This past August my Dad passed away on my birthday. Everyone expects me to be sad and depressed, but truthfully I found the whole thing to be quite beautiful. I believe that the most important days in a persons life are the day they were born and the day they die. To be able to say that I get to share that with my Dad is something that not many people can say they have.
August 30, 2014 is now our day.
To rewind a little bit, he had been sick for the last 14 years of my life. After his mother passed away he was soon diagnosed with Hepatitis C and later Type Two Diabetes, this is not a mix that anyone should have to live with. However, there were times when I would forget how sick he really was. We would go on rides up and down the coast of Cape Ann, have Sunday morning brunches at the local diner, and he was even the loudest parent at all of my youth soccer games. But then certain instances would occur and he would have a seizure, or he would be too sick to go to brunch, and the father daughter dates became a lot more spread out, until they just kind of stopped. As time went on and I started to grow up and realize the severity of his illnesses, I realized that those promises he was making about going to the movies or taking the family out to dinner were normally empty and they would never actually happen. Not being able to trust the words that come out of the most important person in your life’s mouth was hard to grasp; especially when you don’t want the reality of the situation to be the reason behind it.
I went away to boarding school for my junior and senior years of High School, and now I am currently in my sophomore year of college. I knew that at any moment I could get the call saying that my Dad passed away in his sleep, or that he did something to endanger those around him, aka my mother. Luckily, I never had to be on the receiving end of that phone conversation because the day he passed away was the Saturday I was supposed to move into college.
That whole week he had been in the Hospice House, where they were giving him the treatment that my family could no longer give him.
“You guys just ran 90% of this marathon, now let us finish it so you can be the wife, daughter, and son that you deserve to be.” The nurse that said those words was the nurse that made me take a step back and realize that I’m not a caretaker. I’m a daughter who has no skills in the field of nursing, I just did what I had to do to make him more comfortable.
The day before my father died, my uncle and I drove all of my dorm stuff up to school. One of my main concerns was that I didn’t want to have to come back up to school and decorate after the fact. When we were done and heading back to the car I received a call from my mom telling me that my brother Aj and his girlfriend Sarah were on the way home from North Carolina. She said that tonight will probably be the night. The night that my Dad was going to pass away.
At about 8:30pm all of us were standing around him, saying what we thought were our last words to the man that I called Dad.
He died at 7:45pm the next day.
