Facie’s Ramblings

I hate to say that I am still working through my grief. I mean, in some ways I can imagine I will always be grieving. But I feel pretty confident it will get easier, and I will cry less and less. But, yeah, I guess I am still working through it. Yesterday, a thought occurred to me: I had not hugged my dad since the end of February, and that will now be the last time I ever did. I did not see him for almost three months because of COVID, and then at the end of May, he started his series of hospital visits with skilled nursing stints in between. I was always afraid to hug him then. What if I gave him COVID? And yet when my dad had really bad ICU delirium during a few different hospital stays, I fed him. If I could do that, why not hug him? So I cried a bit last night thinking about that. I am not necessarily a big hugger; I used to hate it, and then probably before Jordan was born, I got back to doing it again. Before COVID, I hugged my friends goodbye (and sometimes hello). I always wou...

Two weeks ago today, my dad died. At this time (9 a.m.) I was either getting ready to head to the hospital or on my way. The day before, we thought he probably had days left, which was good in that it meant we had more time to spend together and he was in no pain, but bad in that he was just lying there, not reacting. Why keep going on? Plus twice I had gotten a phone call saying he had hours left to live. Those calls are awful. I typically think about my dad when I first wake up. Today, he was not my first thought; it was, which cat is lying next to my feet. But he came to mind soon after.  Most days I have cried; some more than others. I had a run of 2 or 3 days where I did not cry at all, but then on Monday, I got some more sympathy cards in the mail. Even Verizon started their letter about discontinuing my dad's service/phone with "On behalf of Verizon Wireless we would like to extend our deepest sympathies to you concerning your recent loss." Verizon has made me cry ...

I more or less gave up blogging a few years ago. FB replaced it. But since my dad died on 10/8 (one week ago today), I feel that I might need to start back up again. I have things to say. A lot. So here goes. I will start with how we got to where we are now, which is my dad no longer being of this Earth.  My dad did not always make the best decisions. But during the last year of his life, I was there for him a lot. He needed me. He could not keep track of his many, many ailments, so I was the one who talked to doctors, nurses, etc. Frustratingly, he had two (main) competing health issues: congestive heart failure/blocked arteries for which he was told in November 2019 he needed open-heart surgery within a few months, and hematuria. For months, urology was afraid to put him under to figure out why he had blood in his urine, and cardiology did not want to operate on a man who was losing blood. I spent a lot of time going back and forth with those people. Then stupid COVID came. My hu...