Four years ago, Mom and I had to say goodbye to my dad, just before midnight on June 11, 2022.
It was exactly one week before Father's Day. And it was, without a doubt, the hardest day of my life.
It wasn't that I didn't see it coming; in retrospect, I think about six months before we lost him, I began to realize that we were closing in on that moment. My dad was so tired, and he was giving off clear signals that he was done with being poked, prodded, managed, and handled.
But even when you sense it's coming, nothing quite prepares you for when it actually happens, especially when the end-of-life decision has to be made. Mercifully, my dad had gotten his final papers in order a few years prior, and he left explicit instructions that if he had to be put on life support, that was it for him.
In fact, one week before he passed away, he told my mom that he wanted to be cremated when the time came so he could "get back to dust as soon as possible."
SEE ALSO (VIP): Caregiver's Diary Part 76: One of the Best Life Lessons My Dad Ever Taught Me
It's still too painful for me to talk about the last week of my dad's life, in part because it's hard, but also because there are things that happened that week that I feel my dad would rather be kept private, that he wouldn't want his legacy boiled down to the more vulnerable moments he experienced in his final days.
So when I think about him and tell stories about him, I choose to center the thoughts and words around happier times, like the trips to the beach and the mountains we took over the years. My dad absolutely loved to fish, and when I was a little girl, we'd either go to the beach or the lake, and he'd show me how to bait the hook, fish, etc. I wasn't very good at it, and was not a fan of baiting the hook, but he'd make me feel better about it by bragging about the big fish he'd sometimes catch on hooks that I'd baited.
As I've talked about before, in his later years, going out onto the pier at the beach got more difficult for him, with the last one being one where about all he could do was make it to the first bench on the pier with his cane. But though he didn't fish that day, he talked to plenty of the fishermen who would come and go, and who seemed to enjoy the stories he told about the successful catches he'd had on that very pier in days gone by.
DIVE DEEPER: Caregiver's Diary Part 85: Beach Trip Dreams and a Life Update
I was a tomgirl in my pre-teen years, and I think one of the reasons why was that I learned early on that showing an interest in things like sports, fishing, etc., was a way to better connect with my dad, who never had a son. I was about as close as he got to that, and as I got older, sometimes he'd joke that if he'd had a son, his son would have already gone outside to cut the grass, go fill up the car with gas, etc, which of course prompted me to begrudgingly get those jobs done.
Though I was pretty good at figuring out things to do that would help me better connect with him, two things that he enjoyed doing - tinkering with old cars/trucks and watching gross movies on the Sci-Fi channel - were things on which he could never bring me around to his thinking.
Not that I didn't appreciate his love for old vehicles - I think I told the story of the time when I was 13 or 14, when he'd done some work on an old Ford truck he owned and we went for a spin in it. The passenger door flung wide open while we were out on a back road, and I had to grab Dad's arm to keep from falling out. I thought it was fun at the time, but the older, more "seasoned" me is quite aware that it could have turned out so much worse.
And not that I didn't appreciate his love for sci-fi movies. I didn't necessarily have a problem with them either. I just didn't care for the ones that involved blood and which left nothing to the imagination in terms of what happened to the victims in the movies.
My dad was like a lot of dads in that he was a bit rough around the edges and grumbly at times, and could be the most confounding person you'd ever been around. But he had a heart of gold, loved his family, and worked hard to provide for them over the decades, only stopping working once his body wouldn't let him anymore.
I still miss him every day, with his heavenly anniversary and Father's Day being two days when it hits a little harder that he's no longer with us. But what has always given mom and me comfort and peace is knowing that where he is now, there's no more dialysis, there's no more struggling to walk, to see and feel things.
Love and miss you, dad-o. Now and always
READ MORE: To check out my previous Caregiver's Diary entries, please click here. Thank you!
