it was 20 years ago today...

July 29, 2008 is the 20th anniversary of my dad's death.  Last month I started to compose a post about him.  It turns out that there is a lot to say and before I knew what was happening, it started turning into a multi-part series.  Maybe at some point I'll be able to finish more of a life story about him.  He was a really intense and complicated person.  

But for today I will just say that I miss him still.  I think he would have liked the person that I have become.  And I've never found anyone who gives better hugs.  Love you, dad.

will you still need me...

My dad would have turned 65 today. I'll be writing more about him this July, which will be the 20th anniversary of his death, but today I just wanted to take a moment to wish he were here for another milestone birthday.

somebody has to lose

I may have mentioned this before, but I am very excited about my trip this weekend - I'll be at the RCA Dome watching this game Sunday afternoon. This trip has been planned for some time, because Mike and I decided to pick a game to go to in Indy this year and this one sounded the best to us even during pre-season. We'll be using seats provided to us by his employer, because they are pretty hooked up in Indianapolis, and we'll be catching up with my aunt and uncle, who are Colts season ticket holders. I'm a big Peyton fan, despite his overexposure in commercials this year, and I have some fantasy stakes in the game as well (Randy Moss, Dallas Clark, Bob Sanders and Marvin Harrison if he plays). Should be a good game. Even if it is a blowout either way, which I sort of doubt because they both have such effective offenses, it will be fun to be at The Game Of The Year. At least until the playoffs.

Only question that I have at this point is whether I should buy an Indy shirt while I'm there or just wear my (Eli) Manning jersey...

Happy Spring

New photo album link to the amazing tulip festival that mom and I went to in Utah last week. Check the right hand column already!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-Jig

Mike and I flew back to LA yesterday. It was a very long day. Mike's day started at about 3:30 a.m. when the nurses were not able to successfully draw blood for his morning bloodwork and they managed to both wake him up and piss him off. Then he had the incredibly painful removal of the drain that has been in his abdomen since the surgery last Sunday. He called and woke me up at about 7:00 a.m. to vent about the pain and the lack of sleep.

Late-morning we managed to get him checked out of the hospital and picked up his prescriptions at Walgreen's (the whole nationwide pharmacy chain thing is really great, by the way). We went to my sister's house for lunch and in order to allow him to rest up a bit before our evening flight back home.

Aside: I had a really good visit with my family this trip. I've sort of put in place a 3 day rule for family visits, so when the trip changed from a 3 day excursion to a 10 day adventure, I was a bit concerned, but I had a great time overall visiting with mom and my sister and her daughters (quite possibly the cutest nieces in the entire world, but I'm not biased). Maybe our family unit isn't perfect still, but we've made a lot of progress in the last few months. And my sister was very welcoming and nice to Mike.

We left for the airport really early so that we wouldn't need to hurry. It was a good thing, since we ended up spending about a half hour talking to the good folks at Hertz about what we were going to end up paying for the car (the phone operator when I called to extend the reservation did her best to royally screw us and we ended up talking a $730 bill upon return down to a $330 bill for the 10 days' use of the car). Thanks to the kind folks working the counter at Hertz yesterday. They went out of their way to help us out, after seeing the state that Mike was in at that point.

The flight and airport scenes worked out okay and after about 4-5 hours of travel (including drives to and from the airport), I got Mike home and he spent some quality time with our very lonely, very needy cat. Mission accomplished.

Then I turned around and went to the concert that we had tickets for last night. Typically I would have bagged the show, but it was a small, not-very-publicized show by one of my favorite acts (Travis) a full 3 years since their last tour. They were in town for Coachella and they did an add-on show at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood. Sure, they'll be touring again this summer to promote their upcoming album, but this is exactly the sort of show that makes the LA music scene so cool, and I really didn't want to miss it. The show was pretty good (the not-so-great acoustics and my general fatigue are the only things that kept it from receiving a "Phenomenal" rating from me). They played some of my old favorites and the new stuff that they threw in was all pretty catchy and fun. I'm glad I went, but by the time it ended, I was so incredibly happy to head home to sleep in my own bed once again.

Welcome home.

Please Come to Utah in Springtime

A Friday-through-Sunday weekend trip to Utah to visit my family has turned into a much longer trip. Mike's appendix ruptured and he had an emergency appendectomy in beautiful American Fork, Utah on Sunday. So now I know why people don't write songs about Utah. (Actually, it is very pretty, but still too cold for my tastes, but I feel I must be snarky since I am basically trapped here against my will.)

Maybe I'll write more about this trip from the comfort of my own home at some point. If I ever make it back there.

A Wedding and a Funeral

I had a busy week last week. I had to fly up to Bloomington, Indiana for my gramma's funeral AND to Santa Fe for a friend's wedding. I feel a bit like Hugh Grant, except, well, that I am nothing like Hugh Grant. Or Andi McDowell for that matter.

The trip to Bloomington was generally fine. In a way it was a relief to know that gramma is finally free of her pain and suffering. By the end, things were pretty grim. She spent a couple of days willing herself to die and being disappointed every time she woke up from sleeping. It makes me wonder which is worse - diseases like cancer that allow the mind to stay sharp while the body deteriorates or diseases like Alzheimer's that have the opposite effect. Undeniably, both are terrible on the people around you, but it would seem that in most instances the person with the disease suffers less with the mind-destroying ailments.

I saw my sister and my nieces (along with my mom, of course). The last time I saw them, my oldest niece was 2 and my other niece was not yet born. Now they are 8 and 4. They are very sweet little girls and it was great to get to know them. I'll be seeing them again in April when Mike and I take a trip to see mom's new house in Utah. I'm looking forward to that.

My sister and I got along fine. But I've reverted back to my old ways of just keeping quiet about things that I don't agree with. I think that is okay at this point because our relationship is different now than it once was. We shall see, I guess.

It was really odd going through gramma's house and deciding who wanted what. I took a few things that remind me of growing up and gramma's house. And the two things that I'll treasure most - gramma's passport from 1965, when she travelled to Europe for a teaching program (I also have my dad's last passport), and an 8x10 photo of her teaching french class in the 60's. I also took the hand-marked trip diary that she wrote while she was in France and I intend to transcribe it and send it around to my family members. That trip to France was my gramma's "big adventure" in life and for some reason I sort of fixated on that. Maybe because we spent a lot of time when I was in college talking about France (I did an exchange program there and almost minored in French). Those things mean so much more to me than the "valuable" stuff that the rest of my family members seemed to fixate on. And maybe I'm wrong for saying or even thinking this, but I'm pretty happy with who I am as a result of realizing that distinction.

On to the happier part of my week...

Mike and I got back yesterday afternoon from a short trip to Santa Fe. One of our best friends from Dallas (who has relocated to New York) got married. When we lived in Dallas, Christine and I would lament the weird Texas dating scene (and politics). However she had great luck meeting guys in New York who shared her interests and found her to be the smart, funny attractive person that we knew she was. About a year after moving to New York (she left Dallas the same time we did), she met her now-husband. And I've never seen her happier.

After the wedding on Sunday evening, Mike and I stuck around New Mexico yesterday and drove up to Los Alamos, where Christine grew up (her dad is a physicist there). It is a really amazing part of the country and I'm so glad that we had a chance to drive around a bit, although our time there was too short. I love to see where my friends come from. It always gives me much more insight into how they grew up to be the people that I know.

I've never been happier to be home in my own bed than I was last night. I was also really happy to see the sun and feel the warm LA air yesterday afternoon. It will take me the next couple of days to thaw out.

She's Done All She Can

My gramma* is dying. I know that I'm lucky to still have a grandparent alive at this point in my life. But that knowledge doesn't make the thought of losing her any easier to bear right now. So I'd thought I would write a bit here about my amazing gramma.

My gramma is 93 years old. Her husband died in 1969, before I was born. She had a master's degree and taught high school french (and coached the women's golf team) even though she never needed the money because she and grandpa made a good amount of money off of the sale of a family business many years ago. After she retired from the school system when she started having health problems, she became an active member of the board of her local Meals on Wheels (now she is a recipient as well as a volunteer; all of the Meals on Wheels volunteers who bring her meals now know and respect her).

Gramma had heart attacks in 1979-80, which resulted in the installation of a pacemaker. She pretty much stopped traveling at that point because she didn't like being away from her doctors. About fifteen years ago she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Since then she has done course after course of radiation, chemotherapy and any other sort of treatment that might have some ability to slow down the progress of the disease. She's talked her doctors into letting her take part in experimental treatments even though she was out of the age range for the studies. She is very persuasive.

Time and time again she has come back from bad prognoses. Meanwhile she's lost all of her remaining siblings (she grew up on a farm in a family of 9 children), along with most of her friends who she socialized with during her retirement.

Now the cancer seems to have finally caught up with her. She is too weak for any more cancer treatments and we have to watch it "take its course". It is hard to see someone who is so strong and courageous taken down this way, but there don't seem to be any alternatives.

This week I went to Indiana to see gramma one more time. We've been saying each visit may be the last for 5 or 6 years at least, but unfortunately this time I think it really was.

Gramma was hospitalized late last week so that they could drain the fluid that built up in her lungs. She had been resisting hospitalization for several months, even though the fluid made it very hard for her to function, because she's been living at home and she's really adamant about not being hospitalized or put into a nursing home, even though it is harder and harder for her to take care of herself. Once she was admitted, the prognosis was not good. Her doctor thinks we are talking about weeks or months at the most.

Because of gramma's toughness and determination, my mom and uncle set about finding any way that gramma could live out her remaining time at home. It helps that my uncle lives a couple of blocks away, but he is already stretched to the limit with his daily visits to her and he can't take on primary caregiver and the round-the-clock sorts of obligations that are necessary at this point. Luckily Bloomington has what seems to be a great home hospice system and somehow my mom and uncle managed to get gramma's doctor on board with a combination of home hospice and hired caregiver treatment. After a long couple of days of working towards her release from the hospital, getting her house set up for this new system and hiring an overnight caregiver, gramma went home on Wednesday. We spent a lot of time talking to the hospice folks and I'm hopeful that this might work. The most important thing at this point is letting gramma live out her final days with as much dignity and comfort as possible.

I'm really going to miss her. But I'm thankful for all the bonus time we've had with her. She is such a fighter. But she should probably let it go now. As painful as it will be for those of us who love her.



*Not grandma, not grandmother, etc. She's always been gramma. And that name suits her perfectly. Tough as nails with everyone except for her three grand-daughters. She's always fawned over us.