As I look back over the year since his passing, I'm left with a sense of awe at how time seems to be crawling by but simultaneously coursing swiftly. Case in point: my husband and I have been married for six years. In the time we've been married, 8 relatives have died, 5 of which were at the wedding.
When I initially started the idea for this blog, I was just going to direct attention to the November timeline, but it seems that I should provide the timeline on how rapidly my father deteriorated to give a full scope of just how quickly things can change. Let's start with 2011 because that's where the changes began. Forgive me in advance, as some of the times will be vague.
- January: Ayden is born, making Dad a two-time grandfather after a 15-year hiatus of Ariana being the only grandchild.
- May: After forty-odd years of apartment living, my father leaves Valleybrook and moves in a house with my husband and me.
- July 2011:I get into a single-car auto collision while on my way to work, totaling the only truck I ever bought.
- November: Dad quits/loses gas station job in Forestville, after a long struggle with new management and shift changes. It is worth noting that not only at this point was my dad walking independently, but driving and working. In this same month, my father would have a mental breakdown, the first one he'd had in 15 years. The stress of moving from his own place and worrying about how to contribute to household where he lived started wearing on him.
- August 18, 2012: I get married. Dad walks me down the aisle and we share our father/daughter dance to Beyonce's "Daddy."
- February 2013: My dad attends my grandmother's 100th birthday party. In retrospect, in pictures, it was easy to see that my dad wasn't quite himself.
- March 2013: My dad has another mental health breakdown. He also go into kidney failure and codes in the hospital. On a ventilator, he remains in the hospital for an extended period before he is well enough to be released to a rehabilitation center. The new normal changes as he transitions from a wheelchair to a walker. He also has to start dialysis 3 days a week. He never regains his full mobility, but he eventually gets well enough that we believe that he can stay back at home with us.
- June 2013: Niece graduates high school, but Dad is too weak to attend and is still a patient in rehab.
- August 31, 2013: My grandmother dies and we bury her during Labor Day weekend. My mom comments that my dad is an old man :-).
- Sometime in late 2013: Dad makes it home. New normal is that he gets picked up three days a week by Metro Access and stays home by himself during the day. Little do we know that he gets progressively weaker as time passes.
- December 2013: My brother and niece come home and I "sell" my dad's car to my brother for $1, marking the last of my dad's independence. Ironically enough, in January 2014, I get into a 2nd auto accident with a Dodge Challenger on bad tires in an ice storm and wish I'd never given up the car.
- October 27, 2014, 2am: I get a call shattering my life. My brother died of a heart attack that afternoon in Stone Mountain State Park in Georgia. He'd been fishing when he just fell backward. I had talked to him just that Wednesday, trying to convince him to retire and move closer to home after finding out that he had just been released from the hospital after a second bout with fluid in the lungs and recent pneumonia. We travel to Georgia for a week, leaving my dad with my uncles until he is able to fly down to help bury his son.
- November 1, 2014: I attend my brother's funeral. And my dad is sitting in front of my about 8 feet to my right since he is bound to a wheelchair, flanked by his brothers, while I sit next to my niece. My mom refused to accept it or attend.
It's at this point, I had to take a break in my narrative. Did all of this really happen in such a short time period?
The next year goes by quietly as I adjust to the new normal of no big brother to call and gripe to. An uncle dies. An aunt dies. both of them were technically in-laws,but had been married so long before my own birth that there was no separation of them from blood relatives. The uncle lived next door to my grandmother the entire time I grew up and then some, before getting ill enough that he needed around the clock nursing care, and the aunt went in the hospital in late December 2015 and died on New Years Eve. We fast forward again to 2016. In August, my mother decided she no longer wanted to pay rent to her siblings.
This list has exhausted me.
