Day 36

Nice to be back to some sort of realm of normalcy today. What a long weekend it was. Had to do my usual crap today, my weekly report, contracts, etc. Its a cold one out there. This week before thanksgiving is always crazy for me, but this year more so than any other year. I've got so much to do and so much on my mind right now. I am not sleeping particularly well of late. As I prefaced in a blog entry last week, these are the days from last year that I vividly remember, but I wish I could forget. Leah and I went to lunch yesterday and she asked me how I was feeling about the upcoming week and a half. I am so filled with mixed emotions. Its hard for me to think about the fact that a year ago this week, I had no idea I would be spending my last moments with my father, the man who I revered and tried my hardest to emulate; my role model as a father, a husband, and a friend. But I was lucky in a sense. Although he wasn't the same Bobby D we were all accustomed to, we were still together.

One of my last great times I spent with my dad was actually in that hospital room. Before he went into the hospital, some friends of his got him a DVD player to hook up in his room. One afternoon, I told Mom to take a break and go down to the cafeteria. It was just me and him. Dad did little other than sleep, get treatments, go to the bathroom and watch TV. He could barely talk. He just wasn't himself. The chemo had taken so much out of him. I popped in the DVD of The best of Triumph the Insult Comic dog. I sat in a chair next to him and spent an hour or so laughing hysterically. He rarely smiled during the last few weeks because of the pain, but he smiled and laughed as best he could while watching the DVD. I know it helped him forget, for a small time period, that he was suffering so much.

The darkness and the cold today may be doing this to me. It takes me back to the place that I never want to be again. In the next week and a half, there will be a lot of entries about my father, the last weeks of his life, and a tribute to him. As we close in on the one year anniversary of his passing, the last major hurdle I need to get over, I am reflecting on him more and more. It is so unbelievably unfair that he is gone, but as my Mom always says "nobody says life is fair."

Song of the Day: "8:16 AM" by 311