Love is like a dying ember, and only memories remain
LJ tells me I posted one week ago. It was 9 days ago, to be exact, and things were a lot different. I was overjoyed, filled with excitement for what my life has become and is becoming, celebrating my good news and the great things happening in the lives of friends, and I should've been in Apple Valley.
I knew my dad was sick. He has been sick for years, with emphysema, COPD, bouts of tuberculosis and bronchitis; within the last two years he's suffered the loss of his wife and watched his youngest daughter graduate high school. He's been getting smaller physically, and gentler emotionally, but he's remained just as sharp as ever intellectually. But I knew he had a cold, and I should've come straight away. Instead, I waited a night, and by the time I got here the next day, he had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
He was conscious and talking at the time, but he was struggling so hard to breathe that his body didn't have enough strength to walk to the car, so the ambulance came. When I got to the hospital, he had been intubated, sedated, and diagnosed with a bad case of pneumonia in one lung. The doctor didn't seem to want to give any details, but the nurse emphasized that the ventilator was not life support, that Dad was very sick but would come home from this, after a few days on a ventilator to give his lungs a rest and clear out the infection. We went home worried but optimistic.
The next day he was worse - he wasn't responding to the medicines as well as they would like, his kidneys were failing and not properly processing all of the antibiotics, his blood pressure waxed and waned with medicine correcting it, and he looked 10 times more sick. We knew what this all meant - it wasn't long ago that we saw our mom in the same position, with the same tubes going in and out of her. We struggled to walk the line between having faith and fooling ourselves. We started calling family.
The next day Tara and I went in early before anyone else, and it was clear that things had worsened even more. I knew he was ready to go, and we just wouldn't let him; I called my brothers and told them, and we all agreed that we couldn't hang on to him. The doctors spoke with us - all of his organs were shutting down, as all the blood was being used to just power his heart. Even his brain had shut down by now, so his brow furrowing and his eyes slightly opening were not a result of emotion or thought process - they were just his body doing what bodies do. He was gone.
We knew his wishes, and his style, and we knew we had to let him go as soon as possible. We discussed it with family, and everyone agreed. My mom's brother and his family showed up to say their goodbyes. That worthless priest who spoke at my mom's service last year (which we all hated) showed up to give the last rights and then left, and he didn't even remember us. He was accompanied by a very nice chaplain who stayed with us. The doctor finally showed up at 7:40 to take the ventilator out, and my dad was gone half an hour later.
So a lot has changed in the last week, and I've been pretty much in seclusion. I'm not processing it all yet - we were all so dumbstruck and speechless that I'm not sure if any of us have really processed anything. Plus, this is a lot different than my mom's death was. I think we all knew that my dad was hurting in a way we couldn't imagine, so we stayed strong for him. We helped him do all the official stuff, and tried our best to celebrate her life instead of mourn her death. This time, I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me, and there's so much more to figure out. I haven't been able to talk to any of my friends even, while last April I leaned on them more than ever. But we're dealing, and I feel more optimistic than I did yesterday, so that's a start.
What hasn't changed is that my life is beautiful. It would be more beautiful with my parents around, but I have amazing siblings and the most inspiring and handsome nephew. We're still a family, in our own weird, Mahoney way. Covering emotions with jokes and burying love with good-natured insults, we will get through this okay. And as for me, I have a myriad of friends who have always taken care of me, and that I love very much. And I am getting married in a year to the most kind-hearted, sincere and gentle person I've ever known.
Today is the wake, which will just be my family getting drunk and remembering good times, I think. It's at my aunt's house, the same place we all gathered last April for my mom, but this time it's just going to be the family. So, if you have access to it, drink some whiskey in honor of Cornelius Brendan Mahoney. He was a great but humble man, who had the ability to make everyone he met smile and laugh, including but not limited to, his nurses, the mailman, my friends, the checkout clerk at the supermarket, the pizza delivery guy, our teachers, our coaches, neighbors, in-laws, and so on. I will miss him so much, but I'm glad he's with my mom now.
I knew my dad was sick. He has been sick for years, with emphysema, COPD, bouts of tuberculosis and bronchitis; within the last two years he's suffered the loss of his wife and watched his youngest daughter graduate high school. He's been getting smaller physically, and gentler emotionally, but he's remained just as sharp as ever intellectually. But I knew he had a cold, and I should've come straight away. Instead, I waited a night, and by the time I got here the next day, he had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
He was conscious and talking at the time, but he was struggling so hard to breathe that his body didn't have enough strength to walk to the car, so the ambulance came. When I got to the hospital, he had been intubated, sedated, and diagnosed with a bad case of pneumonia in one lung. The doctor didn't seem to want to give any details, but the nurse emphasized that the ventilator was not life support, that Dad was very sick but would come home from this, after a few days on a ventilator to give his lungs a rest and clear out the infection. We went home worried but optimistic.
The next day he was worse - he wasn't responding to the medicines as well as they would like, his kidneys were failing and not properly processing all of the antibiotics, his blood pressure waxed and waned with medicine correcting it, and he looked 10 times more sick. We knew what this all meant - it wasn't long ago that we saw our mom in the same position, with the same tubes going in and out of her. We struggled to walk the line between having faith and fooling ourselves. We started calling family.
The next day Tara and I went in early before anyone else, and it was clear that things had worsened even more. I knew he was ready to go, and we just wouldn't let him; I called my brothers and told them, and we all agreed that we couldn't hang on to him. The doctors spoke with us - all of his organs were shutting down, as all the blood was being used to just power his heart. Even his brain had shut down by now, so his brow furrowing and his eyes slightly opening were not a result of emotion or thought process - they were just his body doing what bodies do. He was gone.
We knew his wishes, and his style, and we knew we had to let him go as soon as possible. We discussed it with family, and everyone agreed. My mom's brother and his family showed up to say their goodbyes. That worthless priest who spoke at my mom's service last year (which we all hated) showed up to give the last rights and then left, and he didn't even remember us. He was accompanied by a very nice chaplain who stayed with us. The doctor finally showed up at 7:40 to take the ventilator out, and my dad was gone half an hour later.
So a lot has changed in the last week, and I've been pretty much in seclusion. I'm not processing it all yet - we were all so dumbstruck and speechless that I'm not sure if any of us have really processed anything. Plus, this is a lot different than my mom's death was. I think we all knew that my dad was hurting in a way we couldn't imagine, so we stayed strong for him. We helped him do all the official stuff, and tried our best to celebrate her life instead of mourn her death. This time, I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me, and there's so much more to figure out. I haven't been able to talk to any of my friends even, while last April I leaned on them more than ever. But we're dealing, and I feel more optimistic than I did yesterday, so that's a start.
What hasn't changed is that my life is beautiful. It would be more beautiful with my parents around, but I have amazing siblings and the most inspiring and handsome nephew. We're still a family, in our own weird, Mahoney way. Covering emotions with jokes and burying love with good-natured insults, we will get through this okay. And as for me, I have a myriad of friends who have always taken care of me, and that I love very much. And I am getting married in a year to the most kind-hearted, sincere and gentle person I've ever known.
Today is the wake, which will just be my family getting drunk and remembering good times, I think. It's at my aunt's house, the same place we all gathered last April for my mom, but this time it's just going to be the family. So, if you have access to it, drink some whiskey in honor of Cornelius Brendan Mahoney. He was a great but humble man, who had the ability to make everyone he met smile and laugh, including but not limited to, his nurses, the mailman, my friends, the checkout clerk at the supermarket, the pizza delivery guy, our teachers, our coaches, neighbors, in-laws, and so on. I will miss him so much, but I'm glad he's with my mom now.