It's been 11 years.

My father.
When I think of my father, I think of the man who raised me, my biological father married to my biological mother (there are all types of families.)
I grew up in a "nuclear family" as it was called when I was a child. There was Dad, Mom, siblings, pets, and that was it. We lived in a single family house in a suburb.
That's where the average resemblance to a family ended as far as I am concerned.
I am the youngest of five siblings. Technically we are six, but my second eldest brother died in-utero. Thomas was his name and he was rarely talked about. He wasn't raised with us. He was a source of great pain for my dad and mom and eldest brother, his twin.
Mom was young when she married Dad. Their first pregnancy was after the wedding though naysayers in their day liked to pretend they were the reason for the swift courtship and marriage. No. Mom and Dad met on a blind date. They spent the entire evening talking on the levee. Two weeks after they met, Dad proposed. Two months later, they married. Six weeks or so before their first wedding anniversary, my brothers were born. T1 (eldest brother) and Thomas were born. Thomas was taken away as medical waste I assume, as we never have visited his grave. I don't know if Mom knows what they did with him. Times were different back then.
So my parents moved forward with life. Dad worked many different jobs. He was smart as hell. He had great "street smarts" and could read a person like a book. He knew how to fix anything mechanical, could build a wood frame house, wire and plumb it, and roof it with shingles despite having no official certificates. He was a soldier in the US Army, he could complicated arithmetic and calculations without aid of calculating devices of any kind. As a child, I accompanied him to the grocery. He used to calculate the price per ounce of food in seconds. Keep in mind, this was in the early 1990s, where there were no cell phone and calculators weren't in our pockets.
My father was a stubborn, determined, intelligent man. If he wanted information, he found it.He was an avid reader, he absorbed facts like a sponge.
He was kind, he was considerate, he was gentle to his children and wife.

He was also sick. All my life. I never knew him in a healthy state. My earliest memory of him was one where I felt guilty.  It was Chritmas, and I had just launched myself onto his lap/ He caught me and winced in pain, then gently asked me not to jump on him like that again. I asked why not. He told me it was because his leg was sore and it hurt him when I landed on him. I remember the last time he played "horsey" with me. His breathing was labored and he said "No more, Sweetie, this horse needs  a break." I never saw him run. I saw his last construction project rot before our eyes because his health failed before he could complete it. I went with him to purchase tools from a hardware store he used once or never, and I remember feeling so special that he chose me to go with him. i remember his health declining steadily. I remember the last school function he went to with me. It was my freshman year, MCJROTC banquet. After that, he saw me graduate but left before I ever got a picture. You know the one. The new graduate in cap and gown, with proud parents on either side? never got that. He and my mom left to get home so he could elevate his severely swollen legs and recover for the next month from the outing.
I remember the alcohol. At my uncle's 50th birthday party, I remeber his jumping off the sobriety wagon. I was standing at his front, talking to him about something silly. He old me to close my eyes and count to ten. I did and opened my eyes to see him swallowing the last of the tumbler of some brown alcohol. That  was the last night I ever knew him to be sober. He wasn't ever the typical drunk or anything. he just always had a state on inebriation to him.

In January 1980, Daddy was on his way home from work on a motorcycle. He stopped at a four-way stop. The Cadillac driver did not. He was dragged with his bike about a hundred feet before stopping. His injuries included a cervical vertebrae break, a compound fracture of his left femur, a broken left ankle and a lot of road rash. Helmets in 1980 apparently eight a lot more than today and doctors told him he'd have been decapitated had he been wearing one. They attempted to fix his femur,( and it want badly, as the orthopedic surgeon did a bad job the first time. It broke a few more times after he left the hospital). He was kept in a medically induced coma for two weeks to give him time to heal. he woke up, they kept him on straight morphine from admittance into that hospital until discharge day. He was in traction for a month and was not treated well at the hospital. It was a Veteran's hospital in 1980, again, times were VERY different back then. These were Vietnam Era veterans, and if people don't remember, anyone associated with Vietnam seemed to be looked down upon. He had to relearn to walk, to do many things, and he now had less control over his temper. Due to morphine withdrawal, he left the hospital coming off morphine cold-turkey. He turned to alcohol. For a while, it helped take the edge off the pain, but after a time, he could not cope. There was a time of arguing, and once it got close to becoming physical, Mom gave Dad an ultimatum and Dad chose Mom and my siblings. Things go well for a while, Dad learned more coping skills, He went to work again after the grim diagnoses or "you'll never walk again, you'll never work again, you'll be a cripple in a wheelchair" He learned to walk, re went back to work and he and Mom had two more kids, me and my youngest brother.

Somewhere between 1980-something and that night at his brother's "over-the-hill" party, he learned to balance alcohol and living a fruitful life. I never saw him drunk, He was a dedicated father, hard working husband, and a skilled homeowner.
I remember him getting a tiller and making a big huge garden. Building a grape vine trellis , laying concrete slabs in parts of the yard, and being the one to tune up the vehicles.


After 1992, when he had a massive heart attack, and his doctor laid it out bluntly of "medically retire or have another heart attack and die next time" he retired. His drinking became more frequent and my development of abhorrence for beer bottles and cans became overwhelming. things from your childhood leak out all over your adult choices at time. For me, I will not deal with anyone else's empty beer vessels. So, Dad retired from work, but his mind was as sharp as ever, despite his body giving up on him.

See, let me backtrack a bit. Before my mom, my dad was a kid raised in the dangerous areas of New Orleans. He grew up on Magazine street. I'm not sure where he lived before my grandfather died, but after, it was in the heart of the Irish Channel. He was the younger of two sons between my grandparents. My uncle left right around the time my grandfather withered away from lung cancer. My dad was 13. My grandmother went to work to support the two of them and Dad was left to roam the streets of New Orleans alone. He got by but I gather from comments not made and tones of voice that left a bit to the imagination, that my dad had some shady dealings in his youth. Once in high school, he butted heads with a young math teacher fresh out of college. Remember my mention of my dad and his arithmetic prowess? Well, that bit him in the ass one day. He got into a verbal disagreement with the written textbook and how the teacher was teaching. Dad spotted an error and the teacher disliked being corrected in front of others. Words were said. My Dad's temper flared. He got so angry he walked out of the school and to the nearest recruitment station. In 1970/1971, my dad went to the Marines, then the Air Force, then the Navy, then the Army office. The Army was the only recruiter not out for lunch at the time. Dad enlisted, with apparent approval from his mother. My knowledge is shady of that time as both parties are gone now.
 He enlisted, served in the military, then left military life for civilian life in New Orleans. He worked odd jobs, one of which was as a man who worked the X-ray machines on the roof of the Superdome. He handled radiation pellets for the machines and worked them. In my humble opinion, his handling of the materials played a role in his later heath decline, but as I am no scientist and there was never a study done in which he was included, it is only my supposition which links the two things.
So, he was in the Army, then back to civilian life. He did many odd jobs. He met my mom, they married, they had 3 kids, then he had the accident, then recovered, next was 2 more kids. Life tooled along until 1992, where he had heart attack, Retirement, more of him thirsting for knowledge, and finding it in any material he could learn from. He would have LOVED the internet's resources availability. Then 2005 rolls in. His health is declining even more steadily. He has more instances of his legs "going out" on him and episodes of confusion. I believe he had mini-strokes which caused temporary weakness and loss of memory. Then March 4, 2005. It happened. He had a massive stroke and heart attack. I refuse to get into the hours surrounding the events leading up to his arrival at the hospital but I will say my guilt for the hours will never go away.
Mid-March, he has heart surgery. He recovered, is extubated, and begins the process of recovery. I go to class. I go back to the hospital. He is re-intubated. I spend the next two weeks living in his hospital room. I watch him die, slowly, and without realizing it. He fights the intubation, he thrashes each time the "milk of amnesia" (propofol?) wears off. He tries to pull the tube out! They put soft restraints on his arms. I held his hand as he fought them and tried to be there for him. It never helps long. I sleep in the chair next to the bed so I can try to stop his thrashing at night. Finally the fights begin to ease after a few days. I memorize his medications, the schedule and frequency of the doses. I fight with the doctors who want to change things without my mom being there to approve them. I live there, watching him slip away. I wake up to a code blue, his heart stopped while I slept next to him, and I never knew. The machines wail, the beeps, the sounds of the defibrillator, them getting him back, fumbling for my phone, Calling over and over until my mom answers. Telling her to come to the hospital. Waiting, waiting, waiting; they arrive. Doctors gather us around' tell us he is brain dead. We can wait for him to die on his own or we can turn off the machines. It's March 30th. My sister's birthday is coming up. We do it that day, so he doesn't die on her day. We call everyone. People arrive, my active duty Soldier brother is still here on emergency leave, thank God. We surround him, we pray, we tell him he can let go. Mom tells him goodbye. We assure him we understand he has fought a long, long time to stay with us but he can go now. The nurse slowly begins turning off machines. Heart flat-lines. That horrid sound of the the heart rate monitor signalling flat-line. Thank God she turns it off quickly. The doctor quietly pronounces him dead. We cry, we weep. We begin to grieve. I can't leave but they want me to go. I sit at his feet. I watch his face as they extubate for the final time. His lip is bitten through completely. The thrashing makes sense and the guilt washes over me in waves. As with the time preceding his arrival at the ER on March 4th I didn't listen. The guilt never leaves, to this day. His face has turned green. He's really dead, they're really urging me to leave. I don't care that they need to take him to the morgue. That's my daddy. He's going to be cremated and I will NEVER see his real face again, only pictures. They convince me to go. I hate them for it but I have to go. I try to be there for my mom. I sleep in my home for the first time in two weeks. I sleep on his side of the bed, next to my mom. It's hell.
We make plans with a funeral home. I go to classes on the coming Monday. I have a huge exam. I can't take it. I break down in the hallway telling my professor why. It's the first time I've said the words out loud and it nearly beaks me.
Life moves on, the pain starts as waves during my conscious hours. The waves recede until they come less frequently, Now, eleven years later the waves hit like tsunamis, rather than a constant category 5 hurricane that won't hit landfall yet wont leave the coastal waters.

In those eleven years, I've accepted he is gone. I've felt this overwhelming sense of loss each time I reached a milestone without him. Getting my driver's license, my first real job, meeting the man I would marry, graduation college I skipped completely but he missed that as well. My wedding, the birth of my children, buying my first home with my husband. My first car wreck, my first surgery, my child's first surgery.
He missed it all.



When I think of my father I feel pain, loss, grief, sadness, and pain.
I also feel relief. I am relieved he is not suffering. He was in physical and emotional pain from the day of his accident until he died, twenty-five years later. So while I am sorrowful that he is gone, it comforts me that he's not suffering through unceasing pain, drinking himself into oblivion in an effort to ease the agony that was his nervous system following his accident, his development of asthma and emphysema, lymphedema, and in the end, systemic organ failure.

My dad suffered a lot but he did it out of a strong will to live, to love his family, and to be there for us as his father could not.
I hate that he is gone but am thankful his pain is ended,