(no subject)

[katallison]

After three days of moaning and snivelling, in the grip of the Death-by-Phlegm cold, I woke up this morning actually feeling fairly chipper. Got myself into work, got through a couple of big meetings, and then went off to meet my stepbrother C. by prearrangement at a nearby restaurant to go over legal paperwork stuff pertaining to my dad's anticipated impending demise.

Got to the restaurant, got seated, and then the waitress came over and said, "Uh, you had a phone call from your stepbrother, he asked if you could call him back." I went and found a phone, expecting that something had come up to delay his arrival. Instead, when I reached him, he was crying, and said my dad had died about fifteen minutes earlier.

I drove up to the nursing home and found C. and my stepsister and another stepbrother there, in various states of tears, waiting for the guys from the funeral home to come take the body away. There ensued a very strange 45 minutes, in which we traded stories and memories about my dad, his eccentricities and oddnesses, with him lying there on the bed right next to us, most visibly and indubitably dead, eyes not quite closed, jaw hanging open. Every now and then one or another of the stepsiblings would go over, kiss his forehead, squeeze his hand. Though I didn't feel at all inclined to join in, I felt moved by this; my stepsiblings have always been closer to my dad, emotionally, than I and my brothers, his biological offspring. He mellowed a lot in his later life, after marrying my stepmother, by which time my brothers and I were grown and gone and carrying around a lot of ... well, let's say, mixed emotions about him, a lot of chequered and often-unpleasant history. I feel very glad that he got to have his stepchildren -- got to have a kind of do-over on fatherhood -- and I feel like it's just that their grieving take precedence over the more muted, ambivalent regrets and sorrows my brothers and I feel.

C. and I are meeting at the funeral home tomorrow to handle arrangements; I think my main task is going to be selecting music for the service, and preparing some remarks. Since my father loved opera, I'm thinking about Nessun dorma, from Turandot (a favorite of his). But then, the Judds were also favorites of his, so this may be a somewhat scrambled musical melange.

Anyway. I'm tired, and somewhat sad, but mostly relieved that he's finally free from the pain and misery of the past year and a half in the nursing home. He was a proud, dignified, fastidious man, and his life had become one long round of indignity and the incremental, unending loss of everything that had defined him. My hope is that with time I'll be able to forget all that, and remember him as he was in his better times. I probably won't be around much until next week, so keep well, all, and I send you love and thanks for all the support you've given me through this ordeal.