, but I was already a day or two late to school so I would not have spent much time there. I have patches of memories of him being sick and having symptoms but I'm not sure when they are from. It must have been though in the few days between training and going back to school that he and I went for a run because it was warm out.

I thought I would make this a separate post, a separate story, but maybe it does fit here. My dad had always been a larger than life creature to me. He was strong and athletic, intelligent and astute. He seemed to know something about everything without being a know-it-all. There was a time when he could do no wrong in my eyes. That time lasted much longer for me than it probably does for most children.

I mentioned growing up on a lake. The swimming leg of the local triathlon was held on our lake. In the years my dad did triathlons, I would sit on the couch, or perhaps out on our pier, and watch him swim through binoculars. We had really large and heavy binoculars, I think they may be from my uncle from the Vietnam war. I could be wrong about that. I enjoyed watching my dad swim in the herd of thrashing arms. I knew his stroke well, I had no problem spotting him, because I had watched him swim back and forth across the lake. I always wanted to swim across the lake too, but I was afraid I may not make it. I was afraid of the seaweed that might rub on my belly while swimming, and afraid of letting my feet drop down past the termoclime if I had to pause while swimming.

I recall him coming back from runs with his friends. Three large sweaty male bodies stretching on our living room floor talking about the run and what they were about to eat. Dad would ask me if I wanted to run with him, and I always said no. I'm not sure of my age, but that had always been my response probably all through high school. I knew I wasn't fast and I'd feel insecure or something silly like that running with him at my pace, slowing him down.

How silly of me, I now think.

When he was running ultramarathons, I just thought he was the coolest thing. My favorite running shirt of his? On the back it had two definitions, printed in the font and style of a dictionary entry. "Marathon: the first half of a race. Ultramarathon: a real race." Or something like that. I still have it. I want to make all of his running shirts into a quilt. I will eventually make the time for this.

There did come a time though when he asked if I wanted to go running and I said, "no, but I'll bike with you while you run." So that is what we did. He ran around the lake, and I biked at his side. We conversed about...well, anything imaginable. He knew something about everything and I was well on my way. :) Certainly, I found most anything he said interesting, larger than life though he was.

I recall driving home with my mom one time, and we saw Dad running. He wasn't far from home, but he looked terrible. We stopped and he got in. I think he had been doing a 20 mile run or something and, well, I guess that's what happens when you run that far. He hit that wall people talk about.

There were a few times when I was in college that we ran together. He wasn't running as regularly anymore, he had developed a problem with his ankle after a 50-mile run one day and a karate tournament the next, and so we were compatible runners. These were awesome times. He would watch me run and critique my form. I would tell him about aches and pains in my body and he would give me suggestions about how I needed to change how I was holding my body. He would be always giving me cues about how to run. After he died, whenever I'd run, I'd have his voice in my ear whispering, "drop your shoulders, relax your wrists, square your chest, let your legs turn under you..." I wonder if I wrote these down anywhere. I feel like I've come to do all these things so much now that I don't hear his voice anymore.

It might have been at that time between training and school, or maybe some weekend I went home, when we went for a run. But I did the running and he did the biking. He was too weak from the chemo to run. I recall some obnoxious boys of the junior high variety saying something about how we were moving really slow. How little people often know about what is actually going on. That is why you should always leave generous tips, even when you get crappy service. You never know what someone else is going through. You don't know who in their family just died, who was diagnosed, or who was the victim of some violence.

But the scary part, the sobering part, was not the boys. It was when we crossed some train tracks. Maybe you haven't been on a bike in a long time, so I'll explain this carefully. When crossing train tracks on a bike, it's important to cross them perpendicularly. If you hit them at too oblique of an angle, your wheel will get stuck in the groove and you'll fall. My dad knew this, of course, he'd done triathlons, and had ridden bikes for years and years. But there is a part of the route around the lake that involves going out on a busier street, and running and riding parallel to the traffic a bit. The train tracks intersect with this road on an angle. If you can imagine the scene, there are cars rushing by and train tracks that you are approaching at an angle. So somehow my dad tripped up the bike tires in the train tracks and fell. Not a big deal to anyone. Except anyone on chemo with the appropriately weakened immune system. He had skinned his hands. Again, not a big deal. Unless you were a person who couldn't eat fruit unless it had a peel.

He was a man who routinely broke bricks with his knifehand and had ran distances longer than I care to sit in a car. He had the most awesome nunchaku form, complete with sound effects and facial expressions. Though humble, he was show-off. Why did he run so far? "Because I can," he'd say.

But here, on a bike, on a route that had just a few years before been too short a distance to warrant getting sweaty over, I saw him humbled in a way that was difficult to digest. It took me a bit to understand the pained and worried expression on his face, the tenseness in his body. It was difficult for me to grasp that a scrap on the skin of his hand could be all the invitation a deadly bacteria would need.

If it hadn't become clear before then, it was clear in that moment. I felt nauseous. It was clear to me that my dad was sick. Very sick. This wasn't something far out there anymore, in the future, something I might have to deal with at some point. It wasn't pretend. It was reality. He was sick. And death at any time was a real possibility.
But it's challenging to go through life, living for the future, knowing there could be a very long future out there, while also realizing that at anytime, the last time I talked to him could be the last. And so still I tended to ignore that this was the reality of my life.

But sometimes it was hard to ignore. When I was home over winter break Dad had pneumonia. When he'd cough, I didn't know how I could handle it emotionally. He was a person who had never been sick. Occasionally, he'd have a cold, of course, and he'd stay home from work and sleep a lot. But he never took aspirin or ibuprofen or anything. He had always been robustly healthy and extremely fit. But now, the lymph nodes in his armpits had been collecting all the cancerous cells in his blood. They were overflowing into his lungs. Whenever he'd shift position, the fluid in his lungs would move and trigger a cough. This was in addition to the pneumonia. I was working on a 750 piece puzzle of with no borders, a repeating pattern of goldfish, and 5 extra pieces. I loved it, though I didn't finish it til I got back to college. But I would sit in the dining room working on this, grimacing as Dad would cough on the couch. He was trying to reach his doctor or nurse on the phone. He remarked that he hated how this, this illness, had become his hobby.

One time over winter break he and I took the train into the city together. This reminded me of the summer after my senior year in high school when I had the job of cleaning pay phones. My cousin and I drove an Ameritech car around, parking in loading zones, hunting the free Snapple giveaway vans, and scrubbing outdoor payphones in preparation for the 1996 Democratic Convention. That summer, I would take the train into the city every morning wth my father. A couple times a week, when we left home with time to spare, we would stop at the local bakery and pick up a donut or sweet roll. This was when I learned to drink my coffee black. There is no reason to sugar it if you were eating it with something sweet. Dad's favorite was apricot or apple sweet rolls, his one unhealthy habit. I say sweet roll because that is what he called them, I'm not sure if that is their official name. I'm referring to those individual-sized coffee cake-like things. I already knew his favorites because the bakery was a few doors down from the karate dojo. He would give my sister and me money after Saturday morning karate classes and she and I'd go get smiley faced cookies, or a donut, and a sweet roll for him. Some of my happiest memories of him and my sister are Saturday morning karate classes.

On that winter trip on the train though, I don't recall if we had stopped for sweet rolls or not. We had parked the car in the adjacent lot and walked to the train. Except we didn’t just walk to the train. I walked. Dad lagged behind. I had to wait for my Dad. There were a few reasons for this in addition to the usual fatigue that would accompany having chemotherapy. One was the fluid and pneumonia that occupied his lungs didn’t allow him to take full breaths of air. This was again challenging for me. He had had the largest lung capacity of anyone I knew. You think I’m exaggerating for the sake of the story? Nope. At rest, he took an average of 2- 2 ½ breaths a minute. This was the result found in some exercise physiology test he had taken. My mom will still remark that she’d look over at him sometimes when he’d be sleeping and wonder if he was breathing or not because he’d breath so slowly.

Another reason was that, and I think it was a side effect of the chemo, his red blood cell count was low. Mom would give him shots of something to boost this, but it was low. And so he had less hemoglobin in his blood to bind with useful oxygen. Oxygen needed for such things as walking.When we were aboard the train, after a few stops a man got on who knew my dad. I think he may have been a lawyer that he used to work with. My dad didn’t have a high opinion of most lawyers. And I didn’t have a high opinion of this guy.

Dad, to me, looked obviously sick. He was pale, washed out looking. It was difficult, if not impossible for him to smile. He was so tired he was having trouble staying awake on the train. And this guy wouldn’t shut up. He had sat down behind us and was leaning forward against the back of our seats. He kept trying to engage Dad in conversation, expecting Dad to turn around. Dad had retired about two years before, and this guy wanted to know what he’d been up to, why he was going into the city. “Oh, you’re sick? You’re on your way to the doctor? Oh, that’s too bad, I’m sorry to hear that…” And then he’d go on talking. You know that feeling when you are super tired and want to fall asleep, but you’re sitting up and you can’t because someone is demanding your attention, and you can’t leave because there is no place to go? And that feeling becomes physically painful? That is the feeling I got from my dad. I felt so bad and so angry at this insensitive brute behind me. I think I may have said something to make him stop talking, it sounds like something I would have done.

I recall the last Late Night Conversation, also over winter break of my senior year in college,I had with dad. The thought and flittered across my mind, should I record this? There are a limited number of conversations I’m going to have with him. But he would not have appreciated me pointing out his mortality, and so I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t record it. This is why I always want to say to parents, stop recording your kids! Your kids, when they are grown up, will be less interested in seeing themselves blow out their 3 year old birthday candles, and more interested in hearing what you thought about the world. So turn the camcorder around and show them who you are. Because you’ll forget to tell them, or you won’t be around, or time will blur it so much they’ll forget what they know when it is most important for them to remember.

The last conversation I recall having with Dad was over the phone when I was back at school, this would have been Spring Semester my senior year. He had had a good day the day prior, which meant he had enough energy to leave the house. He and Mom (I think) had gone to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I hadn't seen it yet. I didn't see it until after he died. But I do recall what he said about it. Overall, he enjoyed it, but he didn't like how dark it was, you couldn't see all the choreography as well as he would have liked. Also, he thought that the fantasy element and special effects used in the movie detracted from our appreciation of just who incredible some martial artists are in real life.

I'm now distracted by the memory of one of my favorite martial art stories he would retell. I sit here trying to recapture enough of it in my mind to tell it and I'm not sure that I have... Hmm. I will have to work on gathering up the details from the recesses of my mind, all the details have not come to mind yet.

Anne, do you recall the one? There is a gathering of martial art masters of a variety of traditions. The protagonist is at about a blue belt level and is perhaps a practioner of karate. Perhaps he was checking out all the other masters and traditions, trying to figure out if he was in the right one, the best one. He observed an older Tai Chi master drinking tea or something during the day when everyone else was doing some "martial arts" and perhaps thought something deprecating about him.

That night he was awakened from his sleep by a loud, "boom, boom, boom, boom..." The whole building was shaking. He went downstairs to see what was causing this loud noise. And there was the little old Tai Chi master, repeatedly punching the center beam of the house (I don't know why he'd do this), shaking the whole house. The protagonist then decided that Tai Chi was the best martial art and that he should change traditions. But I do believe that the Tai Chi master advised him, essentially, that all roads lead to Rome, and to stay on the path he was on. But I forget the details.

On Thin Ice

I grew up on a lake, a small and shallow lake. Generally, in the summer the boating traffic consisted of kayaks, canoes, windsurfers, sail boats, and row boats sometimes with an outboard engine. Occasionally, like on the Fourth of July, an illegal pontoon boat might saunter by. They were illegal because their large engines would stir up the lake's bottom, which could create problems with the underwater ecosystem. Also occasionally, a hot-shot high school lifeguard might take the park district's boat around the lake for a spin. Obnoxious, they were. Much like the snow mobilers in winter.

When the lake appeared to be frozen, Dad would first test the ice. He always made a big deal of me staying on the pier until he was sure the ice wouldn't crack. It did happen occasionally that it wasn't frozen thick enough and we'd go back inside to wait. I vaguely remember being out on the ice when I was a little kid with a small kitchen chair as my guide. My dad had played hockey back in those days and loved to skate. So I had skates for every size of my feet growing up. I was never an accomplished skater, but I could always stay upright and move forwards and backwards.

When it was snowy, we would shovel a rink. We'd go inside for some hot cocoa to warm up before putting on our skates to play. Too many times, when I got back out to the rink, a snow mobiler had viewed our heaps of displaced snow as an obstacle to play on. The ice of the rink would be ruined by the treads of their snow machines.

But one year, when I was in fifth grade, there wasn't any snow to shovel and the ice was remarkably smooth. So Dad and I decided to skate around the lake. When running around it, it is approximately a three mile distance, so skating the inner perimeter is substantially less than that. It was in January and the days weren't very long. It was getting dark. We were perhaps 3/4 of the way around the lake. The local conservation people had earlier installed an aeration device to keep the lake alive and the ecosystem balanced. In the summer, this was un-witnessable, but in the winter, the lake never froze completely all the way across anymore. Still, there were snow mobilers out and ice fisherman in their protective blue huts, so the ice felt safe.

But it was getting dark. And in January that means it was getting cold. When you're running around the outside of the lake there's not much you can do when you want to get home faster, but when you're skating, you can cut the corners. And Dad did.

"Dad, I think you're getting too close to the open water."

"No, I'm okay."

And his words, whatever they were exactly, just sort of hung there. As he went down. Through the ice. He was wearing jeans, and a dark green down winter coat.

When his head came back up, the first thing he said was, "Mary, get on your knees!"

I did.

He was splashing, trying to get back up on the ice. It kept breaking. It wasn't thick enough to support his weight, nor the added weight of the water that was now seeping into his clothing.

"Crawl to the shore! Mary, crawl to the shore!" He had shouted. Was he crazy? I wasn't going to leave him. I looked around for a rope or a branch or something. I was perhaps the crazy one. We were in the middle of the lake, there wasn't any rope anywhere. He shouted again. I think I may have moved closer to the shore, but my eyes didn't leave him.

He kept breaking off more and more ice chunks, trying to get to thicker ice. [This seemed to go one for many minutes, though it likely was only a few.] <----I need to edit this but had to remember to add it.

Eventually he did. And I am forever grateful that he had been the show-off jock that he was. Push-up champ, gymnast, martial artist, swimmer, ultramarathon runner etc., these things saved his life. If not for the upper body strength, muscle memory, and the high level of fitness he possessed, I know he would not have gotten out. I don't know if you've ever tried to pull yourself out of water under these circumstances, but it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.

While we skated the last quarter of the distance, I still felt he was too close to the open water, but he didn't fall through again. He was soaked, of course, in freezing water, skating in below-freezing air temperatures. The danger now was hypothermia. He looked very tense, as you might imagine. But, we got home okay. He got in a warm bath and everything for him turned out to be okay.

It took awhile for this to all sink in; that he quite possibly could have died. If he had been almost anyone else, he probably would have died.

And what it had meant; all the words he had shouted had been with my safety in mind.