Dad on my mind

It’s been 468 days since I last saw my dad alive. I keep thinking it will get easier and I suppose in a way it has but not really. I have good days and bad days but there has not been a single day that I have not thought of him in some way. Some days I sit and think about the good times we had together and some days I dwell on those last 2-months of his life that were such a struggle.

Tonight, June 8, 2017 all I can think about are those hard days that I spent with him trying everything in my power to help my mother take care of him. It was February 16, 2015 when I knew he would not be with us much longer. I emailed my boss at work and told him that I needed to stay with dad because he had gotten extremely bad. For the next 9 days I rarely left his side. I told my mom that I would be there for her and help in any way that I could. I had no idea how hard things would be.

Jennifer had come in for a while and stayed as long as she could but eventually had to go back to North Carolina. I hated that she wasn’t there when he died and know she did too. I know it was one of the hardest things she ever had to do in her life. I remember her sitting beside him on the bed before she left and I took a picture of them. Dad somehow managed to smile for the picture. He always loved being around Jennifer, she always seemed to make him happy. It would be the last time that she would ever see him alive.

The first few days that I stayed with him he was able to communicate some, but he soon stopped wanting to eat and after that he stopped communicating very well. He was very restless wanting to get up and walk or go from one room to another. He has always been a very private and self-sufficient person and I know that it embarrassed him to have people helping do everything. Mom and I would have to hold him up to even go to the bathroom. It soon got to where he was so weak that he was unable to steady himself enough to do much of anything.

We had some horrible times of trying to allow him to function normally and it got to a point that we simply could not hold him up in the bathroom and there were a few times he fell. One time he fell between the toilet and the bathtub and we liked to never got him back up. Mom finally made the decision that he would have to start wearing adult diapers and we would have to change him instead of trying to get him to the bathroom.

We had a hospital bed at the Church that we brought to the house and we had to practically force him to stay in it. He hated that bed. More than anything he hated the rails that we would have to pull up on the sides of it to keep him from falling out. He would get mad and tell us to put those rails down but for his own protection and for the sake of our own backs we had to leave them up.
He finally got to a point that he was not making much sense when he talked. He would say things that were very unusual for him to say. During the day and sometimes during the night we would put him in a wheelchair in front of the television. He would just sit slumped over making groaning noises and saying “ah sh#@, ah sh#@, ah sh#@” and “oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord.” I don’t think he knew what he was saying, or maybe he did and that was his only way of communicating.

I would sit on the couch at night and cry while I watched him sitting there in misery.  Sometimes he would slowly lift his arm up and rub the back of his hand against his nose, he looked nothing like himself at those time. I would pray that the Lord would either take him on home or transfer his misery to me so that I could bear it for him.

Mom was worn out. She stayed by his side as much as possible and still had to take care of things that needed taking care of. We would take turns watching him while the other tried to get some sleep. She and I both went on very little sleep those last few days. It was like living in some kind of strange dream that neither of us wanted to be in.

One of the hardest things to do was picking him up out of the recliner and transferring him to the wheelchair and then to the bed and from the bed to the wheelchair. I suppose my back will never be the same after all the straining that I did picking him up.
One evening my mother went to a funeral of someone that she knew, while Mary and I, and Matthew, stayed with him. Matthew got his guitar out and played thinking it might give him some comfort but dad didn’t even seem to notice. He just sat there staring into space.

I would come home long enough to shower and to preach at Church and then I would hurry back over to help mom. I will never forget that last night. I had been up for so long and I was worn out. Dad was in the bed and mom and I had sat there for hours staring at him while he laid there with his eyes closed breathing with a rattling sound. Mom laid on the bed beside him and held his hand. It was about 2:00 in the morning and I went in the living room and laid down on the couch. I did not intend to go to sleep but I did. I couldn’t have been asleep more than 30-minutes when mom yelled from the back bedroom for me to come. When I walked in the bedroom he was already gone. Mom had been there by his side as he passed away. She tried to be strong but it was too much for her. I’ve never heard anyone cry like she cried. As hard as it was for me to lose my dad, I know it had to be twice as hard for mom losing the man that she loved and had been with through 53-years of marriage.

While mom stayed with dad, I took her phone and started calling everyone that needed to be called. It was one of the hardest things that I have ever had to do. We went through the next few days like we were in some kind of dream. Dealing with arrangements and schedules and all the things that have to be done in times like this.

Tonight, I sat outside in the dark and smoked a cigar that I had found in dad's truck, and just thought of him. I wondered what he would be doing on a night like tonight. I imagined that he was sitting there with me. He would have enjoyed the cool night air with the moon coming up in the distance, lightning bugs lighting up, our beagle walking around, the sound of a train whistle in the distance. He probably would have been thinking about going fishing.

Sometimes I go out and sit in his truck and just think about him. I’m not sure why I chose tonight to write about all of this. I guess it is just weighing heavy on my mind. There are so many other memories and thoughts that I have but perhaps I will write about more at a later time.