My father passed away yesterday
I knew it had been coming for about a week prior and I had so many thoughts in that time. Mostly sadness, a lot of anger, and just exhaustion all around
I need to put my feelings somewhere, but none of them change the reality that he's gone. So there's no need to read this if you're not in a good place to do so.
I need to say first, that I loved my Father, I really did, but my Father was a difficult person to love
He had his kindness and you knew he loved you if he did
And as such, I feel I should start by talking about things he did and loved
He loved Karaoke, it was his absolute favorite thing to do. And he was an amazing singer, every person who ever heard my Father sing could fall in love with his voice alone.
The fact that he only ever sang for Karaoke and never like, posting videos to YouTube or covering songs or finding a way to sing for a living still baffles me because the man could SING.
But instead he was a Karaoke DJ, who would host Karaoke at Bars he loved. He loved going to bars too, for some reason, I never understood the appeal. But bars were where he met most of his friends, most of the people he would date after my mother, and that was how he made his money.
He was an amazing cook as well, if he made something in the kitchen you were usually in for a treat. He used to cater parties for his friends where he would do all the cooking and the meals were always delicious.
He loved comics and comic book characters, especially DC but also Marvel. He loved watching the newest shows on Netflix, or Hulu, or Disney+, he was always watching something new and enjoying it. He always lamented that he never could find anyone to talk about what he was watching with him.
He was passionate, he was a bit of a dreamer, and he always wanted to be doing whatever made HIM happy.
But growing up he also had anger issues. He yelled and fought with my Mom a lot when I was a kid, which eventually led them to get divorced. And after that I basically didn't hear from him for years, until he randomly showed back up one day.
And that was when I learned he, essentially, had no fucking idea on how to live his life.
Everywhere he ever lived was in a single bedroom entirely. Doesn't matter if it was an apartment with multiple rooms, he only ever lived in his bedroom. And he didn't really care if that bedroom was clean either.
He didn't just sleep in the bedroom, if he was home he was in there. He even cooked all of his food in his bedroom. He did not leave it, despite the apartments being under his name, despite him being the one paying the bills.
And this was because he always had roommates who took over everything else. The first roommate I ever met was a crazy woman who didn't want her child to go to school because she was afraid they were brainwashing her kid. Why the fuck was she a roommate of his???
When that apartment got evicted, his next roommate was an alcoholic who spent every night drinking on the front porch of their apartment getting nearly blackout drunk on the cheapest alcohol he could afford.
I don't remember what happened with that apartment, but that too fell through and he had to leave it. From there he eventually developed diabetes, suffered major heart failure, and had to have a quintuple bypass done to keep him going.
That was the start of his health decline. After that he was just never the same again.
Him and my sister had a falling out for even more years than me because he abused her trust and nearly financially ruined her from all the money he needed to borrow. He eventually paid her back, but what broke the straw for her was the fact that she's a nurse and he's a patient that refuses to listen to the medical advice he was given all the time made him infuriating to be around.
Some time after his heart failure he ended up getting disability (because his untreated diabetes was making him legally blind) and he went house shopping with that money.
And he bought the worst fucking goddamn house I have ever had the displeasure of walking into. Jesus Christ it was basically falling apart the moment he bought it and in one of the worst neighborhoods he possibly could have gotten it in.
Out of the kindness of my heart, because my Father's health had been failing and I wanted to spend time with him in case it got worse, I would visit him between once a week or once every other week (even at the expense of me going into credit card debt just to visit him), and it was a shit show in there.
The AC was broken from the day he moved in so the house was always fucking hot. The only time I ever developed heat exhaustion was because I was in his fucking hot ass house for too long without cool air or water. Once again he ONLY lived in his goddamn room, including cooking food in there, but now he was wheelchair bound, blind, and apparently dumb, because he let one of the WORST roommates he'd ever chosen live in THE REST of the house.
I would go in the front door and would often have to walk past his asshole roommates in the living room just to get to him. And if he wasn't going anywhere he was just laying in his bed watching TV or making food. That was it.
And NO ONE in the family wanted to take him in because of his shitty fucking attitude towards the rest of us. He couldn't live with me because I live with my Mother because times are hard and I can't ever blame her for not wanting the man in her life again. If it wasn't for me needing a ride to see him I doubt she'd ever have had anything to do with him! I was basically forced to drag him back into her life!!
That house got foreclosed, by-the-way. And his shitty ass roommates became squatters in it. Even with Dad gone they're still sending him letters about the foreclosure and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if those assholes are still squatting in his old house to this day.
The only reason he got out of that house, the ONLY REASON, is because his health failed so badly once again he was hospitalized. His kidneys ended up failing and from that day forward he was on dialysis for the rest of his life.
We literally could not trust him to be on his own, but none of us could stand to live with the man, so we managed to find an independent living for him to stay in. Easily the nicest place he'd lived in for decades at that point, and no possibility of any shitty roommates following him because they'd have to be approved by the facility.
He was doing better there. Sure, he was still being hospitalized once a year because he never fucking took care of himself, but there was some genuine hope that he might be able to recover enough to maybe live on his own there or figure something out so he could get back into some shape and maybe get out of the wheelchair one day and walk on his own two legs.
I don't think my sister or I ever believed he would though. He just seemed to prefer being in the wheelchair and despite all his talks about wanting to walk again, I don't think he ever took them seriously. He always, always pushed it off to later, because he was tired, and I'm sure he genuinely was, but that just meant he was never letting his muscles rebuild to walk again.
And then eventually he fell in his wheelchair. And he didn't tell us about it until it was too late. He fell in his bedroom, and apparently laid on the ground of 14 hours, before calling the paramedics to get him up, and when they asked if he wanted to go to the hospital, he said no.
And we didn't know this, not till weeks later, when he should've gone right away.
Did you know he had a secret girlfriend while at this new facility? Yeah. Neither did we. SHE didn't convince him to go to the hospital after the fall either, though I'm sure she recommended it.
My father was a stupid, stubborn man, who believed that he didn't need the hospital unless it was life-threateningly severe. In his brittle, weakened state, where his legs basically didn't work, his eyes were clouded over, and his heart had a pacemaker in it...
Yeah, he was in the perfect shape to just sleep off a head injury.
It turned out he had a brain bleed from it. And then he started slurring his words, which none of us knew, and it was only because the dialysis center noticed his speech was slurring and sent him to the hospital.
He had three simultaneous heart attacks while there, and he left us. His body still worked but he wasn't there anymore. We gave him a week to recover, but there were zero changes what-so-ever, and then he was gone. Just like that.
And as much as I was furious with my father, because he was a fucking asshole who never took his stupid health seriously and lived in the worst conditions possible all the time, I still cried and wished he didn't have to die like this.
He was the type of guy who was just going to die in his room one day and we would have just stumbled upon him that way and it upsets me that it almost was what happened.
But in the end we were all there with him, watching one of his favorite movies with him as he passed. I'm grateful for that. All that seems to be left since has been a lot of anger at how fucking stupid he was, a lot of sadness I'm working through, but despite it all I still loved him deeply.
And getting this all out has helped me get over some of that anger, to get over some of my hang ups with him, and hopefully, now, I can just heal, and remember the father that I loved growing up.
I love you Dad. I hope you're in a better place now. Saying goodbye to you was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life, but thank you for being my Dad.
Hopefully your next roommate won't be an asshole. You always deserved better than that.