Losing My Father

(Background still...) I lost my Dad to heart disease back in November of 2003. He had his first heart attack fifteen years earlier when I was only thirteen and B and I were first dating. Over the course of those fifteen years he had nine more silent heart attacks before he had the "big one" in September of 2003. His health had been failing in other ways for more than a year, and the early months of 2003 saw my ex-husband and I selling our house and moving back in with my parents to help take care of my father and his fading health. I was pregnant when we moved back in, and my new son Z was almost six months old when we finally realized that my Dad was dying. My mother and I took care of Dad at home. Doctors and some of my less helpful siblings suggested a nursing facility, but my Dad wanted to be at home in his bed with his family around him, enjoying the time he had left. So that's what we did. And I cooked. Like a fiend. I made anything and everything I could think of to cook. Just to fill the hours in the kitchen while I watched him waste away in that back bedroom. Maybe some small part of me felt that if I could just keep cooking, fill everyone with comfort foods, I could stop him from dying. Sure I was twenty-eight, and I really did know better, but my head just spun out of control when I had to contemplate giving up the most important man in my life.
It didn't matter. He died anyway. On November 22, 2003, my Dad took his last breath as he lay in my arms with my mother holding his hands and my sister sitting beside him. He went quietly, and on his own terms. It was as good a death as I can imagine; if death can ever be said to be good. It was peaceful. That night I staggered under the reality of the situation. I cried for a while, and sat out on the porch steps watching the stars in the cold.  We held my father's funeral service the night before Thanksgiving that year. My memories from that week are spotty at best. I remember picking up my daughter from girl scout camp, that my youngest had the chicken pox and then an ear infection and then pneumonia, that my middle son was simply too young to understand. I don't remember much of anyone from the funeral home with a few stark exceptions. I know that my sister was there and I thought that she shouldn't be; I know that B showed up there at the last minute after eight years of near perfect silence between us, and that him being there at the moment when I needed him mattered most of all...even though it would take us the better part of five years to figure that out.