This has been a very insane year..
In the last 12 months, I have seen the heights of joy and the lowest bottom of sorrow.
I buried a family member, nearly lost another... twice, and have gained a future family and member.
Looking back over my journal, it was almost a year to the day to my father's heart attack last year to his re-admittance to the hospital after his fall earlier this week.
My relationship with my father has always been either hot or cold. Growing up I was very much a momma's boy, but I was walking her path, I did the catholic school thing, and was trying to get myself educated and trying to be a "respectable" member of society. Thanks to spending the summers on the road with my father to be able to spend time with him, I grew to know, love, and respect him all the more. I also gained my love of travel and driving at the time. By the time I was out of highschool I was walking more of my father's path, throwing myself into the workforce and doing what I can with the skills I have and trying to keep my bills paid and myself and as many others as possible happy.
After my accident and moving home, my parents helped me out for a little while... and then things kinda went to shit at home and I was working then and it was time to return the favor. Too many sons have to go to great lengths and never end up knowing they have earned the respect of their father... I am very lucky in that fact, those 2 years where I helped keep the family afloat earned my father's respect and for the first time in my life, he finally saw me as not only his son, but another man.
Anyways, I digress on quite the tangent. With my father being as sick as he is with the cancer and the "cure" which is ravaging his body so badly that if I didn't still see the man I love in his eyes, I would never know who he was anymore... I feel lost and adrift, I fancy myself "a rock" for others, someone to lay their burdens on to lighten their load. In my mind I have always followed my father's example, hard enough to take the beating but keep going, but just soft enough to let people know that you care. He was my rock, even if he didn't know it.
I have always kinda failed at the parental holidays... mother's day and father's day, I might make a phone call within a day or two on one side or the other, but this year I needed to be different, I need to stop pussyfooting around and be the man I am supposed to be. I racked my brain for weeks but after having a conversation with my fiance, I had this great idea. The chief of her bureau raises bulldogs, which while really cool on its own struck home once she told me that one of said bulldogs is the official spokes dog for the mack truck company. I best remember my father as the truck driver, he drove a few different types of trucks but the old mack midliner is the one I have always associated with him. Borrowing said spokesdog just was not possible, so I gave up on the idea. Unknown to me, my fiance took the idea and ran with it. I got a call at the beginning of the week to tell me that she wet to the mack truck website and ordered a stuffed bulldog and it arrived at her place and I would have it to take to him for father's day. I was so happy I could barely contain myself, and after he was admitted to the hospital this week it became all the more important.
So here after far too much vamping, here is a picture of my father and his new buddy mack.
For the sake of argument in how much the cancer and chemotherapy has ravaged my father, I am my father's son in many ways, including looks and build...