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Sylvan Abbey...his new home

Where he sat for a while

Prior to moving his urn to Sylvan Abbey I kept him up top on my bookshelves. To have him up there right next to wear I sit and read felt both good and bad. Mixed feeling I guess. I know he is not inside that urn, but seeing it felt weird and made me a little sad each time I walked by. And that isn't how my father would want me to feel. We had extensive conversations about death and an afterlife and what he wanted and didn't want to happen when the day came for him to leave this world. Being at Sylvan Abbey was his request and we honored it. But the few months where we sat up there on the shelf felt necessary as I wasn't really ready yet to take him away.

Anyone can leave a comment

If you are struggling to figure out how to leave comments just give me a call. It is an easy process once you get the hang of it. I'll step you through it. My consultation fee is only $25 per hour. This is a real bargain if you ask me.

Seeing as some people still stop by this Blog

I am going to start posting some photos once in a while so that those of you that stop by to remember my father have something interesting to see. Please leave comments once in a while or there won't be any reward for posting the pictures. Comments are the only evidence I will have that someone has appreciated the effort.

Happy Birthday Dad! I miss you.

I'm not sure why I'm doing this. Today is your birthday and I am really feeling sad and empty and missing you bad. This is your first birthday "away." I'm not sure if they have Internet access wherever you are, but if you can read this just know that you're in my thoughts and always will be. If there is a heaven I know you're there. But I don't think there is a heaven. And that's the hard part. Thinking you're gone forever is a horribly sad thought.

We spent 7 days a week together for so many years. And I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Any excuse we could come up with to hang out and just talk and be together. We were best friends.

I miss watching our HBO specials together every Sunday night.

I miss driving with you in your car...no destination in mind.

I miss talking to you about religion and politics.

I miss going to the Crab Shack and eating a ton of stone crabs together.

I miss hearing about all your experiences as a child.

I miss going camping where we sat around the campfire and just talked all night.

I miss talking to you about BookTalk - the good and bad aspects.

I miss your advice and fatherly suggestions.

I miss your stupid jokes.

I miss having you there to laugh at my stupid jokes.

I miss all our dreaming we did together, like wanting to go to Ireland and see the "motherland" together. Damn I wish we had been able to do that.

I miss everything about you. Nobody knows how close we were and how your death has impacted me. I keep it pretty hidden. But I am so fucking sad right now. I can hardly type this.

I feel mad at you a little. Why did you keep smoking when it was clear you were getting sicker and sicker from it? We all tried so hard to get you to stop. But you kept at it year after year and pack after pack.

Today would be your 70th birthday. I want to spend it with you. I want to celebrate your life with you. But you're gone. It's over. Forever. And I don't like this.

You will never meet my children. No, Tina's not pregnant yet. We're trying. But I wanted you to hold your granddaughter or grandson. I so wish they got to meet you. I have lots of photos and videos, but they'll never have the opportunity to call you grandpa or papa or anything. I feel so damn robbed. They were robbed. You were robbed.

No, I'm not mad at you though. That's stupid. Smoking is addictive and everyone that smoked had a hard time stopping. It's not your fault. I'm lucky to have never tried smoking in the first place. Heck, I can't stop eating bad foods so I'm overweight. How can I blame you for smoking when I can't break the habit of eating the wrong foods.

I just miss you and want you in my life. I want to be there for you too. We were best friends and inseparable. But now we're separated. Forever. I don't even know what the hell I'm doing typing this in your blog. Nobody reads this and never will. But it feels good to tell you I love you once again. That I miss you. That I wish we were together for your birthday. Mark and I joked last night about wanting to get your urn out of the niche and bring it to his house or to mine. We don't like you being all alone there at the cemetery. There is a nice spot right here on top of my bookshelves - YOUR bookshelves. I feel that you belong here with me. I guess that's weird for me to think about such a morbid subject. It would just feel good looking up at the urn and thinking you're close by. I'll get over that in time I suppose.

I guess I should get to work now. I have so much I want to talk to you about. Not having you as a sounding board is hard. I sure hope there is an afterlife and you're somewhere peaceful and happy right now. If there is I know you earned a ticket to get in. You weren't a perfect father, but you made up for your earlier mistakes 10x over. Few people know how good of a man and father you became. But I know. And if there is some sort of cosmic superhero out there he or she knows too.

I guess I should delete this blog. Maybe not. Happy Birthday dad. I love you.

Who would come to see you on your death bed?

Here it is, October already, and my father is still hanging on. He has declined significantly over the months and at this point he is barely able to sit up in bed without help. Come to think of it he does indeed require assistance just to sit up.

The nurses use some contraption (like a crane) to lift him out of a sitting position and wheel him into the bathroom. The technology is fascinating, but experiencing the technology on your own father takes most of the fascination and turns it right into sadness.

Watching my father slipping away is difficult. Many people reading this have gone through the same thing so I am not looking for sympathy - perhaps a little empathy would be nice. The good thing is I have had ample opportunity to tell my dad I love him and speak about all the things that a father and son would want to speak about at the end of life.

I remember my father telling me about how people acted when my mother was dying of cancer. Even close friends and family seemed to walk away and avoid visiting her. When he told me this I was astounded. Granted, I was just 6 years old when cancer took her away from us, but it is still painful to hear that my mother didn't have all of her loved ones in her life at the end. Where were they? What justification and rationalization did they employ?

We're all different. Some are stronger than others. Having spent a good chunk of my childhood in foster homes and institutions I have had the opportunity to see more of the pain in life than the average person. Maybe not more than you, whoever you are that is reading this, but more than the average person. The trauma of seeing pain and suffering up close and personal makes you stronger, but also overly sensitive. At least this is what all those therapists told me as I was going through the hell. And I believe it at this point.

So here I am watching my dad die. And I am a bit sensitive. I am amazed at how some people behave. I don't have it in me to turn my back on a friend or family member at their time of greatest need. I just couldn't do it. It is literally impossible for me to avoid seeing someone I love just because seeing them brings pain on me.

There are times when someone else’s needs come first. When my mother was laying there on that couch in our living room crying in pain and only a few people came to comfort her is something I find hard to fathom. One person that never turned his back on her was my father. And for all the bad things that some people believe he did in his life I can honestly say that I have seen his love for her all my life. It has never diminished. To this day he talks about her almost every day. He loved her with all his heart - despite his human weaknesses. And she loved him back.

So why did people turn their backs on her? What does a dying person do to process the clear fact that people they believed love them just might not care as much as previously thought? Or is it just too painful to the living to witness the dying? And is that enough of an excuse?

In my opinion there are no valid excuses other than an inability to visit and comfort and love the dying. If you truly love someone and you fail to show it then was it really love after all?

What happens when I am dying? Who will come see me? Who will be the one holding my hand as I leave this world? Will anyone? How about when you are dying? Have you ever thought about it? Or is that thought too scary and painful and you push it right back into the recesses of your brain?

When I am dying who will take time out of their busy lives to drive an hour or two and have a few laughs with me? Will close family and friends actually get on an airplane and stop their lives to see me one last time? Do they love me enough? Am I really sure about that?

None of us know the answers to these questions. But they are on my mind these days as I experience the dying process up close. And I am evaluating my friendships and relationships under a new light. I ask myself these questions as I think about my relationships. Would these people come see me? Even if seeing me made them cry? Or would the inconvenience keep them away? This helps me qualify my relationships right now, while I'm healthy.

Maybe I shouldn't be doing this to myself. But I'm the one sitting with my dying father 7-days per week watching him hallucinating, coughing up chunks of blood and falling asleep in mid sentence. I'm left wondering where certain people are. Why haven't they come to see him?

Am I mad? No, I am too emotionally exhausted to be angry with anyone. But I am very disappointed and saddened. I love my father and am tired of making excuses for why this person and that person haven't been able to visit.

At this stage he is no longer reading this Blog. He doesn’t read anything anymore. Reading is too difficult. So I am ok speaking freely here as I know he won’t ever read this. Maybe I'll delete this right after I post it.

Those of you that have taken time out of your lives to visit with my father I cannot thank you enough. It has been the highlight of his days in the nursing home. And those of you that have not I am sure you have your good reasons. The fact remains that we will all one day be approaching death and we will have to look around us and see the people that really care. So who would come to see you on your death bed? Ask yourself that.

Alain "Spiderman" Robert

This guys is literally amazing. Watch the video long enough to get to where he is climbing skyscrapers with his bare hands and no safety equipment.

This is John here...

Chris is typing this, but I am the one saying it to him.

Hi, this is John. I will be getting in touch with each of you as time goes by. The hospital has loaned me a computer so I can access the internet and send and receive emails and Blog posts.

My foot is healing very well and I expect to be able to walk around soon. My strength is up and I am walking again, but with a walker and only short distances.

I'm not sure what else to say right now, but I do appreciate the posts and hope you continue to visit my Blog and say hi once in a while. Bye for now.

"R" hath arrived!

Robert Eaton has arrived in Florida as of yesterday. And we're all happy to see him. Robert goes by "R" and has for most of his life. If you don't know him he is quite a character. Everyone is laughing whenever he is around. And no, it is not at him! He just has a way about him that makes people crack up. Trust me.

I picked him up from Tampa International yesterday afternoon and brought him to my father's apartment. He got settled in and then we headed down to the VA to visit my father. Naturally, they were both happy to see each other. I'll try to find a photo of the two of them together, but it will be from months ago. Maybe in the next few days I'll snap some newer pics.

R is staying at my fathers apartment and driving to the nursing home each day to visit. In fact he was there for several hours earlier today, but he plans on doing a second trip with me in about an hour. After seeing the nursing home yesterday R was relieved that it was quite pleasant and the people extremely caring and friendly. We've all been shocked at how well run this place is, to be honest, but my father has been bragging about the VA hospital for years and years.

It's all in how you look at it

Today was a big day. We had several rather important appointments at the VA hospital this morning and we we're a bit nervous going into them. The first appointment was simply a visit to the clinic where they drew his blood and made sure everything looked fine. And everything looked fine.

The next appointment was an X-Ray of his chest. The goal was to determine how the lung cancer had progressed. And as expected the cancer has grown. Cancer does this. But the good news is that the growth is very small since April, which was the date of the last X-Ray.

It sucks having to be happy about the cancer growing slightly, but growing slightly is much better than growing significantly. So today was a pretty good day. We left in good spirits.

Food at the VA isn't always edible

When I arrived at the VA to visit last night I noticed that my dad ate almost nothing at all for dinner. Obviously, this worried me. So I asked him why he didn't eat and he responded, "Did you see that pork chop!?" Note Exhibit A below.



Exhibit A

Now wanting to see him starve to death I asked him if McDonald's would be more appealing. See Exhibit B.



Exhibit B

I felt sorry for that Big Mac. It didn't stand a chance. And the Sunday went down pretty fast too. I even tried to take a bite of the corn bread that came with the nursing home meal and I literally spat it out in the bathroom. It tasted like ass-flavored cardboard.

But not all of the meals at the VA are like this so don't worry. I've tasted several and they're darn tasty. Last night the cooks must have been drunk or high or mad at something.

Pics from when Keith visited

Picture this...

Here are some photos of my father and his new home at the VA. Of course this new home could very well be a temporary one, but it is still home right now so that's what I'll call it.