Some answers

I don't even know how to begin this. I really don't. I'm sitting here staring at a blinking cursor. Blah. My mind is at once everywhere and nowhere. Should I share this? Should I not? I don't know. Yet, here I am, typing.

Many of you have sent me messages to check up on me. I really, really appreciate all of your emails. Some wondered why I stopped blogging, others expressed grave concern at the possibility that I had been incarcerated, held hostage and/or been victim of a grave accident in which I lost my fingers, rendering me unable to communicate internetally. That's totally a word. Look it up. Internetally. But rest assured, friends, I am not in jail, chained up in someone's dungeon nor have lost my precious digits. An unfortunate chain of events over the last nine months or so have brought this silly little innernets weblog diary journal to a screeching halt.

First was the news from On High that Internet access at work was being monitored and - get this - timed. Fuck. Me. A twenty minute daily limit was instituted corporate-wide and I, after roughly a dozen nights of crying myself to sleep, decided to start working for a change. Just kidding, just kidding. I didn't start working. C'mon, that's ridiculous. Nah, just kidding, I did. Really. I did. Never have I been more productive! So, gone were the days of spending an hour or five and a half at work checking blogs and commenting and getting paid to fuck off. Boy was it a hard transition. Whew.

Then, if that weren't bad enough (!), in early June, my father, after a routine chest x-ray at his pulmonologist's office, was told things looked suspicious and was asked to undergo a few more tests. The result was a devastating diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer which had already spread to the liver. His lifelong smoking habit had finally caught up with him. Fucking cigarettes.

At that time he was given a rough estimate of how much time he had left -- if he pursued chemo treatments (the only option available), he'd be looking at six to twelve months. If no treatment three to six months.

Holy. Fuck.

And so off we went - my dad, my stepmom and I, out of that oncologist's office and back into the world, to somehow go on living our old lives with this new reality -- this godawful black cloud of terribleness. My sister and brother, who both live out of state, came home immediately after hearing the news. The tears. Man, the tears. They just seemed endless. And Dad, who I'd seen cry only a handful of times in my entire life, started to shed his bravado and reveal the emotional sensitivity of, well, a person who has but months to live.

There were conversations about final wishes. Lifetime Network-worthy moments where we talked about how much we loved eachother. I remember holding his face in my hands as we both cried, me telling him how proud I was to be his daughter, him telling me to let go of his damn face. Just kidding, just kidding. Him telling me how lucky he was to be my father. We all just laughed and cried and tried to wrap our brains around this. Dad has cancer. My dad, my dad, MY dad, has lung cancer. My dad has lung cancer. No matter how many times I said it it still felt foreign leaving my lips. That sentence simply didn't belong in my vernacular, damn it. I didn't fucking want it there.

But with each day the tears were a little less than the day before, and somehow life took on a new normal. I poured over every word on the world wide innernets about lung cancer. The more I read about it the more real it became. On the cancer spectrum, lung cancer is in the "get your affairs in order" column. Damn it. Dad opted to try treatment, so in early August he went for his first round of chemo. It made him pretty sick. He said he'd give it one more try. Even sicker that time. He decided that was it. He didn't want to live his remaining days in chemo hell. He signed up with hospice in late August.

Throughout this whole time there really weren't any signs of the disease taking its toll. He felt pretty normal, thank goodness. But over the last few months he's started to sleep more and more, eat less and less and withdraw a bit. And over the last month or so things have declined a bit more rapidly, until this past Saturday when it was apparent his time to go was coming very soon.

As I write this I sit next to him in his dimly lit living room -- him lying peacefully asleep in his hospital bed, me in a chair by his bedside. My stepmom is asleep on the couch a few feet away. The last few days he's been catheterized because he can no longer walk and he has stopped eating almost completely. There have been times he is awake, but when he is he is often talking nonsense. We're trying to keep him comfortable with anti-anxiety and pain medication, but sometimes he refuses to take it. When he's not sedated he's sort of all over the spectrum - one minute happy and laughing and talking, the next yelling at us, agitated and confused and frightened. We laugh with him and engage him, we're patient when he's frustrated and scared. The meanness is so not my father -- he hasn't a mean bone in his entire body, so it's tough to see him like this. I guess I would be pretty damn confused and frightened if I were dying, too.

My sister comes home today (Wednesday) for an indefinite period, my brother flies in on Friday. I can't wait to see them both. Dad, in the midst of his confusion breaks into beautiful lucidity still. He keeps asking for Patrick (my brother), and it's clear he's hanging on for him, for all of us, so us kids can be together with him. We don't know how long it will be after that. I don't want him to suffer. That's all. I want peace and love to surround him as he goes.

Despite my struggle with a belief in a god, I find myself praying. I suppose I do believe in a greater force or a higher power and I pray. I pray for strength, for comfort, for peace. The tears just spill and spill writing all of this, but I don't hold them back. They're here for a reason and I'm okay with that.

I know I've been gone a while and at least now you know why.

My father is dying and my heart is breaking.