My Father Died... Twice

Since it's Father's Day here in the U.S., I thought I'd write a post about how I lost my father. Gimme a minute, I've got to grab some tissues, because I'm already crying. This is going to be hard in many ways and is going to bruise some hearts, including my own.

I wish I could tell you that my father was the most loving and caring man who always had time for his children... but the reality is that he was a selfish man, quick to lash out at his children, and who spent quite a bit of time in his own head. He adored our mother even though he didn't show it in the best way (dude gave her two cans of bug spray for Christmas one year). He was a member of Mensa International, and he was absolutely without a doubt the smartest man I have ever known.

He taught me the value of research. Well, I guess he was just impatient during my "Why?" phase... but he once sat me down and said, "If you have a question, look it up. If you don't know a word, look it up. If you still don't understand, figure out which part you don't understand and THEN come to me and ask." This was in the pre-Google days so for the most part he just pointed at our set of Encyclopedia Brittanica when I asked any question after that. I wish my mother had a picture of me at three years old, a volume of the Encyclopedia on one knee, her ginormous copy of Roget's Unabridged Dictionary on the other. A lot of times my parents would ask me what I had learned, and I'd spew it off, and then I'd do my own interpretation. I wrote a ten-page research paper on Down Syndrome in the first grade.

He taught me how to use power tools. I still don't trust myself with anything sharp that uses electricity or gas to run (he accidentally cut two tips of his fingers off with a circular saw, and that kind of made me leery), but I'll hold the end of a piece of two-by-four or plywood or sheetrock while someone else does. I know how to hang sheetrock and spread mud so that it looks seamless. I know how to redo a floor in tile, bamboo, and hardwood — my knees ache just thinking about it — and I have no problem figuring out the instructions to rehang a lighting fixture of any kind. Just remember to flip the fuse or breaker, hey?

He spent hours on the computer at work and at home, designing machines that had never been dreamed of before. He didn't just design the machines though, because what made him valuable to his employers was the fact that if a part or fastener didn't exist to build his design, he'd design that to the correct specs so that the part or fastener did exist. He poured everything he had into his inventions, which probably explains why he had very little left for his children. He wasn't the father of the year, that's for sure.

Let's put it another way — I know what it was like for Albert Einstein's children growing up, and I admire the hell out of Nicola Tesla for point-blank saying that he had no time for women, just his inventions.

That doesn't mean that I didn't adore my father. I remember being insanely proud of the fact that my father sounded like a jailer when he walked the hallways of my schools. When I would go to the school nurse and she'd call my parents (who worked out of the same building, just different businesses), like as not my mother sent my father to pick me up because she had a meeting to run. He wore steel-toed boots on the end of his insanely long legs, and wore a slew of keys, only he knew which went to what, that hit his thigh just so and made every child in the classrooms on my hallway tremble with fear. His voice was deeper than a river, and it made every teacher take a second glance, every single time he came to pick me up. He was a six-foot-four-inch long and shaggy man who always looked like he had come in from the rain, and wore the crags and valleys of his face with aplomb. In short, he looked like a Tim Burton character.

My daddy drove a truck that I always called the deep-throated monster that rumbled in just a certain way that no other engine can come close to, and it should have — it had a Ferrari 350 diesel engine in it. My father subconsciously and constantly hummed deep in his chest at that same frequency, even when he was asleep, and I thought of it as his secondary heartbeat. Remember that hum. I will always miss that hum.

Ten years ago, the man who had never had a headache in his life started getting violent migraines. My father, who refused to take the pain medication the doctors gave him for his fingers as they reattached them, was downing aspirin and ibuprofen and acetaminophen like it was water. He was in such pain that he was nauseated. My mother remembers a night where he was running to the bathroom and hit his head on the door jamb so badly he knocked himself out. When he came to, he got sick in the toilet.

After a week of this nonsense, he decided to go to what we all called a "doc in a box" kind of emergency clinic. If you don't have a primary care doctor (and we didn't), you go to these doctors if you have the flu or a nasty cold, or bronchitis if you're unlucky. The reason we didn't and don't have a primary care doctor is because we're remarkably healthy the lot of us.

The doc in the box decided to do X-rays to make sure, gave Daddy a prescription for some migraine medication, and told him to come back next week to review the X-ray. Sure enough, Daddy went back and the doc in the box did something I will never ever in a million years ever forget him for (forgiveness, sure) and curse his ancestors for spawning such an idiot and pray he did not pass on his idiocy to his children if he ever had any. He said, "Well, there's this mass in your head. I want to send you back for some more scans so we can figure out what it is."

I want to emphasize this: This was a general practice doctor who did not have any oncology or brain-treatment training whatsoever. He treated colds and flu and mono and bronchitis cases, with the occasional stubborn splinter that has gotten infected. This man had no business sending him for additional scans of his head, he should have immediately gotten a consult and sent my father scurrying to the nearest EFFING oncologist or brain-treater as soon as he laid eyes on the monster that was growing in my Daddy's brain-case.

That Sunday, my father stopped church for a grand mal seizure. That Tuesday his brain was missing a quarter of its mass. That Saturday, my father was walking around at the local Highland Games like nothing was wrong. The following Tuesday, he started chemotherapy and radiation treatment, and I started losing my Daddy.

I was so scared and so mad, because here I was, barely an adult, and I was losing my Daddy. I railed at the world, I cursed Fate, I pounded on my chest like it was the only way to restart my heart. My daddy was Superman, He-Man, and the Hulk all rolled into one. I hated my life every single day because I would have gladly traded places with him because I was a nobody next to this man who still had so much left to give to this world.

I remember the day I knew I had lost my daddy forever. I came home from my classes, and my father was sitting in his office, reading his credit card number out loud over the phone to someone. I snatched that phone out of his hand so fast he spun in his chair. We yelled and screamed at each other for at least an hour, him saying that he just wanted to help a charity out, me telling him how many times he had told me to NEVER give my personal information or my credit card number out over the phone. My mother came home and I ran into my bedroom, determined to study because I was getting nowhere with that person who was wearing my father's skin. Instead, I cried like I did when my grandmother passed away, and I knew then that I was mourning my Daddy.

For seven and three quarters years after that, I called the monster who wore my father's clothes and skin and hats and coats "Papa." He racked up so much credit card debt to charities and to online catalogs and to cheap-as-hell stores, it might as well have been a second mortgage. He drove erratically and haphazardly, and I was scared to be on the road when I knew he was on the road. He whined and complained about being cold while wearing long johns underneath jeans and three wool flannel shirts while wearing a woolen coat sitting outside in the 100˚ heat of summer. He complained to me, his daughter, about how his balls hurt and nothing was going to fix them.

Hate is such a strong word, and I dislike using that word, but... I hated that Papa as much as I had loved my Daddy. I detested every move he made, every sound that escaped his lips, every painful step he took. I was not patient, I was not kind, and I was not in awe of what medical technology had wrought. "Look at him!" I screamed at everyone who would listen. "That is NOT my Daddy! That is an impostor, a changeling, a shadow of the deepest depths of Hades that has missed Charon's boat because he didn't have the coins! That is NOT my Daddy!"

I was furious for many reasons, not the least of which that not only did I have daily contact with that fiend, but I was missing my brother and was envious of him that he didn't have to see this happen. My brother was enlisted in the Army as a cavalry scout, stationed in Fort Carson, Colorado when he wasn't overseas. My brother had friends and compatriots who were closer to him than I would ever know. He witnessed tragedy after tragedy after injustice after injustice, but he wasn't here to witness the death of our father. I was jealous of my brother for having to witness the pain of war because he wasn't here to witness the struggle of my father's slow decline. My brother enlisted two weeks after my father was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, and I went back to school at the local satellite school to help care for the man who was not my Daddy.

Depression is a funny thing. It comes out in different ways. I dated a slew of guys to escape the torture I was witnessing, the wrong sort of guys. The ones who took and took and took from me every shred of dignity I thought I had, not to mention my money. The ones who used to their advantage the hurt I was feeling. The ones who had no idea that I had no love left because I had used it all up in the loss of my Daddy. I had a Daddy-shaped hole in my heart that ached for the loss of the man I thought I knew.

In 2011, that shell of a man who wore my father's face started dying. It was slow, it was painful, it was inevitable. In July, just after my birthday, he had another tumor growing in his brain, and his bladder cancer started acting up again. His body was shutting down. No doctor had ever seen a patient with his brand of cancer live for as long as he had, so they suggested that he have a laser ablation of the tumor.

We met as a family, and I fought him on his decision to go through with it. I wanted him to be as mobile as possible for as long as possible, and there was no guarantee that he would be after that surgery. Papa and I had talked before, and I knew that he was fighting so damn hard because he wanted to be his old self again, the brilliant man who designed machines in his sleep; there was no way he would ever be that man again.

He went through with the surgery anyway. He started actively dying.

At the end of October, he went to the hospital and they started hospice care, because there was nothing else to be done. Two weeks after that, I helped set him up in the parlor of my mother's house to die. The day before Thanksgiving, I kissed his forehead, whispered "Thank you for being my Daddy," and then I helped the funeral home directors wheel him away. I don't remember anything after that for a long, long time.

I have a vial of his ashes that I will, hopefully, one day get made into a piece of jewelry, a charm to wear around my neck. There will be a spot for my mother's ashes to be made into a jewel to put in that charm. I will treasure that piece more than any other piece of jewelry anyone has ever treasured, and I will tell anyone who asks that I carry my parents with me.

My father died twice, once as Daddy, once as Papa. I love my Daddy, and I always will. I will always have a Daddy-shaped hole in my heart that nothing will ever fill.