grief

My Dad is Sick


My younger sister called me tonight to tell me that she and mom were taking dad to the walk-in clinic.

Dad has been ill since just before my husband went into hospice in the fall of 2005. He’d suffered a series of TIA’s which are small strokes caused by an ulcerated artery in his neck. He had recovered but for a limp by the time Will died in January of 2006, but in March of that year complications from a routine surgery set him back. Soon after he developed plumonary disease.

Though the doctors told him he wouldn’t last out the summer by fall he was recovering nicely again. When I saw him at Christmas he looked good but for a more noticeable limp.

This past week though he has developed a hacking cough and now has a fever. Hacking cough could be a bad cold or bronchitis even but fever means flu or pnemonia.

Will died of pnemonia. Not really all that unusual for the chronically ill. It is not a pleasant thing to watch. It is not something I think I can watch again.

Last spring when dad was in ICU and my uncle’s wife was dying of heart failure in the room next door, I told my sister that I didn’t think I could be in the room if dad’s conditioned worsened and he seemed likely to die. She said,

“You will be in the room because you have to.”

and I didn’t answer her because she didn’t give me the chance. She walked away to get back to work (she was a technician in the hospital’s lab) and left me standing in the hallway.

If she had waited for an answer, she wouldn’t have cared much for it.

I can’t watch someone die again. Not then. Not now. Maybe not ever. And I think that is what holds me back from the idea of having a relationship again that has the potential to be serious. Seeing Will suffer like that. Watching him frantically gasping for those last breaths of air to fill already stilled lungs.

It seared my soul and the new skin that has only very slowly grown back is still too delicate.

My dad is a cat. Nine plus lives but even my grandma’s tenacious DNA has its limits. Hopefully they won’t be crossed once again.

I Miss Reading


When I was a child I could lose myself quite literally in a book.

I went through a novel every couple of days.

My favorite place to visit was the public library.

As I got older, I only read more. It was a comforting hobby, a place to take refuge. Now that I need that safe, soft place to land, it’s nowhere to be found.

I have a stack of books by my bed, because I can’t resist buying them still though I don’t frequent bookstores as I once did, but they are largely unread. Those I have read I did in a haphazard manner even more perplexing to the outside observer than my reading habits of old.

Will was always amazed that I could barely read the first chapter of anything before curiosity drove me to the last chapters. How could I enjoy a story if I knew how it ended?

I suppose it was the writer in me that found the author’s path to th ending as intriguing as the story itself.

I can’t focus enough to follow a whole story anymore. I can’t even remember the last fiction novel I made it through in my own unique fashion.

As my concentration waned, I substituted magazines and newspapers because a day without reading something is too foreign to me. Even this though is difficult to the point that I prefer my information in cyberbites on the web anymore. I still try to read everyday.

I hope that by abilities aren’t lost forever as so many other things have been this last year.

Sometimes I wish I could be that little girl who read her way through the Hardy Boys books in the children’s room of the public library for just a day out of the month. Be able to read for hours and not notice the time slip by.

Had a Bad Day


Somedays no matter what your intentions or how hard you try there is nothing you can do to stop the irrevocable slide into self-destruct mode.

It is sometimes easy to see the day coming, but often it smacks you from out of the blue.

And interestingly, sometimes you set the timer on the bomb yourself.

It happens, for me anyway, when frustration crowds out sense. Sometimes razzing the countryside is the more satisfying option especially when you are facing one of those no-win scenarios that even James T. Kirk couldn’t have cheated his way past.

I just don’t have the patience to think things through or wait and see anymore. Even though I know nothing is ever as cut and dried as it seems, I want it to be and act accordingly. Being sick and dealing with a sick child for the second day in a row doesn’t improve the visual field much either.

So, I acted out….in total opposition to my daily horoscope…. and with intent.