three
As I sit here and watch the snow sift endlessly and silently down to earth, I keep circling back to the arithmetically tidy thought, that, today, my Dad has been dead for three months. At times, it hardly seems possible that he is dead, let alone "dead as a doornail" (if I may, since Christmas is nigh, and it is snowing out), this quarter of a year past.
The sheer simple brutality of this has stopped me dead in my tracks so many times since then. It hardly seems possible. I think there have been times that I've been close to having one of those momentary bits of forgetfulness - but I've never fully gotten there, because nothing else has been uppermost in my mind since the night he died.
I miss him.
I'm not going to miss him anymore because Christmas is coming up (Thanksgiving was more of our family holiday, anyway, and had been especially since I've been married) - I miss him simply because he's gone from me. It is still very, very hard for me to watch the last out of the World Series without getting choked up (like I fucking am right this moment), or to work on genealogy, or to check the oil level in my car, or to talk to my Mom (or my Dad's mom) or Sister or Brother without his ghost hovering over the conversation.
The hardest part of it all is to try to think back past what he was like at the end, before the cancer robbed him of his vitality. Those last four weeks of his life are very long length of mental anchor chain for me right now.
I think a lot about how I wish I had stayed in PA 33 more hours, so I could have been with him when he died, instead of driving back to a job that I knew in my heart I was going to have to put off for a week. Would it have done my Dad any good? I doubt it. It would have been a perfectly selfish gesture on my part to simply bear witness to the final act of his life; after being with him for all that time, I wanted to see him through to the end, and I didn't do it.
It took a while to talk to my brother about it, and as hard as it was for me to listen, I am sure it much, much harder for John to relate it. Sometimes death is easy, and sometimes it isn't. In this case, it wasn't. Whatever the outward manifestation of my Dad's dying was, it convinces me of one thing - that he was in no way ready to give up his fight against the cancer. It took him, regardless, once there was nothing left for him to fight back with. I gave up on my Dad long before he himself did, and that hurt will never go away. The day that I left, I somehow found solace in the fact that his upcoming cremation would do to the cancer what the miserable, misbegotten chemo couldn't - rid his body of this disease.
As crazy as it sounds, there were a lot of beautiful moments in the days following the 19th. True, they needed my dad's dying to act as a catalyst, but they showed just how much he was loved by so many people. They showed me that, whatever his death was, his living touched others in ways I couldn't comprehend. For all that I sat and agonized over what to say about him when it came my turn to eulogize him (and, wouldn't you know, my brother still busts my chops about giving the "better" eulogy...I must love him a lot to not want to kick him in the skull), the most bittersweet part of the proceeding was to listen to others - in eulogy, in simple, kind statements, or just a hug - let me know what my Dad meant to them.
And, somehow, magically, I am here, three months along. I think about my Dad before I go to sleep at night, or driving home to work. I talk to my Mom, Tara, Liz and Scott, and John and Gretchen. I talk to Bucky sometimes, too. I watch the video that I made for the viewing. A lot. And, I think about the fact that I will always carry him inside me. Most times these days, it isn't very satisfying, but it is the best that I can do.
And, I wonder - will I see him again? I don't know. My days of Catholicism are long behind me, but that doesn't divest me entirely from the ability to hope. I hope so. If so, that joy will surpass anything I can comprehend. If I don't - well, then it just makes it all the more important to keep him alive in me, and play a life-long game of generational whisper down the lane...where hopefully the accuracy is better than 50%.
I look back over the past summer, and I think that I can say we (which includes my deepest, deepest appreciation to Hospice - without them, it would have been a much tougher road) did the best that we could for him. If the outcome was foregone, at least we made him as comfortable as we could, and he died at home, surrounded by those that loved him.
And, when I see my family in two weeks, we'll eat, and we'll booze, and we will talk about how my Dad lived, and what did, and how he could be a raging a**hole at times (oh, yes...my goodness, the stories I could tell...), and how we loved him.
And that has not a single thing to do with cancer, or sickness, or death.
