September 19th, 2017 - 12/19/17
It was an average day, only 2 ½ weeks in to my first year in college. Nothing
was out of the ordinary, or so I thought. I was hanging out with my friends in my
dorm room just messing around when I got a call from my mom around 8:45. I
thought she was mad at me or I was in trouble. She left a voicemail saying that
she wanted to talk about something but I ignored it for as long as I could
because I didn’t want any sort of confrontation. I texted her and asked her why
she called and she asked if she could talk to me on the phone because it was
urgent. I called and the first thing she said was something along the lines of “I
have some bad news”. I knew it was going to be bad, like really bad. I told my
friends to leave and had them shut the door. The first thing I assumed was that
grandma died, but thats not what happened. “Erin your dad died tonight”. My
heart sunk. I was in disbelief for at least 30 minutes. Everything is such a blur. I
was so emotionally distraught, I didn’t know what to do with myself. They
explained what happened and I talked to the medical examiner. It felt like
something you would see in a movie. I was told that he most likely suffered
from what they call a “Widowmaker” otherwise known as a heart attack in the
left anterior descending artery. Ironically, my parents were recently divorced,
meaning my mom was not even considered a widow. When he was 33, 11
years before, (December 18th, 2006) he experienced a heart attack with many
symptoms leading up to it, making it quite obvious what the issue was. This
time, he barely had a single one. Looking back over the summer, he was
suffering from what he thought were anxiety attacks. I was the only one he told.
He then had a cold that lasted a couple weeks and went away right as I left for
school. He hugged me goodbye and that was the last time I ever saw him…
well alive at least. I went camping with some of my family the weekend before
his death and he was camping that weekend as well. He went with his brother
and friends to a car show and camped near by. He sent us videos and texts,
proving that he was having the time of his life. He was so happy. He still had a
cold and according to his brother, he had some shortness of breath and fatigue
when doing fairly simple tasks. He also mentioned that my dad was talking
about how his cold was moving to his chest and he had a chest cough with
tightness. That could’ve been either a catalyst or the beginning of his heart
attack. Because I was not there the night of his death, I couldn’t determine if he
was feeling okay or not. My brother was there. He explained that he heard dad
snoring from the other room and thought he was taking a nap like usual. He
them heard a loud noise from the living room and came out from his room to
find that my dad had fallen out of his desk chair and was laying on the ground
unconscious and snoring loudly and unusually, his face beginning to turn blue.
He could not wake him up and texted my mom who was at school for parent
night. She ended up calling an ambulance and our neighbor Jill went over to
help them and my brother as well as my mom once she arrived. They did chest
compressions and used an AED 2 times but were unable to revive him. His
heart had stopped and he was pronounced dead at 7:53 pm. It was so sudden.
Too sudden. Hardly any warning. How could he have not known after going
through this once before? The medical examiner decided not to do an autopsy
and that was that. I cried. I cried all night long, scared to look at myself in the
mirror to see how this intense amount of grief was affecting my face. I got up
and took a shower and cried more. So much crying. My grandparents picked
me up and brought me home the next morning. I arrived home, fell into my
mom’s arms, and my life was changed forever. Here I am today, 3 months later
and only 1 day after the 11th anniversary of his first heart attack. It’s a hard day
but I am still here and doing okay.