One year and one day....

...since my dad died. Actually it could be one year and two days, since he died alone, overnight, we dont know exactly what day he died. but likely it was in the wee hours of the morning, on Tuesday, November 15, 2005.

I've been having a hard time this week. Its been pretty stressful. First my daughter was sick and had to go to the ER on Saturday night. Sitting there with her, waiting as the medication kicked in to help ease her difficult breathing, I was thinking that this was the exact building that they brought my father's lifeless body into almost a year before. I wondered where his body went - what door it entered, where it was kept, etc. I couldn't squeeze that image out of my head. I was not there when my dad died, and by the time I got to my parents house, his body was gone. But I still replay what it might have looked like - what my mom saw when she discovered him, the ambulance attendants bringing his body up from the rec. room. My mom did call me when she was trying to do CPR on him, that moment is frozen in my nervous system somewhere. Every once in awhile I remember that call, her distant, floaty, disoriented voice saying that she thought he'd passed away, and he wasn't responding to CPR... the emotional ice-bath that hit me as I was trying to sit there and process the news.

I sometimes cant get that thought out of my head and when I go to my mom's house (its so weird to not call it my parents' house anymore) I have to literally squeeze my temples and pinch myself to stop thinking about what the scene might have looked like. I try not to spend too much time thinking about that, or if he suffered, or if he knew what was happening to him. I hope that God made it quick and painless, that my dad didn't even know it was happening. I hope he wasn't in pain, or scared. He was scared of so many things. I hope that Jesus was there to meet him, or someone he knew, maybe my grandmothers, so he wasn't scared.

For the one year memorial, I placed an ad in the local paper with the following in memoriam notice:


No farewell words were spoken,
No time to say goodbye,
You were gone before we knew it,
And only God can tell us why.
It broke our hearts to lose you,
But you didn't go alone,
Part of us went with you,
The day God called you home.
Peacefully sleeping, resting at last,
His weary trials and troubles past,
In silence he suffered, in patience he bore,
Till God called him home to suffer no more


Yesterday, for the anniversary, I took the day off and went to the cemetery along with my husband, my brother, and my mom. We cried buckets. I'm so exhausted today.

I need to sleep, but I have to go to work, and my daughter and my husband are both sick, and I feel like I'm coming down with yet another cold. I was not feeling well early this week and I thought I was done it, but who knows. I could just be in acute re-grief again. Grief feels like a cold that's for sure.

So many painful memories this week, and no rest for this weary Mama.