Another one of those Sunday nights when I find myself wondering where the hell my weekend went. Unfortunately there will probably be a lot of those over the next few months. All the same, I’m going to get away for a few days soon. Suggestions welcome. I’ll also be doing a conference presentation in DC in April and I’m pondering (not sure how seriously just yet) a trip to Seattle sometime this year. It’s been way too long.
Assorted thoughts (without links for a change) on a Sunday night:
- As I expected, the really weird thing to get used to is the calls I’m not getting from my dad anymore. I’ll be using an even smaller fraction of those minutes I so much resent paying for now.
- Realizing that I’ve lost so much weight that my suit now looks utterly ridiculous on me was pretty exciting. Realizing it on the morning of my dad’s funeral–when I needed to wear that suit–was less so.
- As of tonight, the house is in order, the laundry is done, and I actually have a full complement of groceries for the first time in almost a month. It’s nice.
- All the above allowed me to make curry tonight. That was pretty nice too.
- Back to work on Tuesday. That might even be nice.
It is much more difficult to stay sad when wiping your eyes and blowing your nose with Elmo tissues.
We said goodbye to my dad this afternoon. It was a very difficult thing (you really don’t know until you’ve done it) and I am pretty thoroughly wiped out after the service and the two weeks of significant hospital time that preceded it. I’ve spent exactly one full day at work since before the holiday break and I’m actually looking forward to Tuesday when I can start back.
There’s a long post in me about my dad but it’s not coming out tonight. I mainly want to thank my friends for your calls and messages and for letting me know you were thinking about me and checking up on me, and also to thank my family for being there unquestionably and without even needing or waiting to be asked.
More later. I’m not going to do much other than watch movies and try to eat reasonably healthy food for the next couple of days. I would have really enjoyed last night’s snow if it had come tonight instead.
17 August 1925 – 16 January 2013
Meriting a mention despite my avoidance of such things over the past week:
- RIP Vivian Brown, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Huell Howser.
- I too wonder why I hear so few librarians (even of the academic variety) discussing this.
- it makes me happy to realize that Mr. Rogers’ first neighborhood was actually a neighbourhood.
- The big question is “who will notice the difference?”
Friday: My parents and I were all together for what I imagine will be the last time when we brought my mom over to the hospital to see my dad. It went fairly well, given the circumstances. I’m not sure how much of it my mom will retain. About half the time now she seems to think it’s my grandfather (dead for over thirty years) who’s in the hospital rather than my dad.
Saturday and Sunday: Spent a good chunk of my time in the hospital but also tried to catch up on things at home.
Monday: Worked as much as I could. My aunts are staying with my dad during much of the day. They’re truly wonderful people. I also consulted with two funeral homes in preparation for the inevitable. Visited Mom for a few minutes. Came home quite exhausted.
Today: Nothing new. Just a slow, steady decline. People tend not to stick to a schedule when they die. He stops breathing very often, sometimes for twenty seconds or so. Initially my heart stopped every time this happened. Now I’m getting used to it. The nurse thinks we’re pretty close to the end.
Situations like this do tend to restore my faith in people. Everyone has been really helpful and nice. My family has been quite amazing. Friends too. I’m torn between needing to talk about it and not particularly wanting to. Which sucks…
Given what’s going in with my dad, some of my coworkers have been surprised me to see me coming into work whenever I could this week and have encouraged me “not to bother.” But it’s really no bother at all. In fact, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t want and need to.
Right now, my dad is heavily medicated and sleeping most of the time simply because when he’s awake he’s in mental and physical agony. You can’t imagine what I’d give to have one more actual conversation with him. But any time we spend together now is not exactly quality time. He barely knows whether I’m there or not and every minute makes it a little bit harder for me to picture him ever having been alive and independent. I think he would benefit more now from an alert son who spends a few hours a day by his side than from one who’s exhausted from putting in twenty-four hours a day watching him sleep.
Maybe I’m rationalizing. Or selfish. I don’t know. But I do know that I very much need to spend a few hours every day feeling normal and trying to think about something–anything–else. I find that work is increasingly what I rely on in a crisis. The weekend after Mark and I split up I decided that it was the perfect time to do major surgery, including a WordPress upgrade, on every single one of my sites. Just as my mom was going into memory care last winter, I dived right into a major grant application. My house has never been cleaner and neater than it has for the past two years. In each of these cases–not to mention the current one and many others–I was confronted with a situation I felt I had no control over. Therefore I desperately needed something I could control–something I knew I could do well to make up for whatever failure or misfortune was tearing me apart.
I’m not the most together person on the planet but I’m smart enough to know that this works for me. And i have a sneaking suspicion that my dad would approve.
Random thoughts while I have too much time on my hands in the palliative care unit:
- I seem to get my most emotional these days when strangers (nurses, friends of my Dad’s, etc.) are nice to me. Not sure why that is.
- A year or so back, I said that childhood ended when you started looking for long-term care for your mother. If any trace happens to linger, it evaporates when you have to make the decision to let nature take its course as your father approaches the end of his life.
- Death is not a neat and tidy thing.
- My dad is an amazing person who apparently made friends wherever he went. I sometimes wish I’d inherited a little more of that.
- Despite my distaste for Wells Fargo when I banked with them in California, they do have at least one employee in Greensboro who is a human being. Not surprisingly, she was hired during the (pre-First Union) Wachovia era and made things much easier for me Monday than her counterpart at Bank of America did five years ago when I had power of attorney for my uncle.
- Hospital cafeterias are not as bad as their reputations suggest.