I Hope He's Smiling

My Dad was a good man, and I miss him.  I don’t actively ‘miss’ him, per se; I don’t cry or obsess over what happened, at least not regularly.  But when I glance over at the picture next to my desk of my parents and my daughter on Grandparents’ Day at school, my stomach just knots up.  If anyone should be here, it’s him. Don’t get me wrong – I still think my Mom got the short end of the stick and should have had a hell of a lot more time with Emily than she had.  Emily was a chance for her to redeem herself for what she did to me when I was a kid and that chance was cut very short, too short for my liking. But my Dad, it was just different.  He was here to hear her say Grandpa with such enthusiasm it was hard to not cry with joy over it.  He was here to buy her her first bike.  He was here to hear about all of her crazy antics at school and beyond.  And he should be here to hear more of it, to see more of it, to feel more of it.  I hate looking at that picture and remembering how much she made him smile.  My Dad didn’t have a whole lot to smile about in the last year+ of his life, except for her. I knew I could get him to laugh if I told him a crazy Emily story and now, I have to hope and find a way to believe that he sees it all now and he’s with her.  I hope that he is with me sometimes; he was my gravity – he kept my feet on the ground and he kept me upright even when a lot of my world was falling down (or up, I suppose would be the right analogy) around me. 

I have a bunch of voicemails saved on my phone from him and I know that I can listen to them when I’m ready to. It’s not like my Mom’s – she left me one voicemail, on my birthday two years ago, and it’s the only one I have.  She died so horribly, and I had to watch it happen, and it happened so unexpectedly, I can’t listen to it.  She was gone just too soon.  Way too soon.  My Dad was different – although it wasn’t expected, I wasn’t totally shocked in the end.  He went through a lot and survived much longer than anyone expected. So instead of the shock and trauma and all of the stuff that came with my Mom’s passing – which included having to wrap my head around the fact that she had cancer for all that time and we didn’t know, now I just feel sadness and a sense of ‘wrong’ in the world now that he’s gone.  I’ll never take this picture down, it will sit on or near any desk I have, but it hurts to look at it now that he’s gone.  To see him so happy, and to know that I won’t see that again, hurts. I miss him so very much.

The Day After

For some reason, today is worse.  Yesterday I felt like I was in a fog – not sure what to do with myself, on the verge of tears but also kind of numb. Today I’m sad. I’m just sad, and I think it’s because of what could have been and what was. Yesterday, I could have seen my Dad for his birthday and we could have had that lunch conversation on the phone that we had every time – he’d ask where I would want to go, I’d say I don’t know, he’d laugh…what I would GIVE to have another one of those. And even if he had still been in rehab, I would have taken part of the day off to go see him and maybe have lunch or dinner together.  There’s so much I didn’t get to do.  I didn’t get to say so many things and he didn’t get to do so many things.  I miss him in a way that is different than how I miss my Mom; I miss my Mom for my daughter but my Dad I miss for myself.  He was the one I could always go to no matter what and he would listen, he would have answers, he would call to check on me – just because he wanted to.  He knew I could take care of myself, but he still wanted to do some of that, too.  I had a dream this morning that was strange but I guess I know what it means to my brain….Rob and I were at a Home Depot; we were going somewhere and for some reason stopped there.  I was holding things in my hands, talking to Rob and I turned around and he was gone – he just up and disappeared into the store.  Well there was my Dad, on line at customer service. He was walking without a cane, with his pants hiked up and his shirt tucked in – LOL – and he looked at me and said something like “oh hi Michele” and he took something out of the hands of an employee, said “thank you” to the man and turned to go to the counter.  I don’t remember anything else.  But remembering his face and his smile just makes me cry, I miss his face and his smile so much.

And yesterday, I think two people asked how I was – just two.  My best friend called to check on me and to tell me she prayed for my Dad that day and put him into the prayer book at church; I can always depend on her for support, prayers, laughs.  My own boyfriend didn’t ask.  When he came home I was emptying the dishwasher with the kitchen light off, he came sweeping in and turned on the very bright overhead light to which I said “please turn it off” and that apparently was enough to annoy him because I didn’t get a kiss hello – I suppose he was coming in to kiss me when I asked for the light to be turned off – and he barely spoke to me all night.  I know that he’s under a lot of stress and pressure this week at work so it’s not like I was angry that he didn’t text me during the day to check on me; I understood that he probably didn’t even think of it. But all night, nothing.  Again.  He did the same when it was my Mom and I thought that after going through that he would know how I would like to be treated.  Guess I have to have that conversation with him again – we’ve been through this at least three or four times in the past year.

I’m just sad today.  I want to go to the cemetery and cry; I’m pretty sure his name is up by now and I just want to go and cry.  Cry my eyes out until I can’t cry anymore because that’s just how I am right now and I was this way when it was just my Mom. Sometimes, I need to cry until my eyes ache and then I feel better; I don’t feel healed or like dancing in the streets, but I feel better.  Instead, I’m at my desk this morning because I have things to do that, I guess in some aspect of my life are more important than taking care of my own emotional health today.  I frequently put myself on the backburner which is one of the reasons why yesterday hurt so much; I do this to myself, I don’t put myself ahead of others but it would be so very nice if someone else did.

Missing Him for his Birthday

Tomorrow would have been my Dad’s 82^nd birthday.  A Tuesday; that would have meant no dialysis for him so we could have had lunch.  But I can’t have lunch with him and I am at a loss as to what to do with myself.  I am supposed to be here at work but really, I don’t know how productive I’m going to be knowing I could be taking him to lunch, calling him in the morning to wish him a happy birthday, fighting with him over who is paying the check for lunch.  If things had been different, tomorrow would be different. But it wasn’t different so tomorrow, I don’t know, tomorrow will just be another Tuesday and I will be expected to just do what I do on every other Tuesday.  I keep trying to tell myself that this is how it was supposed to go – his time was up.  But my brain, and my heart don’t care. I miss my Dad.  I miss the phone calls, the visits, the lunches and I wish I could have just one more – one more tomorrow, to celebrate him.  I still don’t totally understand what happened, as much as I know why it happened; the chances of survival after a surgery like that last one were slim but still.  He had survived so much, why not this one?  Why did this have to be the one that took him out?  Sucks.  It sucks that I have that memory to hold onto; the one of him lying there, unresponsive, on a ventilator that did not keep him alive and I did not get to say good-bye.  I didn’t even kiss him good-bye when I left that night because I figured I didn’t want to bother him, wake him, and I would see him the next day anyway. 

So today, I will do my best to not cry like I did yesterday when I was at his house cleaning up.  I don’t know how my sister did it; she put almost all of my mother’s clothes in bags so yesterday I took a bunch of my Dad’s stuff that was still around in bags and all I did was cry. I found the “Grandpa, Established 2012” t-shirt I had bought for him and I clutched it as if it was the last piece of bread after the apocalypse; I just cried.  He should still be here, wearing that shirt.  I shouldn’t be here, putting his things in bags for someone else to wear one day.  I know that donating everything is the right thing to do and he would want us to do that – but still.  Knowing that doesn’t make it easier.  All that it does is confirm that he’s gone. Walking around the house and seeing it slowly become empty just makes me sad. Although it was never my home, it was theirs and one day it will be empty and it will become someone else’s home and I don’t know where I’ll go after that day.  If I want to see his stuff, I go to the house. But once those keys are handed over, and all of the clothes are donated and the things we are keeping are in boxes, it will be over and I will just keep on with my life without either of them.  I know that this is how it’s supposed to be – the parents die before their children – but again, it doesn’t make it any easier.  I miss my Dad.  I just really miss him.

Honesty

This morning on the way to school, Emily asked me who bought her bike – she was supposed to ride it today in a trike-a-thon fundraiser but it rained (she still had questions about the bike though!).  So I told her that Grandpa bought it (my Dad).  So then she started asking how he was – “how my Grandpa doing, he sick Momma”.  Well, I bit the bullet and we started the conversation I have been putting off for over a month now.  I told her that he was old and sick, and that our hearts are like batteries and when you’re old and sick, they stop working just like batteries.  So Grandpa isn’t with us anymore because his battery stopped working, but he’s in heaven now and we can talk to him whenever we want.  Of course, next came “what is heaven”, which I tried to explain as best I could. And then came what I didn’t expect and I don’t know that I’ve heard before – “I love my Grandpa”.  Yeah, I started crying like a baby and I struggled to get out “I love Grandpa too, and we will always love him and he will always love us”.

I know that this is the first of what will most likely be many conversations about Grandpa and where he is and why we can’t see or talk to him.  But she needed to know and I wanted to be the one that told her.  I still have rather vivid memories of my Grandmother dying; I was almost 5 years old and my aunt told my parents to  not tell me because I wouldn’t understand.  But I was still brought to the wake, where I sat in a separate room alone during a prayer service. I snuck a peek into the room and I saw my Grandmother lying there and I was so confused!  Why is Grandma sleeping in that room with everyone???  And the next day we went to church, where I watched my parents walk down the aisle after a big brown box – what the heck???  And then the cemetery, where I was given a rose to put on the casket and for some reason that’s when it hit me that she was dead. She wasn’t sleeping; that was why everyone was so sad. Grandma had died and I had figured it out on my own. I cried and cried; I cried myself to sleep in the backseat of my cousin Rick’s white car, on the shoulder of his then girlfriend. I didn’t want anything like that to happen with my daughter; I never want her to say that I didn’t tell her because that wasn’t fair to do to me and I won’t do it to her.  I always want to be honest with her, no matter how much it may hurt me to do it.