To be continued ...

It's been hard to put my feelings into writing lately.  Dad will wake up for a day and be pretty alert, and then slip back into mono-syllable responses or 30 hours straight of sleeping.  Every day he seems to have slipped a little farther away, but he's still here.

That scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail keeps going through my head:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kllZsaNGtVg

This is the one of the death cart coming around to collect corpses during the Bubonic Plague.  Actor 1 brings in a body and the body starts saying I'm not yet, I feel happy, I'm getting better, Look I can walk ...  The first actor then keeps saying he'll be dead soon and it's almost over and is there anything he can do.  And then the death cart guy smacks him over the head and moves on.

I'm the creep that's trying to send my dad to his grave before he's ready to go.  Dad is the half-alive man assisting that he's ready to get up and dance.

We live in such a throwaway society.  It feels like I'm trying to throw away my own father right now.  The GUILT is insane.  Yet this is exactly the life he never wanted to live.  After the first diagnosis 4+ years ago, he and mom both made detailed living wills.  He specifically signed a DNR allowing the discontinuing of nourishment if he was stuck in a body that was useless and losing mental capacity.  He's there now.  And he's been there for a while.  But he still has lucid moments, and his only enjoyment these days seems to come from eating.  I'm not going to take that away.

And ever since the surgery last September, there haven't been any heroic life-saving measures.  But he has a healthy 66 year old heart and lungs behind a brain sending out all kinds of crossed signals.  He's slipping away but it's a very painful fade-to-black rather then the overly scripted deaths we've all seen too many times on TV.

And maybe that's my real problem.  Death is the end of the story, and we all know how long the book or movie is supposed to be.  Problems are supposed to be solved at the end of an hour show, maybe an occasional cliff-hanger to carry us over to the new season.  But real life isn't neat and tidy.  Real life is awkward, and doesn't have XX pages left until the end of the story.

I've always lived my life in fast forward.  Looking ahead to the next milestone and not really stopping to smell the flowers.  Right now, I need to live in the moment and enjoy the lucid moments with my father.  While these aren't the memories I would have chosen as the end of his story, they are the reality.  And I need to face it.  Real life is hard sometimes.