One Week an Orphan

I’ve been trying to write this for a while now.  But now that I’m back at work it seems the right time to just do it.

My Dad died on May 30^th.  I got the call around 7:50 that he had coded.  His blood pressure dropped, he stopped breathing and coded.  They wanted to know if they should continue life saving measures.  How do you answer that on the phone, without your sibling, and while you’re at least 40 minutes away???

I got there in 25 minutes.  It may have been 23, I’m not sure. I met my sister there. 

When we got up to his room, after I yelled at a security guard in the ER, they had done CPR again after he crashed again. He was on a ventilator but they kept losing his pulse.  They lost it again as we stood there, and they started CPR but I asked them to stop.  We agreed that wasn’t what he would have wanted and they were working on him for so long that even if they were able to get him back, his brain wouldn’t be alive anymore.  It wouldn’t be my Dad.

He passed as soon as they took him off the ventilator.  We were not in the room but went in shortly after.

And now, as I joked with my sister as we sat in the room with our dead father, we are now orphans.  He had been in the hospital for a while and although we knew he may not get better, we kept hoping that he would use up another of those 9-lives and make it through it.  But this time, it wasn’t meant to be.  We sat there with him for a while, in disbelief.  All I could keep saying was “fuck” over and over. What else could I say?  I had this whole speech prepared to give him once I knew he could hear me and it was all about how he had to get better so he could see my daughter in gymnastics class, see her go off to private school next year, celebrate her next birthday.  But I never got to say it. He was out of it more than in the last few days and I never got to say it.  There’s a lot I didn’t get to say, including good-bye.

It’s kind of hard to believe that he’s gone.  We had thought for the longest time that he would go first and when he didn’t, there was that additional shock on top of the shock of losing my Mom so quickly and traumatically.  And now that it is him that’s gone, it’s odd.   I can feel that there is something wrong with the world now that he’s no longer in it.  It feels weird not being able to call him, check on him, tell him another funny Emily story.  Everything just doesn’t feel the same anymore and I don’t know that it ever will.

I can’t say how many times I heard the words “wonderful”, “giving”, “dependable”, “always there”, “great” and “we will miss him” followed by “greatly”, “so much” and “more than I can say”.  He was a wonderful man and hearing everyone from the recreation secretary at his retirement community to some of his closest friends say the same things over and over just confirm that I was lucky enough to be Angelo’s daughter.  He will always be the one that supported me the most, the one that just wanted me to be happy no matter what it meant.  He will always be the one that initially scared most of my friends but in the end, made them feel like one of his own.  I posted on Facebook that my world feels a little bit darker now, and I think that it will always be that way. He had a way of lighting up a room with his smile and always managed to break an uncomfortable silence with a great laugh.  And I will miss that.  I will miss being able to call him my Dad, because that was one of the biggest honors I will ever receive in this life.  He was a good man and he is very sorely missed.