Hello all. This is more a message to concerned individuals that might have been semi-regularly following either this blog or any of my NUMEROUS OC blogs out there. I know that I’ve received a few asks in the last months that I still haven’t answered, and if you’ve been following my Sea Wolf series on @tennesonrhames it sort of fell to the wayside. While I understand I don’t need to explain why, I feel the need to. Part so I can explain what happened, and part so I can just talk about it because talking helps. Just a fair warning that things will get deep and a bit emotional down below the break, so if you don’t want to deal with feels just take away from this that I’m alive and well. Just been away for a bit dealing with life.
So the long story short version is that sadly a few months ago on Nov. 1st my father passed away suddenly at home. He’d been suffering from various medical issues stemming from diabetes, and a leg injury that he should have but never received surgery for. Over the course of the few years since my wife, @waitingrose and I moved back in with my elderly parents to help them with the house, and various other things we’d done what we could to ensure his good health. It wasn’t always pretty, and there were numerous times when tempers flared from us keeping track that he’d taken his medication, and remembered to eat. It was never out of spite, but love and he understood that we wanted him healthy.
About two weeks before it happened he started having dizzy spells, and suffering from some nausea as well as pretty severe weakness. We went to the hospital immediately but unfortunately they couldn’t determine the cause, simply noticed an arrhythmia that hadn’t shown up before. While my father had a weak heart due to rheumatic fever as a child this was a new development. We went home, and kept an eye on him but things progressed. He had trouble getting out of his chair due to being extremely tired, and started skipping meals because he forgot to eat. We committed to making sure he had cooked meals ready to go, and I was on him like a bloodhound to keep eating properly and taking his medication.
November 1st started simply enough. I got up in the morning, made him a sandwich and went to work. When I got home I made sure that he was taken care of, my wife made sure he was taken care of, and my mother made sure too. He seemed to be having a pretty good day, hadn’t been coughing or having any dizziness or weakness and was very responsive all day. He got to have a delicious home-cooked meal, and then we all adjourned to our various evening distractions, namely WoW for the wife and me (#nerds). About twenty minutes later I went out to the kitchen to take care of dishes and found him slumped over in his chair.
Normally I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, he’d fallen asleep in that chair a hundred thousand times that it was a running joke. Except this time the TV remote was halfway across the floor and his glasses were sitting on his chest. The red flags went off, and when he didn’t answer after calling to him twice I ran to his side. By then my mom and wife were out in the room, but we determined that he already didn’t have a pulse. I pulled him out of his chair and started CPR immediately until my brother arrived, and he took over before the paramedics arrived on scene. There’s not a single second of that evening that I’ll ever forget until the end of my days, and I can tell you that it was the most terrified I’ve ever felt my entire life.
You know that moment in every hospital drama where the family is pulled aside from the rest of the waiting room people, and they get that bad news. Yeah, you never really expect to be on the receiving end of that. The days after that night were incredibly long, and some of it I have a hard time remembering everything that happened leading up to his funeral. There hasn’t been a day that goes by that I don’t catch myself asking what I might have missed, or what I could have done more to help him. I know that we did all that we could, but there are some questions you never stop asking yourself.
It’s been three months and things are still off, and probably always will be. I tried to keep writing for a month afterward, but it became hard to focus on anything. My mind is slowly getting back into it, and there’s a sort of renewed perspective on everything now. What I want to tell you all is that something like this will never be easy, and it doesn’t get better. People will say that it does, but in a sense it doesn’t. This sort of thing doesn’t go away, but what does happen is you learn how to continue on even without a person that was in your life every day. You realize that you continue living for them, in honor of them, and because those we love would want us to. I’ve had a tremendous amount of support from my wife, and from my very good friends @adilynia and @catraenablazewing who I couldn’t thank enough for it. Times like this make it abundantly clear how remarkable it is to have friends to help you along, and I cherish all of them.
To my followers at large I just want to convey this message to you guys. Take the time to tell the people you love that you love them, and be unafraid to do it. Never be afraid to speak your mind, even if what you have to say is unpopular, and never be dishonest with yourself. We have a very limited time on this planet in the grand scheme of things, and the greatest disservice you can do for yourself is to not live your life as you want to. We face hardships every single day that may discourage us from doing it, and walls of people will tell us to accept who and where we are in life as just being our lot. My father was an opinionated, political, and religious fellow that never missed the opportunity to say what was on his mind. Looking back on it I regret the times that I chided him for his words, but the lessons that he imparted to me have become a rallying cry in my heart. Never do anything half assed. Always follow through on anything you do to the very end, and give it your all. Even if you fall a bit short, you’ll know in your heart that you tried. And even if you fail, if you learn something from it then it isn’t really a failure.
You owe it to yourself, and to those around you to live. And to those who we have lost, we owe it to them to carry on with our lives. They will live forever in our memories and in the minds of those they knew. They will always be there, in a way, and it’s up to us to see tomorrow for what it is. Another opportunity to live our life, to love our life, and to be unashamed of it.
