My Dad Doesn’t Live Anymore – Thoughts from May, 6, 2003

As of 3:00 pm on Tuesday, April 29^th, 2003, my dad existed in memory only. My mom and I were in his room at Redlands Community Hospital the moment his body functions stopped working. It sounds very clinical to say, “his body functions stopped working” (and it is), but that’s what happened. There were several unpleasant images from the hospital room that will remain with me. The tubes carrying substances to and from his body, the smells of interior fluids suddenly outside the body, and the sounds of the machines beeping will live in my mind for a long time. His ashes were spread in the ocean at a specified location. My mom’s ashes will be spread in the same longitude and latitude when she passes. At the very least, it’s a romantic notion. Very rarely would anything associated with death be romantic. Even Romeo and Juliet is a romantic story that ends in tragedy because they both die (but they die together).

I cried when my dad passed, but I really cried when I talked to Patti about my dad’s passing. I tried to call her from the hospital but gave up mainly because I knew I wouldn’t be able to say anything. I also cried whenever I saw my mom or my sister cry. I’ve always told myself I could cry on cue if needed because I could think of my cat, Porge, on his last day. We had to put him to sleep because he was too sick, including going partially blind. I was driving to school and crying in the rain. I say I “told myself” I could cry because I very rarely tested it, and I was usually alone. I can now cry with a new memory prompting the tears.

Some co-workers told me I have psychosomatically lost my hearing in my left ear. It’s only temporary, but it happened only a day after my dad passed away. I woke up in the morning with a huge amount of pain in my ear. I tried to fix it by running warm water in my ear to clear it. Later in the day, my ear was bleeding. For several days now, my left ear has been completely clogged and there is a general static making hearing almost impossible. When I eat sometimes, it sounds like an arcade in my head. It’s not even one of those cool sounding arcade games. It sounds like Asteroid or Pong, which are great games, but they’re annoying to only hear them without the awesome graphics.

(Future note: I thought for many years my hearing loss began years after this point. I blamed it on other things that may have contributed to it, but were not the only cause of it. Here in the future, my hearing in my left ear is gone. I luckily don’t have static in that ear and the arcade sounds only happen rarely, if at all. I probably messed with my ears too much during this time. It may be the real reason for my current deafness. If your ears are having problems, go to a doctor. Don’t be stupid like me and try to fix them yourself.)

We’re looking at buying my parents’ house. My mom is going to go to an assisted living community, so she needs to get the assets out of her name. The place is a fixer-upper and needs some major changes, but I figure Patti and I are the best ones to do those changes. We’re working on the financial part of it right now. It’s definitely going to be weird living in my parents’ house. I know and like most of the neighbors, which will be a pleasant change from my current situation. We are out of the San Bernardino house by the end of this month. We had a yard sale at which we got about $100. It was not a huge hall and not what we were hoping for, but we at least got rid of some of our junk. I’ll be honest. It was mainly Patti’s junk. Most of my junk I kept. I guess I will carry on my dad’s packrat ways. He would be proud.