My Story Contd.

Ok, so I here's a little more about my story.

After up and down reports on my dad's condition, I decided to fly up and got a ticket for Wednesday morning returning the next Tuesday. My husband stayed behind and would come up if things got worse. Two of my brothers were there when I arrived and one had come and gone already. At least my mom wasn't alone. We camped out in the waiting room for the ICU and took turns in my dad's room holding his hand during visiting hours. We didn't want to leave my dad alone. I don't know why, he wasn't going to open his eyes, he wasn't going to spontaneously crash, we just didn't want him to be alone.

Our hopes grew when the orthopedic surgeon came in to see my dad and scheduled a time for surgery on the rest of his body. In the accident not only his skull was crushed, but also his left hip and elbow were crushed too. We knew that he wouldn't go into surgery unless they were confident that his brain pressure would stay normal under the situations. He was kept under the entire time to allow his body to focus on healing instead of being awake. He couldn't move voluntarily anyways, but was in so much pain that his body would involuntarily shudder. Once every few hours they would bring him out of anesthesia and rub his sternum very hard to try to see what would move. Sometimes his toes would move and we would get very excited because they were voluntary moves. We never really knew his condition because it would change so much. We didn't know what constituted progress and what constituted set-backs.

The worst moment of my life happened Friday evening when we met with the director of the ICU. He told us that there was no chance of my father ever improving. If he continued to live, he would continue as he was in ICU. There was no chance for recovery. My dad had a living will. If this situation were to happen, that there would be no chance for recovery, that we were to let him return to God. We knew this is what we had to do.

The brother who wasn't there caught the first flight he could. We spent a few hours crammed in that little room crying and laughing, talking about dad and his life. After we prayed and sang a hymn, the ICU nurse turned off the machines.

The next hour was awful. My dad wasn't dead; he just couldn't survive without the machines. We didn't know how long it would take for him to pass after the machines were removed. This is the hardest part for me to remember. My dad labored for breath for just over an hour. His chest moved up and down. Each breath was a little shallower than the last. I knew that he wasn't really there, but it was so hard to hear him breathe like that and have us wait for him to die. Why couldn't we do something? I didn't want to hear it anymore so I curled up on my chair and tried to sleep instead of waiting. I was dozing when my brother woke me and said that it had happened. We prayed and sang again and then left. It was about 3:00 am.

My mom's bishop and his wife came up to drive us all to my parent's house. Food and well-wishers rolled in. The funeral was held on Wednesday. I gave the eulogy and my half-sister played a beautiful violin piece. Two of my dad's former students played a song that my dad composed. The place was packed.

My husband and I drove home on Thursday. Life went back to normal day-to-day for me, I just felt empty and sad.

The No-Granddad Phenomenon

One of the most difficult parts about my father's death for me is knowing that my kids won't know their grandfather. I don't have any children right now, nor am I expecting, but I keep thinking about significant events in my children's lives (birth, baby blessing in church, baptism, etc.) and not having a grandfather there.

I don't understand the whole grandparent thing. My grandpas died before I was born, my paternal grandmother passed when I was 3 and my maternal grandmother passed when I was 16, but she had been sick and in a nursing home my entire life. She didn't have enough energy to be the traditional grandmother figure. I am the youngest of my family (by 17 years) and my mother was born later in her parent's life. Consequently, everyone in my family is older in comparison to the parents and grandparents of my friends.

Additionally, my husband's father passed away seven years ago. My husband is also the youngest of his family (by 16 years). He never knew his grandparents either. I'm confident that our mothers will be around for a while but the question is if their health will permit developing strong relationships with our children.

Some ideas I have come up with to deal with this situation when it comes are:
1. Make good friends and keep them close. They will serve as extended family for kids if there is no one else around. It's more than ok to have kids call their parent's close friends "Aunt" and "Uncle."
2. Adopt an elderly person into your family. They may not have children around and you may not have grandparents around. This will take a bit of effort to develop a relationship with them but if you get close it would be great for both parties.
3. Keep sibling relationships close and long-term. Make family vacations with the cousins, venture to visit each other and have everyone talk on the phone often.

None of these things will substitute for the real thing, but it may help you and your children deal with that void further on in life.

Memory Books

My sister-in-law, Nichole, is an amazing digital scrap booker. She is able to take a moment in time and recreate it through pictures, phrases and graphics. She has decided to take pictures from dad's life and make a memory book of just him. The picture is a page that she did two weeks after my dad's death to honor him. The pictures are from his birthday the month previous.

She designs the pages using free templates and graphics from the web and then changes it to fit whatever it is that she wants to create. I believe that she uses Adobe Photoshop to do the designs. I am not nearly as talented as she is but I have come up with my own ideas of memory books to honor those who have passed.

There are several websites that offer different services. The first is iMemoryBook. This is a site that creates a memory book for you based on several people's input. The way it works is that you create this book and have it online for a certain period of days. You then invite people to go to the site and contribute their pictures, stories and messages. I have not personally used it but the interface seems simple enough. The service costs from $49.95 to $199.95 and then the cost of the books (which decreases significantly with quantity). To make the cost worth it, you would need to have a large group of people, too large to collect the memories by yourself. This would be great for large families that are spread out geographically. There is no limit to the number of people you can invite. After everyone has put in what they want, you can edit it to make it look nice and then order books.

The off-line take to this collective memory book idea is something I plan on doing at our next family get together. I bought an album/journal with nice acid-free pages (important if you want to keep it for a long time) and an acid-free pen. I used acid-free glue (ok you get the acid-free point) to glue my favorite picture of my father on the front page. For each page after that I am going to have each member of my family spend time writing their favorite memories about dad. This one is more for me because it's a lot more difficult to mass distribute hand-written things. I suppose I might type them up for everyone in the family and email it to them. I haven't figured it all out yet, but I want to do this because sometimes it is just nice to have things handwritten. I'm a hopeless romantic sometimes.

Another option is using picture book services to create a book. This one can be fairly inexpensive, there are plenty of websites offering this so you can pick and choose, and it's simple to put together. The downside is that there is limited space for words, it is not extremely customizable, and the price can sky-rocket if you try adding a lot of pages. Here are some websites that I know of that do this type of thing. MyPublisher, Shutterfly, and Snapfish are all pretty similar and allow you to upload photos and create albums from there. Price them out depending on what you want to do. iPhoto is a program on Macs that lets you do a lot offline then send it in online. Check out the iPhoto website for more details. Generally, it will cost around $40-50 for the book. I think some of these offer quantity discounts too.

The way that my sister-in-law publishes her digital scrap booking is by creating her designs full-page and then using some of the above services. She uploads her designs as photos and they print out with a full page bleed (right to the edges). It takes a little bit of experimenting and time to figure out what will work best.

Of course there is good old fashioned scrap booking. This takes quite a bit of talent and know-how around serrated scissors. Also, it is difficult to make copies for other members of the family unless you do color photocopies which don't turn out nearly as well as the actual page.

The best way to remember people is by talking about it. These projects may help you remember to great times you had with your parent and share them with people who may not have known them. Good luck!

My Story

So how did I become qualified to write a blog about the death of parents? I wouldn't say that I am necessarily qualified. My father passed away recently (it feels like yesterday) and so I have experienced the death of a parent. Since then, I have bonded with people particularly because we have experienced the death of a parent. We had similar life stories. But everyone's story is different. Here is mine:

The last time I saw my dad alive and well I was walking out of my wedding reception with my new husband, leaving on our honeymoon. I don't remember if I even hugged or kissed him before I left. That day, August 25, 2005, will be so precious in my memory for so much more than it was that day I got married.

My dad was a piano technician. This means he went around to businesses/houses/churches in our community fixing them up to play well and in tune. He had been doing that for over 35 years and he was really good (I am a little biased). On October 17, 2005 he was just on the outskirts of town regulating the action on a family's piano. He had been working on it all day and the previous day as well. I think he had one or two days left on that job. This is where the mystery sets in. My father was driving home from that job on a one lane each way undivided highway. He had been driving these roads for decades but for some reason something changed. The police report says that my father's car (1990 white Honda Civic) drifted into the oncoming lane. The 18-wheeler truck tried to move over but my dad's car just kept coming over the center line. The driver's side of the car was run over by the 4 wheels on the last trailer of the oncoming truck, crushing my father.

This is the part that gets me. How could my dad drift? He was old, but not that old, only 63. If we have road trips, he always drives because he's the best driver. It was only 5:45 pm so he couldn't have been that drowsy. He uses the cell phone for his work but he has a headset always attached to his ear (to the point of annoyance) and he makes a point to pull over every time he used it. Maybe he had a seizure, maybe he dropped something, maybe he was thinking about something. We'll never know because we can't ask him. I just don't understand how it could happen.

I was at home waiting for a study partner for an exam the next day when my sister-in-law internet messaged me. "Your dad has been in a serious car accident. Call Greg." I stared at the screen in shock. My phone started to ring. It was my brother, Greg. He didn't know his wife had messaged me so he was pretending like everything was ok and asking me about my day. He has this tendency to have a positive attitude about everything and it makes me furious sometimes. He heard me crying and got mad at his wife for telling me over instant messenger. Then he told me the full story. Dad was in the ER in Lethbridge (my hometown) and was in trouble. They were going to life-flight him to the nearest neurosurgeon (Calgary, the biggest city in the province) and try to remove the pieces of his skull that had been contaminated. This would also hopefully allow the brain to swell enough outside of the skull to relieve the pressure against his brain. The pressure is what causes the most brain damage. I cried and I prayed and sobbed some more, but my dad was having surgery so there was hope.

My study partner arrived and we carried on as normal.

I'll write more about the ensuing days a little later. I can only think about it in chunks.