Slouching Toward Uncertainty
My dad's funeral was on Saturday.
Our relationship was...unusual. If you've read Fistfights With Flashlights, you know what I mean. Beyond that, we just didn't "get" each other. Over the last few years, the longest conversations we had were arguments. We could go at it like you wouldn't believe, for hours at a time. It was really our main mode of communication. But...that worked for us. Most people didn't get that, but that's how it was - we'd always come out of those arguments with more respect for each other. I never did end up converting him to a raging radical leftist, and he never converted me to a conservative biblical literalist, but we did manage to somewhat mellow each other.
For the last six months, he'd been sick - using oxygen machines and taking a pharmacy worth of pills every day - but he was still able to walk around, talk, do stuff. He was still himself. Then, all of a sudden, last Monday...he just wasn't. He couldn't walk under his own power. He would fall asleep at random times - in the middle of a sentence, while taking a drink, whenever - then he lost his voice, then lost control of his bodily functions. By Thursday, he was no longer conscious. Two Hospice nurses were here. Around two pm, one of them turned to my mom and I and said that we should come and sit by him.
My mom whispered things into his ear and held his hand. I stood off to the side, silent. I counted the seconds between his breaths - one, one-thousand, two, one-thousand. At two thirty, he stopped breathing. I had counted up to fourteen one-thousand before I realized that that was it. It was over. My mom was crying. I wasn't. I still haven't. I don't know why that is. Maybe the six months of advance warning prepared me. Maybe I'm a bit of a heartless bastard. Maybe it's a bit of both.
Today I took my mom in for surgery.
I skipped class the last few days. My grades are going to hell. Whatever. I'll figure something out, later.
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