Okay, so I may freak out and have to take those pictures down.

I have been back and forth all day about whether or not I should put them up. In some ways, I kind of really want to...but at the same time, I don't want to detract from my posts.

What do you think?
5:10:46 PM     comment []


4:57:17 PM     comment []

So, this is kind of a weird picture, of poor quality, etc...but it was the only recent one of the two of us that I found acceptable. This picture was taken a little over a year ago, one night when I was here visiting from New York. It was a month before I graduated college and my Dad wasn't going to be able to attend the ceremony because he was too ill to travel. He had just given me a necklace (I'm wearing it in the photo) that belonged to my mother and he had bought a pair of earrings (wearing those too) to match. I wore them at graduation the next month.
4:43:33 PM     comment []

Well, here I am again, at my father's bedside. I must have spent ten hours here yesterday. Things were kind of terrible late last night. It's not just that he can't hear me anymore, it's that he can't comprehend anything I try to tell him. He is utterly confused and disoriented. For the last couple of hours I've been sitting here, perusing through Blogland and responding, as best I can, to the incredible people out there, who are choosing, for some reason, to be here with me. My Dad just lays there and looks back and forth from the window, to me, to the air conditioning vent and back to me again. Every once in a while he exclaims, Holy Shit. Also, from time to time he looks at me questioningly. Several times he's asked, What now? or What are we doing? I just shrug at him. I don't know what else to do.

Since he came home from the hospital two months ago, his biggest concern has been the temperature in the house. He likes it really cold, so cold that I am currently wearing two shirts, jeans, slippers and a sweater. A month ago when I was living here he'd wake me up all night long just to have me adjust the thermostat. When my brother came out he rewired it all so that the thermostat is now attached to my father's nightstand so that he can adjust it on his own. This was working just fine until last night. Before I went to bed I started going over everything to make sure he was settled and I realized that while I was brushing my teeth he had turned the temperature all the way down, to 50 degrees. I tried to go over it with him but he kept pushing the lever the wrong way. For ten minutes I tried to help him understand which way to adjust it but he just couldn't understand. I finally waited until he had fallen asleep and then I adjusted it myself. A few things like this happened late last night. I realized that he also forgot how to use the walkie-talkie system we have. There are three buttons on it to push and only one of them sends the alarm call and no matter how many times I showed him, I couldn't get him to push the right button. At one point I was so frustrated that I just sat on the floor by his bed, my fingers entwined painfully into my hair. I wanted to scream and I wanted to cry but there was just nothing I could do. I wanted to call someone, wanted someone to come and fix this problem but all I could do was sit there for a while because no one can fix this.

The thing I'm most scared of now is that this will go on for too long. I don't want him to die but this is just horrible. What if it just keeps up like this for a week or longer, the whole month?

My father is strong man, resilient and determined. During WWII he piloted a B-24 Liberator. On December 17, 1944, on a mission to bomb the Odertal oil refineries in Germany, he was shot down by a German fighter. Half of his crew was killed trying to escape the burning, descending plane. The other half, five guys, including my father, parachuted out to land in what was then, Czechoslovakia. My father had worked hard to ensure the escape of his crew, diving last, head first through the burning, bomb-bay doors. When he did, he hit his head, blacking out for 30 seconds or so as he fell through the cold sky. After those 30 seconds he came to and immediately pulled the rip cord, not knowing that he was still so high in the air. He descended for almost 15 minutes, his breath frigid and the ground below empty and brown.

He landed in a field, outside of Olomouc and some of the townspeople had gathered there, waiting and watching men fall from the sky. They took him in and fed him soup, tried, for as long as they could, to hide him from the German soldiers. Later that night he was captured and put on a train bound for Stalag Luft 1, a prison camp on the Baltic Sea. He remained there for six months until the war ended, subsisting on bread made of sawdust, a dead horse and his own convictions.

How he will be able to let go of this life that he fought so hard to keep, I'll never know.
12:42:35 PM     comment []