Night 1 – Bad News from Home (At Sea)
This post was originally posted on Go with Me on 4 January 2014.
Last night, after I finished my Embarkation Day post, I logged on to Facebook. That’s how I found out that my father passed away sometime Saturday night. He went to sleep after watching his Saints win a playoff game and never woke up. His death was not unexpected. He was in a hospice. None of us thought he was going to die on Saturday night or next Saturday night, or even the one after that. I knew it was a possibility he would die while I was on this cruise. I certainly didn’t expect it to be Embarkation Day.
I hope you will allow me to indulge myself and skip the write-up of what I did yesterday and tell you a bit about my father. He was my hero. One of my earliest memories is of him and me going fishing at a reservoir in Virginia. I made our lunch – peanut butter sandwiches and Oreo cookies. We sat on the reservoir and fished – I caught my first bass, but I remember how special I felt to be there with him – just us two.
I learned to love baseball and football because my Dad loved them. I’d sit and watch the games with him. I remember fetching his beer and even acting as the television antenna—moving the rabbit ears whichever way he said, getting up to change the channel when he asked. So, not only was I the antenna, but I was also the remote control. I wasn’t always pressed into servitude, and I had a little sister and brother who spent their fair share of time changing channels and messing with antennae. As a matter of fact, I had three little sisters, but the 2 youngest were raised with cable and remote controls.
He was a Marine. He went to Vietnam when I was eleven years old. I was becoming aware of the world around me. I knew that “the hippies out in San Francisco” didn’t think much of the American servicemen who went to Vietnam and did what their country asked of them. When I got a little older, I developed some “leftist” sympathies although I’ve never been the “libtard” my Daddy thought I was. I began to see that not everything our country did was perfect, but it was hard to understand how people could spit on men like my father and his friends.
When I was seventeen I decided to join the Army after I graduated from high school. My father and mother both had to sign off on that because I wasn’t eighteen. My father refused to sign those papers. On the day I was supposed to go to the recruiting station to be sworn into the Delayed Entry Program (I couldn’t actually go on active duty until I was eighteen) my mother told me to give her the papers and she’d forge his signature. I got them down from the refrigerator and he had already signed them.
So I joined the Army. I got married and had two sons. Then I got divorced and met Paul. Well, technically I met Paul before I was divorced, but I was separated from my first husband. Paul was just the nicest guy I ever met. He adopted my sons and raised them as his own. My parents loved him like a son. My mother always said she thanked God I found him.
In 1990 Paul deployed with the 24th Infantry Division in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. I was terrified he wouldn’t come home. I was afraid he was just too good for me. One night my Dad took me out to his favorite bar and he told me how much he and Mom loved Paul. I told him I was afraid he wouldn’t come home. He told me he would. He did come home and we had almost 20 more years together.
When my mother died in 2003 my Dad was lost. That’s the only way to describe it. Then in 2005 Hurricane Katrina struck and he had a mission again – getting his house rebuilt and taking care of his daughters’ families while they rebuilt. After the rebuilding was done he told me he was trying to get in contact with his high school sweetheart, Nancy. They got together and spent much of the next eight years together. I’m glad he had Nancy in his life.
Dad was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2013. He was doing well on chemo, but then he got a staph infection in October. He spent the next two and a half months in the hospital. I went home in December to see him and it was clear that although his infection was gone, he wasn’t strong enough to go home.
My sister, Brenda, and I did the hard sell that he needed to go to a rehab facility. My youngest sister, Becky, lived in his house, but she wouldn't tell him he had to go to rehab. Daddy was thinner than he had been 2 months before, but he was still a big guy and Becky weighed 85 pounds soaking wet. It was a hard sell, made harder by Becky refusing to add her voice to ours. I felt like he hated me. He did go to a rehab facility, but then he developed bronchitis and couldn’t do his physical therapy. He hadn’t had chemo in three months. He felt like he was going one step forward and two steps back. He was tired.
I talked to him last Thursday night and he told me that he and Brenda had a meeting with his oncologist. Then he told me he wanted me to have a great time on my world cruise. I knew he didn’t want any more chemo, so it wasn’t a huge shock when my sister, Roberta, told me on Friday night that he was being transferred to a hospice. She said he didn’t have his cell phone and she didn’t have the info for the hospice yet. So I didn’t talk to him on Friday or Saturday.
According to Brenda, Dad had a good day on Saturday. They stayed with him most of the day and through the Saints game. Dad was happy because the Saints won. They got ready to leave and said they’d see him tomorrow. He said, “I’ll be here.” But he wasn’t. Brenda got the call Sunday morning that he died in his sleep.
Dad as much as told me when I visited in December that I should stay on the cruise if he died. As he said, I was going with Paul. We'd saved for 25 years for a world cruise, but Paul died before we retired. So, I will be continuing the cruise and the blog. He had a good life, but he was still my Daddy. So I’m sure there will be times when I miss him more than I can say.
We will miss you, Daddy. Give Mama our love.
