I lost my father yesterday - a sweetheart

My father was an artist with real talent that got sidetracked by war and a military career. He had interests in times of his life that I didn't know about.

I started to write a long post which turned into tedious narrative. I couldn't carry it through. My father died basically from a failing heart yesterday. His heart could no longer pump fluids through his body and it effected his lungs and so on. He passed at about 3:30 in the morning on May 31st. I arrived to the Intensive Care Unit where he was three minutes after he'd taken his last breath. My oldest brother had been there when it happened. My oldest sister arrived just as he took his last breath. When I entered she just glanced up at the monitor which was all flat-lined.

There's a long four-month story leading up to that. I was his principal company and companion while he lived in hospital rooms, nursing homes and rehab centers.

We didn't expect him to die. He'd been mistakenly given a shot of morphine in his care center where he was staying. The on-call doctor thought he was a terminal patient in hospice care. He wasn't. (I'm not law suit happy, but there may be one there.) It caused him to go into a half coma state. I was the first to reach him when they called the family the following morning. I thought I was holding my dying father. He couldn't close his eyes or blink or talk. He could just gently squeeze my hand. It turned out he heard every word I was saying.

The medics arrived and gave him some unique kind of oxygen and he began to revive. Then once in the emergency room (about the fifth time for him in the last four months) it all began to unfold. He knew he would die.

Once they knew he'd been given morphine they gave him a quick antidote and determined he was OK.

He refused my request that he try to sleep because he said if he did he wouldn't come back. He deliberately had two bites of some food and stated (we could see in the aftermath) that that was that, he was now finished with food. (His last bite of food was a piece of cantelope.) Then he went into a personality I'd never seen. A rather unpleasant one I must say. Like a mafia don interrogating family and demanding answers. Ending his sentences unusually with "That's all I'm asking", like 140 times. Or, "That's all I wanna know." One of the two, I can't remember. I felt impatience with him.

The doctor said he was well enough to be transferred back to his nursing care home, so I left to sleep some. When I awoke I, without calling anyone, went to his nursing care home to see him, but he wasn't there. I called my brother and found out he'd not been transferred yet. Something was happening, too, at that moment. He said call back in ten minutes. Ten minutes later I was told my father was "passing."

I jumped in my car and got to the hospital. Several family members were around him crying. I said I'd go get his wife, my mother. I left. When I came back my father revived at the voice of my mother and proceeded to hold court for several hours.

Like an Old Testament patriarch he gave words of wisdom, blessings, and prophecy for each of his children in order. Unselfconsciously (not knowing about such scenes in classical and biblical literature) just falling into it naturally. Very much out of character as well.

In the discourse I swear on God's Word he began to speak to all there the language of recurrence as it's found in Ouspensky's books. "Each one here has to look back on their lives and see where they could make a change. Some things you can change, some you can't. Some things are fateful."

"Did you say 'fateful'?," I inquired.

"Yes."

Then he mentioned 'accident.' "Fortunately none of you has suffered anything that didn't have to happen to you. No accidents."

He also stressed that it was good that nobody had harmed anybody.

He could see his life from a perspective of seeing where changes could have been made.

[I'm getting tedious here...]

Suffice to say just to look at my father these last several months was enough to break your heart. He broke your heart just looking at him. He tried so hard to get his strength back in physical therapy, but he couldn't. His heart was too weak to let him. And he couldn't breathe because of the fluid in his lungs. But he tried. In goofy machines, with several therapists and assistants helping and encouraging him.

I berated him when he developed pneumonia for the second time by being supine in bed too long and refusing to sit up in a chair. I berated him when he didn't show enough effort in his physical therapy. I missed much of his sweet and unusual presence.

I do cherish though now when, after physical therapy, I would take him for walks (push him in his wheelchair) outside to get some sun and fresh air. We could only go within a radius of the nursing care home, so I found myself pushing my father through generic parking lots, passing the backs of restaurants, going through pleasantly landscaped office building complexes, going to a local strip mall that had a drugstore. Just walking up and down the streets the care center was on.

Sometimes I would push him with my hands on his now frail shoulders.

Now I think, me and my dad, walking behind rows of restaurants. What are we doing here? Though I secretly loved it.

I would find quiet spots and have him call family from a cell phone. These were the only things to do.

Then I wheel him back to his room, transfer him to bed, and he would go to sleep until dinner. I'd leave. Then I'd come back about six and stay no later than eight. He'd be alone from eight until noon the next day. Looking back, after he's gone, I wonder how I could have ever left his side. Left him alone there.

You kick yourself. The context is changed when you know the outcome (that he'd be gone at a certain near date), but you still are hard on yourself.

I found out sometimes he'd have bad nights. Now I knew why he was always saying, "I can't get in touch with you!" The phone situation for him was complicated. He was stuck in a bed with little reach for even turning on a light. He couldn't figure out a cell phone at that point anyway. But in those long nights he was calling out for me. I had no idea. Looking back, knowing the ending, I am hard on myself.

When I'd arrive the next day the nurses would say: "Your father's been calling for you!"

My father had a sweet face. Handsome. All the nurses fell in love with him. An Air Force pilot, but now like an innocent child. My mother was the only woman he'd known. He was alone in life at a young age. Made his way. A very innocent man.

I had no idea he ever even thought about such things as recurrence, let alone knew the language. It may have been strange inspiration. He discoursed on all his children, but was mostly silent about me. The "wheel" he spoke of, I thought, was now no longer something I was a part of. Keep in mind this was a dying man speaking. Speaking robustly. In an agitated, "I must say this", mode. Language that had to be interpreted. Everybody cringing waiting for their turn. Brutally honest.

Nobody thought he would die several hours later though. I felt moved to come back to him at 1:20 a.m. He was talking just as rapidly and loudly but now only to himself. He was literally speaking of taking off for a flight. My brother was in a chair trying to sleep, next to him. I sat down and tried to talk to my dad. He was in his own world. He directed words to me, but I couldn't follow them or make them out. At one point I stood up directly over him, looking at him, and said: "I love you, Dad." He said, in a normal voice: "I love you, honey." I said: "You're the best dad in the world." And he went back to his talk about his flight he was about to take.

I left, thinking my presence is making him not fall asleep (see what the context makes you do?) I just left him, as he talked strangely and robustly to himself and to another imaginary person as I left the room. One hour and fifty minutes later his heart stopped racing, and his breathing stopped, and he died.

I had been trying to sleep back at home, but couldn't and had gotten up, and my sister came down the hall and told me our brother had called and said he was dying now. She left immediately, I had to dress and was three minutes behind her. I wasn't there for his final breath, but my brother said he'd been not very conscious once his heart had started to go down.

I was hard on my self for leaving him earlier. Leaving him to talk to himself. The context rules. I didn't know he was on the verge of death. I thought he needed to rest his mind and sleep. I didn't want to be a catalyst for him to keep talking.

When I saw him, I fell on his chest and kissed him and the tears flowed. My sweetheart father, my companion, my handsome dad who I had just begun to truly just look at and touch and help, was gone.

* * *

Today, I awoke at about one in the afternoon and took a drive. I went to the nursing care center. I parked and walked all the paths I would take pushing my father in his wheel chair, feeling him with me, and crying. I then went to the hospital, where his body still was, and just stood in the parking lot, crying, saying: "Dad, I know your body is still here, and I'm here. I miss you, dad."