Gone But Not Forgotten

    It hit me this morning as I drove to work that it was around this time last year that we first found out that my father was sick.  Headaches and vision problems had begun to plague him.  As his family, we noticed slight personality changes, decision making issues and even a change in his gait and balance.  Suspecting a stroke, doctors began a battery of tests from blood work to CT Scans and MRI's.  None of us were prepared for the diagnosis of a tumor in the brain.  A very large, inoperable tumor.
    I was on an end of the school year field trip with my youngest son when I got the call.  We were at the zoo, 15 four year olds in bright yellow t-shirts sporting a class picture and the painted handprints of all their classmates laughed and chattered on as we stopped to see lions, giraffes and elephants.  My son was excited, he loves animals, and was pulling me from place to place.  His favorite were the lions and we had just left them when my cell phone rang.  The sad, tear-filled voice of my mother relayed the absolutely unbelievable news.
    Even now, as I remember back to that day, it still feels so surreal.  My father had survived a bullet wound in Vietnam, a massive heart attack and triple bypass surgery in his thirties and congestive heart failure and a heart transplant at fifty.  He pulled through severe pneumonia and kidney failure and beat a whole host of other post transplant complications.   I had begun to see him as invincible.  A cat with nine lives.  I just figured he would prevail over this as well.  So, it was incomprehensible to me that there was absolutely nothing medicine could do to save him.  Chemotherapy and radiation might have prolonged his life for a few months but the tumor was so large that conventional treatments would have little long term affect. 
    My father, the man I had always known as a fighter, was done fighting.  He chose to have quality in his final days as opposed to quantity.  My sisters, my brother and even I wanted him to want to fight but we understood his exhaustion.  He was ready to move on to the next world and we had to honor his wishes.
    Two weeks after the call, we packed our two boys in the car and made the twelve hour drive to see my dad.  On the way we explained that Grampa was very sick.  I don't really think that they understood what I was saying, they were just excited to see their grandparents and miss a couple of days of school. 
     The long weekend was wonderful.  Dad was still lively and amiable but the time he spent with us was peppered with naps and long rests as he struggled to hold onto the brave front I knew he was trying hard to maintain.  The day before I saw my father alive for the last time, it was also the first time in my adult life I saw him cry.  As we sat in my car in the parking lot of Walmart, he leaned over suddenly and hugged me as he cried and told me he didn't want to leave us.
    That is the last visual memory I have of my father.  The very last memory is of our last conversation.  The night before he passed, I called him.  We laughed and joked about the morphine he was taking and the appropriateness of the Bob Marley CD he was listening to while taking it.  I knew when I hung up the phone I would never talk to him again.  I cried like a baby.
   The next morning was the last hours of my father's life.  Hearing the anguish in my mother's voice as she cried that Daddy was gone was like no other experience in my life.  Even today, I can hear her as clearly as though she were standing next to me.
   Telling my children that Grampa had died was without a doubt the hardest thing I have ever had to do.
   Nearly a year has passed and the emotions are still as strong as they were the day he left us.  Sometimes I find myself reaching for the telephone to call him and ask him how to fix something or get his advice on something and I have to remind myself that he isn't there to call.  A random thought, a quick memory or a glance at a snapshot will bring tears without warning.
     I have heard it said that the only thing you can count on in life are death and taxes.  It is true that from the momenet we are born we begin to die and eventually when our bodies leave the Earth, it is only our legacy that lives on.  My father was a great man who left an unbelieveable legacy in this world in his children and his grandchildren.  He may be gone from our lives but his not forgotten and he will never be gone from our hearts.