goodbyes – Natalie J. Case

When last I wrote, I was on my way to Tucson to spend some time with my father and family. What was meant to be a relaxing weekend catching up with people I haven’t seen in decades became sometime much more profound.

It became obvious part way through the long weekend, that my Dad was not doing well. He was weak and fragile, could hardly walk. He took a pretty hard fall on Friday night, but refused to seek treatment. The next day he was slurring his words, listing to the side and overall not doing well.

On Sunday, we talked him into getting some in-home health care, and I headed out, knowing I’d likely be back within a week to get that health care set up for him. Several hours after I left, I got a call from family that things had gotten worse, they’d called EMTs and he had refused to allow them to take him to the hospital.

I got on the phone with him, hoping to convince him to go be seen, but all he wanted was another cigarette. I screamed at him. A lot.

But, you can’t force a grown man to do what’s right for himself, and when I stopped for the night on the drive home, I had a gut feeling in my stomach that he wouldn’t wake up in the morning.

At around 6:30 am, I got the phone call that confirmed my gut feeling. My father was dead.

I had to finish the drive home, wracked with grief and guilt, only to turn around and fly back with my brother to help my step-mother get stuff handled.

It’s one of those things that you will never understand until you have to…how much work there is in wrapping up a life. So many little things, so much work to manage…and such a waiting game.

So far, I think we’ve managed a lot. We have a celebration of life scheduled for the 5th of November. I leave Tucson on Tuesday, and fly back on the 3rd. Hopefully we’ll have the death certificate by then so we can go about the business of handling the SS, the bank accounts, etc. I’ll be taking my father’s 2020 Hyundai Santa Fe, so we’ll need to deal with the title on that too.

So many details…so much paperwork. And yet, it’s an odd thing to boil down 75 years of living into a stack of papers and the stuff he accumulated.

Today I hope to tackle getting my step mother set up so that her bills are paid automatically, and then help her clear out the thousands of slips of paper that are only lending to her confusion.

For now though, I’m sipping on some coffee and waiting for my brother to wake up so we can head back over there. Happy Saturday, Readers.

E. Bryan Case Obituary

Photo by Storiès on Unsplash

My first experience with death came when I was fifteen years old. In the space of less than seven days, my father’s mother died and a childhood friend died. Grandma’s passing wasn’t a big shock, but finding out about Dennis that Monday morning at school was like a punch to my gut. The shock of it slammed me harder than I would have imagined, after all, we hadn’t been close for years.

Most of that day is still a blur.

Since then, I’ve lost grandparents and others, each of them affecting me differently. The most recent of these was the unexpected death of my step father in May. Mother’s day will be forever altered for us, even if he wasn’t pronounced for another five days.

Today we will say our goodbyes. The memorial service will be at his sister’s house. I’ve spent the last week building a slideshow of pictures of Bob and the life we knew about. It includes what we could gather from his life before my mother, as well as pictures of places he loved. It’s set to four songs that my mother picked out, four songs I may not be able to listen to after today for a while.

It’s strange, wrapping up a person’s life in four song montage of images, knowing that no matter how you try, you are only capturing fraction of that life. We had Bob in our lives for nearly twenty years, but he was already in his fifties when he and my mother met. He has four grown children that we only know in the briefest way possible. He had two previous wives. He had a career that spanned continents and he was a man of knowledge as well as opinion.

For me, today is about supporting my mother through this process. I’m not saying I’ve finished my grieving, but for me, the pain is much less than it must be for her, as well as for the rest of his family. I’ll shed my tears, I’m sure. These songs are something of a kick to the gut for me right now. I’m going to upload the video here eventually, but I need to re-render it at a lower quality…which isn’t going to happen until tomorrow at the earliest.

For now, it’s time to finish my coffee and start loading the car. Mom should be here soon.

Tag: goodbyes

to say goodbye

…to say goodbye…