Remembering

This is a personal journal, so if you don't want to read, feel free to skip. Also I'm not looking for sympathy with this, because I'm completely okay emotionally while I write this.

So two years ago today, I lost the most amazing man I'd ever known, my dad. We lost him to cancer at the young age of 65, exactly three months and two days after his diagnosis. It started as gallbladder cancer, which is notoriously hard to catch early, and by the time they found it, it had spread to his liver and was deemed inoperable.

That was October 12, 2013. He'd been in the hospital for a couple of weeks for gall stones, and he seemed to be doing okay. He and my mom were going to go up to our cottage for the weekend. But his treatments weren't working, and he was sent for a scope to see what was causing the blockage. I was at work that day, and I remember as I was leaving, having a voicemail from my brother to call him. I figured that he wanted to figure out what we'd order for dinner (that was a pretty normal occurrence), but instead it was to tell me that my dad was in the ICU. We didn't know why. When I got the hospital he wasn't in the ICU yet, and after some searching I managed to find him on one of the regular floors, with the rest of my family, a doctor, and at least two nurses. The doctor told us he was in septic shock, and they were pumping antibiotics into him to flush out all the toxins. He might not make it through the night. That wasn't the worst news, unfortunately. Worse was that he had cancer and they anticipated about three months. Everything was kind of a blur at the moment, so it took us all a minute to grasp that she meant three months to live.

It was devastating for sure, and at that time, the thought of him dying from septic shock didn't even enter my mind. My dad was tough, and stubborn, and I knew he'd beat that. After he stabilized, he was went to the Critical Care unit at a larger hospital in the neighbouring city, and me and my mom spent Thanksgiving weekend in a hotel to be closer to him. It was pretty much the first time that both sides of my extended family hung out together, sitting for hours and hours in the waiting room of the CCTC (we all had Thanksgiving dinner togethether at Montanas restaurant). They put two tubes in my dad's gallbladder to drain the bile and keep him from going back into septic shock.

Anyway, we spent the next two months in and out of hospitals with him (once he got pneumonia), and watching cancer turn him into someone I barely recognized. Our last Christmas was sad. My aunt and her family bought a farm in Africa and dedicated it to him, and I adopted a red panda under his name. It's hard to buy gifts for someone who's going to die soon. I ended up ditching in the evening and going to the movies because I couldn't deal with it. 

Dad had resolved himself to dying at home (I wasn't crazy about this idea, but he was really stubborn, as I said before), but in the beginning of January, he told us he wanted to go back to the hospital. So we moved him back there. There were no beds available in palliative care, so he was just in a regular room (he was lucky enough to get a room by himself). We tried to move him to a hospice, but apparently you have to be at death's door to go to one, as they told us he "wasn't sick enough" to be there. He passed away within the week at the hospital, without being conscious once on his last day. 

When we initially found out he was dying, he asked me to sing at his funeral, which I firmly refused to do. Later I figured that I could at least record the songs he wanted and play them at the funeral instead. He asked me to record Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen (which is beautiful) and You Raise Me Up by Josh Groban, which is one of the songs I hate singing more than any other (I also sang it at my sister's wedding, so it seemed a bit of an odd choice). But I recorded them anyway, and I was lucky to have him lucid enough to listen to them before he passed.

The funeral was so well-attended that people had to stand in the aisles and the back of the church. My dad was a really popular man, it seems. He'd been a tax consultant, and volunteered a lot of his time, so he knew a lot of people. It was a lovely tribute to his life.

I'd love to say that I got along with my dad all the time, it's nice to be able to say that kind of stuff when people are dead. But my dad was of Scottish heritage, and was incredibly stubborn (by the same token, so am I), so we definitely had our fair share of arguments and drove each other insane sometimes. But he was, truly, an amazing person. He did so much for people, and had infinite patience with others. He never thought about whether he had enough time to do things, or if he was spreading himself too thin. He just did what he could. He was horrible to golf with, though. Lots of swearing and club-throwing.

Anyway, sorry for the long story. If anyone read the whole thing, kudos to you. It's not exactly an uplifting story, and it's not one that anyone outside my real-life circle really knows in detail.

My heart goes out to anyone who's lost a loved one, because it's honestly one of the most horrible things to experience, and in that moment it can seem like you'll never experience happiness ever again. The day I found out my father had cancer, I didn't think anything would ever feel okay again.

But things get better, and people are there to love and support you. It really does get better.

Alan Rickman also died today, which is awful. I guess at least he gets to share a deathday with someone as awesome as my dad.