Muse and Mischief

My Dad died from cancer when I was twenty-four. To say that event shaped me would be an understatement. In October of that year I was getting ready to go into work and he said he was going to the ER like it was just a minor inconvenience. I said I could call in and go with him, but he said I didn’t need to do that because it was probably nothing. 

He was so very wrong about that. 

I got home from work that evening and my mom left to go be with him at the hospital because they found a lot of fluid around his heart and admitted him for surgery. Later that night she called in a panic, they found something else when they scanned his chest to look at his heart. The next week was a whirlwind of hospital visits, tests, and a biopsy that left me, my mom, and two of my sisters in a plain little room with four chairs in front of an empty table. 

Two doctors sat down and in the plainest language I ever heard dropped one of the biggest bombs in my life. The cells from the biopsy were cancerous and he would succumb to it. I always found the doctor’s choice of word peculiar. Succumb. It’s such a sterilized way of saying my Dad was going to die, which I guess does take some of the emotion out of it. Which didn’t lessen the reaction from my family. 

What erupted from my mom and the oldest of my younger sisters bordered on unnatural, yet was so achingly human. Time slowed for the first time in the month-long journey from there to the end. The world dulled, but my emotions sharpened to dig the pit inside of me. I went into crisis mode. Someone needed to hold it together, be the rational one. For 24 years that was always my Dad, but he couldn’t be expected to shoulder that burden then. 

Doctors gave him six to eight months at best when they found the cancer had spread to his brain. However, a month later, almost to the day, I knelt on the side of the couch in our living room as my Mom held his head in her lap while he struggled to breathe. My grandparents watched their child fight to hold on a little longer. Earlier that morning, two of my sisters went with my cousin to pick our other sister up from the airport. They were driving home when it happened.

He really tried to hold out for her, but he was in so much pain. My mom kissed his forehead and whispered that it was okay for him to go. The girls were together and we would be okay. He didn’t have to worry anymore. 

I watched him take his last breath on that couch where he would spend so many nights watching M.A.S.H. or his latest favorite movie. Often he would end up falling asleep there, so in a way it was fitting it would happen there. The world froze and some part of me thought he would spring back to life and a miracle would give us more time. 

But life doesn’t work that way. It wasn’t fair and it never will be. 

Today is twenty years since that moment, almost to the minute as of when this posts, and he has missed so much. He missed three college graduations, meeting my wife and our wedding, seeing his first grandson graduate high school, and meeting my youngest when he was born. He also never got to meet me, the real me that had been hiding inside all those twenty-four years I had with him. I often wonder how he would have reacted. Questions like whether or not he would have accepted me will forever stay unanswered. 

I think, selfishly, that is what hurts the most. I will never know. 

I’m a little angrier today than I have been these past several years and I think it is because that sense of loss is just so damn overwhelming as I take account of everything that has happened since he was taken. 

I’m also torn. Sometimes people ask if I could go back and change things, would I change this? Part of me immediately wants to say yes, but the other parts of me realize that I wouldn’t be who I am today, I wouldn’t have the life I have today if he wouldn’t have died. That event irrevocably changed me at my core and I really do love the life I have now. It’s ridiculous to feel like I am betraying him by not wanting to go back and change what happened. My rational mind knows he would want me to have the life I have now, have the happiness I have now. That kid that died that Sunday morning in November though, I think they are still really angry at me for moving forward.