First Father’s Day Gone By – Home Away From Home

I thought about my father on Father’s Day just passed, but I was fortunate enough to have my friend from British Columbia visit me for a week.  That made the moments I would normally have taken to mourn shorter and more tolerable.

I have always enjoyed time alone, but lately it has just been too much.  I feel disconnected from the outside world, like I have no real home anymore, like I don’t belong…I question now whether or not New York will be a permanent relocation for me.

But having spent a week with a real friend, a female friend whom I have known for the better part of six years, made New York seem like home.

She and I spent many mornings with beautiful breakfast sandwiches and coffees at a local cafe, a day at Yankee Stadium eating popcorn and drinking $12 Stellas, an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, walking through Central Park and Times Square, shopping in various other districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn while trying out the American-sized portions of food at different restaurants.

It has been a blast, to say the least.  Everything was so easy.  It was the breath of fresh air I needed to cut through the heavy smog I’ve been suffocating in lately.

But now that she has left, all of a sudden I feel lonely again.

I spent today on the telephone and filling out, yet again, more applications for front desk and office jobs.  Something’s gotta give eventually…if it doesn’t, I may just say goodbye to New York sooner than I thought I would, and be on the search for another new home.

Part of me doesn’t want it to come to that, but now that my father is gone, I have begun to question my real purpose for living here.

Dealing with Death: Grieving throughout the Illness

It has been eight weeks plus one day since my father’s death.

He was diagnosed in December 2010 with Glioblastoma- an aggressive form of incurable brain cancer.

My father was a spiritual man.  He believed in God, and Heaven, and that his purpose in life was to live by His words.  To do the work necessary here on earth, while his spirit lived in his human body, in order to be with Him after he died.

After having been told that chemotherapy and radiation as treatment options would not prolong his life more than six months, nor give him any kind of quality of life he would enjoy, my father decided to be true to his heart and leave his fate in the Hands of God.

While crying uncontrollably over the phone at work when I was still in Vancouver, I expressed to him that I would support any decision he made about his health and his life, as I knew he knew himself more than anybody.

The individual facing the dilemma should be the one who has the power to decide for him or herself on how to live out the remaining of their days on earth, despite what we who are not in the state of flux wish they would do.

He faced death as though it was an inevitable thing in life and that ultimately, he would be happier after leaving this earth.

I believed and trusted him, and knew that he knew what was best for him.  Who would I be as a daughter to go against her father’s last wishes?  There is nothing better to do in this kind of situation than to support your loved one’s wishes.

But it was hard.  I began the process of grieving before he died, because I knew his time was coming.  It seemed no matter how much I wished it wasn’t happening, that I couldn’t make the reality of the situation any easier, or disappear entirely which was what I outwardly expressed.  I resisted accepting the truth, in that at the age of thirty-two, I would lose my father.  Somehow that concept seemed impossible.

After the initial shock began settling in, I cried all the time.  I had no control over what was happening, but I had control over how I would deal with it. I had to purge out my feelings.  I refused to let them burrow inside me.  I wasn’t going to let it kill me, and progressively, I hoped that crying would help me heal.

After Dad told me that moving to New York was a good opportunity, I decided to do it, and I did it quickly.  And that’s all it took after a year of trying to trick myself into finding the courage on my own.  In the end, all I needed was the advice from a dying man.

I told everybody who was important to me what was going on.  Why I wasn’t myself. Why I absolutely had to leave.  That it was necessary I be with my father as much as possible while pursuing this other life I had set up for myself.  I said it was enough, and that I would no longer pass away opportunities like they were dust in the wind.

I knew that if I stayed in Vancouver, that I may have never seen him alive again, because it takes a whole day and a thousand dollars to get anywhere east beyond the Rockies.

How would that lie on my shoulders for the rest of my life?

So I took the Greyhound from Vancouver to Pittsburgh.

On the road for three days alone, I reflected on my life, his life, our life as father and daughter, and what it would be like to live without the most significant man in my life.  The irony of my situation was that I had run away from him the first chance I had at independence, and now I was running back to him because I still depended on him to be my father – alive and in the flesh.

It was hard for me to accept what was going on, because I knew he was going to die.  The thought of him no longer in this world for me was daunting, but simultaneously, I had no hope, as I was confusing hope with expectations.  I didn’t want to set myself up for disappointment, so I just believed he was going to die as a form of preparation.

December 29, 2010 had been the first time I had seen him in two years.  He didn’t look himself, but he was in so many ways.  I cherish that I got to see him, even though I watched him physically deteriorate more each time.

Traveling back and forth between New York and Pittsburgh repeatedly from January to the end of March is an experience I have yet to define.   I lost the excitement I once had in my trips to Pennsylvania.  The journey had turned into a reaction I had taken to the threat that it may be the last time.

I learned from this that it was better to act according to my instinct than to risk the chance that it was wrong.

The evening of March 28th, I couldn’t sleep, and I was haunted with terrible dreams.  I had that feeling of sickness that lingered like a bad hangover.  I got up and immediately spoke with my mother.  She expressed that my father was happy that he got to see me so much.  That there was no more pressure for me to act.  That she read him the letter of last words I had composed over a two-week span.  That I had done everything right.

None of it mattered to me.  I had to be there, there wasn’t any negotiating what my gut told me.  I finally realized through this experience that my family is the most important thing to me… before I thought that the most important thing was being an individual.

I hurried-up and bought another Greyhound ticket for that night.  I was due into Pittsburgh at 6AM on Tuesday, March 29, 2011.

I arrived early and made my way to Beaver County on the bus from Liberty Avenue.  I met my mother in Rochester around nine o’clock.

We went home, and prepared ourselves to leave.

When we arrived at the hospice, the nurse informed us that she wouldn’t have been surprised if it would be his last day.

No matter how much I tried to prepare for this information, I wasn’t prepared.  I couldn’t hold back the  tears that fell as I walked into the room.

Even as I write this, I relive the moment, which makes it difficult to proceed because the writing process begs the acknowledgement of reality, which doesn’t hurt less when you face it repeatedly.

What happened that day was that I saw my father unlike I had ever seen him before – living and breathing his last day.

But to me, it wasn’t my father.  It was a dying man.  My father’s light was about to burn out.

I sat around and waited for something to happen.  For him to die.

For him to open his eyes one last time so I could look into them and say what I felt inside.

To tell him what I needed to say.

To let him see my smile and my tears.

To send him off with love, which is all I think every one really needs in the end.