Sad news in shiny things

Ages ago I wrote about my dad having a mild stroke at the end of January, while simultaneously having the flu, then coming down with bronchitis on top of that and being in the Veteran’s Home for rehab. He never did really get a whole lot better - he never was able to get up out of bed by himself - and around the third week in April he started seeming really confused. And was running a fever. When one of the Veterans Home nurses asked him something and he started telling her about needing to put a clutch in his truck, they decided they better take him to the hospital. The VA Hospital determined that he had pneumonia, which we were a little dubious about as they’d said he had pneumonia about a zillion times since this all started… but this time he really did have pneumonia. Plus a UTI, which he seemed to get constantly. So they put him in the ICU at the VA for a few days. At that point I came down from Boone (of course I’d been back and forth nearly every weekend, but this time was prepared to stay awhile) and he really seemed kind of okay. They were giving him a ton of antibiotics and his fever was mostly gone and he wasn’t confused but felt awful. The ICU at the VA isn’t quite the same as ICUs at regular hospitals- it’s more where they put patients who just need extra care, not who are at death’s door. So we weren’t limited to visiting times or numbers of visitors. It was like a normal room with more eyes on him.

I stayed a few days, then went back up to Boone. And my brother called the next day, I think - it’s all a blur now— and said his pneumonia was aspiration pneumonia, and he couldn’t eat or drink without it going in his lungs. And they were moving him to the hospice wing for palliative care. They could give him a feeding tube, but it wouldn’t do more than prolong his misery. He was always very adamant about not wanting any measures taken that would just prolong his life for the sake of prolonging his life, so we told them not to do that. We met with his care team and they said it would be hours or days. He actually hung on for a week and a half, and until the last few days was lucid and able to enjoy visitors. And he had a MILLION visitors - Daddy knew EVERYBODY. Seriously. We went to the Grand Canyon when I was a teenager, and he ran into someone he knew there.

The last couple of days he was sleeping pretty much all the time, and he passed away on Sunday, May 5, at about 7:30. Just like my mom did nearly 10 years ago, he waited till nobody was with him. They actually told us that often happens, and not to feel like we had to be there every minute because people tend to hang on longer than they would otherwise. The hospice was wonderful, very caring and thoughtful. When the funeral home came to get him they rolled him out with a flag over his body and played Taps, which of course made everyone cry.

He was 91 and of course it wasn’t a total shock, but… it kind of was a shock, because although he’d had plenty of health crises in recent years (this was at least his fourth time doing rehab at the Veteran’s Home), he always got better and went home. He was still driving when he had the stroke in January, and doing a good job (my brother followed him a few times). We definitely did not want him lying in bed at the Veteran’s Home for ages, and were starting to fear that was going to happen since he couldn’t get up alone or do anything but sit in a chair when he was up, so in that aspect it was a relief.... but it was still quite awful.

As a little bright spot, my Delaware and Maryland cousins came - Cousin E (for anyone who knew her on OD) and her two sisters. Cousin J and her husband had actually been there the day he passed away because they’d stopped by on their way to help their son at the University of SC in Columbia move. On Wednesday Cousin J came back with Cousin E, Cousin E’s husband, and Cousin MJ. Cousin E’s husband had also been there several days the previous week, when he went into hospice, AND their daughter and her husband (the one who got married last summer) came down all the way from DC at the same time. It was SO great having the cousins there, though. We had been trying to plan a get together this summer, and although this certainly wasn’t the kind of get together we were hoping for, it really made me feel SO much better having them there. And they stayed from Wednesday, when the first viewing was, till Saturday morning. Bizarrely, Cousin E made a reservation at an Airbnb that she could tell was within a couple of miles from my dad’s house, and turned out to be two houses down from him, and across the road from our grandparents’ house, and right beside the house our aunt and uncle lived in when we were kids. That was really weird, and very convenient! And a very nice little house too, although we never could figure out who used to live in it.

SO. It’s very sad, although a relief for it all to be over. I will leave with a few pictures, and a link to the obituary which has the maybe my favorite picture ever of him. Cousin E’s daughter took it a few years ago when she visited him and they went to his beloved Cracker Barrel.

Daddy as a schoolboy:

In the Navy, during WW2. Yes, he does look awfully young. He enlisted at FIFTEEN and was 17 when the war ended.

With my mom when they were building the house I grew up in (and he still lived in):