About the book...

Mother Earth creates an army of paranormal super-beings known as The Gemini. They will try everything to wipe out humanity- plagues, disasters, cancer.

Oliver Weldon, oil tycoon, is recruited by the Mother and becomes a lead Gemini. Renamed Onyx, his duty is to completely destroy the human race.

The Gemini, a powerful rising force, proceeds to systematically decimate towns, cities, states… and eventually, the world.

Amidst the chaos, a forbidden relationship between a girl, Violette, and Onyx, begins. He will wrestle between his new found conscience and his duty to the Mother.

They find themselves in the middle of a revolutionary war that will either save, or destroy human kind.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

My little daddy's hands are blue

On Oct. 6th this year, my dad died of lung cancer. I'm just wondering if anyone else has some of the same regrets/questions/painful notions that I do.

In the first month after his death, I was able to stuff a lot of emotions because I'd spent a good week with him before he died and I told myself he was just on a long trip. I kept consoling myself with the idea that I would see him again when I die and I just have to miss him really bad for however many more years I live. But now, it's been almost three months and it's really starting to ache in my chest. My emotions are turning into physical pain. My jaw aches, my muscles are sore, I'm feeling thirty three for the first time ever. Some of my regrets-

1- My dad didn't accept that he was dying and no one ever told him. He spent six days in the hospital. The Dr. told us he had two weeks to a month, but because he never asked the doctor, or us, his family, how long he had left, we never told him. We assumed he didn't want to know. Now I feel guilty about it. I feel like if he'd known he was dying, maybe he would've said more things to me, shared more of his amazing wisdom. It doesn't seem to matter that all of these are 'maybes' and 'what ifs.' The logical side of me knows I shouldn't torture myself with all the possibilities because that's what they are: possibilities that will never come to fruition. I can't go back. I can't go back and tell him, I can't kiss his bald head any harder than I already did, I can't squeeze his hand any tighter than I did while he slipped away. Regardless of the fact that I did the best I could loving him in his last days, I still want to go back and do more for him.

2- He couldn't sit up, he was too weak. He couldn't go sit by his stream one more time like he wanted to. He couldn't even push himself up in the bed, we had to lay him down and use the sheet beneath him like a gurney. He wanted to walk to the bathroom, he couldn't. He wanted to sit up in bed, he couldn't. He wanted to eat one more time and I'm sure he wanted to hold my step mom one more time.

3- In the ambulance, on the way to the ER, he couldn't breathe. I kept telling him it was going to be okay. He kept trying to talk to me with the oxygen mask on, but I couldn't understand what he was saying and the EMT kept telling him to focus on breathing, not talking. So that's what I told him too. "Don't talk, just keep the mask on daddy, you're gonna be okay. I'm right here with you." I started to rub his head. I told him I wouldn't stop rubbing his head until we got there. What was he trying to say to me? I'll never know and that hurts.

4- In the ER, my husband and I, and my step mom, sat for two hours with him. He was hot and he wanted his gown completely off. He was whining like a hurt animal, trying so hard just to breath. I finally got to see how skinny he was, how the cancer and the chemo had ravaged him. He was molting, his skin was bruised and splotchy, deep purple where all the needles from his IV has torn his veins up. Dehydrated and pitiful, I was on one side, my step mom on the other and we each had a hand. He looked like a baby, afraid and clinging. We knew he didn't want to go; he was weak but he was fighting and he squeezed my hand unbelieving tight. He was scared. I begged the nurses to give him something to calm down because I figured it would help him catch his breathe. They gave him morphine, which put him to sleep. He was snoring peacefully within a half an hour and I was so relieved that he seemed to be peaceful.

My step mom left to get some clothes and come back with his Kindle, his wallet; she wanted to get his blanket too. He started breathing slower. I went and asked the Dr. if we could get a bugger oxygen mask because I wanted him to be able to breathe through his mouth. They said it was the right size. The Dr. came in and got his oxygen reading and it was 99%. I noticed his lower eye lid was open and went to get the Dr. again. She came in to check his pulse and said my dad was "actively dying." Actively dying?! What the hell?! I wanted to scream at her! A half an hour ago he was snoring peacefully! I didn't scream. I held his cooling hand and watched his breathing get slower and slower. I waited ten minutes before I called my step mom because I remembered her saying she didn't want to be around when he went. But something told me to call her. I just told that she should hurry. I didn't say anything abut what the doctor had said. It took her twenty minutes to get back and he was taking his last breaths when she walked into the room. I looked at her and said, "he's going." She cringed, and said, "Right now?" with absolute disbelief and sat beside him. He'd waited for her. Isn't that sweet?

She watched him die with me. He stopped breathing. His hands got cooler and cooler, bluer and bluer. I kept thinking, "My little daddy's hands are blue. How can this be?" I viewed everything in the third person. I was not me, I was a little girl losing her daddy. Not a 33 year old who'd fought addiction and won, not a mom, or a wife, or a friend, I was just a little girl. I sat with him for thirty minutes, I held his freezing hand, I laid my head on his bed, right beside his belly, I wanted him to comfort me, but he was gone. Nobody home, lights out. I kissed his head one more time and it felt rubbery. I had to get out of the room because I was in the room with a corpse; an empty body that wasn't my dad anymore. The relief that his suffering was over was immediate and what followed was a calm numbness.

These aren't all my regrets but this is so exhausting! I'm not expecting anything out of this other than for me, writing is therapy and so is reading. So if my post helps someone know they aren't alone or if you'd like to offer any advice about how to stop this horrible movie from playing over and over again in my head, feel free.

So now, in the wake of the holidays, I am finally dealing with some of the crippling pain. And that's how it feels when I miss him. Crippling. I never knew missing someone could hurt so much. It's so final, so complete. I can't negotiate with death, I can't bargain with it or manipulate it to get my way. I just have to cry and bare it. So that's what I'm doing. It feels good to put this on my blog, however personal it is, it's still a good piece of literature. No matter how disturbing it is, it's still worth reading. My dad would be proud.

13 comments:

  1. Yes it is worth the read. Sometimes getting out the emotions you have been bottling up help with the healing. I teared up reading this. I am so sorry for your loss and wish I had words of wisdom that would help to ease your pain but unfortunately I do not. I just know that you have to let it out. You may have to keep letting it out whether in your writing, crying or screaming until your throat hurts. You just have to let it out.

    The pain never truly goes away, nor do the what ifs, but life does go on and each day you move forward.

    *hugs*

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    1. sgttibbs- thank you so much for the hugs and the kind words. It helps just to know you read the post and felt moved enough to comment. Have an awesome 2013!

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  2. That was beautifully written. I hope it helped to write it out. When my sister died (also cancer) it helped me a lot to write about it, I wrote a lot but only shared a single poem. I still think of her and draw inspiration from her memory. The pain will never go away but you can use it constructively. I hope you do.

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    1. Thanks so much Greg! It did help to write it because I cried the entire time. I always feel better after I cry. Cancer sucks, doesn't it? I think I still have to get through the angry phase. Thanks for the kind words and happy 2013!

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  3. Writing does have a therapeutic value to it. And grieving is something that takes time. You'll get there.

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    1. Thanks for the encouragement William. I'm following your blog now, would you mind following back?

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  4. I'm so sorry for how your father died. My father, father-in-law, and grandfather died of tobacco and my son is dying of it now. It is so heartbreaking to watch. My police partner died in his fifties of it. He had so many plans for his grandsons, and he barely even saw the baby.

    My blog is www.gardenwindow.me, the URL for Books Through the Garden Window. I'm following you.

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  5. Hi Anne! Thank you for commenting on my post about my dad and thanks for offering to review my book! I'd be honored. What format do you prefer?

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  6. I'm so sorry to hear about your father. Losing a loved one is never easy.

    I wanted to stop by and thank you for visiting my blog and following me. I'm following you now, too.

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  7. Thanks so much for following Kelly and for reading my post! I meant to ask, do you review novels as well?

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  8. I just got back from holiday, found your message via Book Blogs, clicked on your link to your blog and read this post.

    Such a brave and heartfelt piece of writing - and my heart goes out to you. This year will be the tenth anniversary of my mother's death. If you hunt around my blog (which you said you're following - thank you!) you'll find a post I wrote last year - it's in June and is called something like 'what is the end is the beginning' - badly quoted, from a T.S. Eliot poem - at the time of her yahrzeit.

    She died very suddenly, and totally unexpectedly one morning, of a massive heart attack. A close friend of hers was with her. The ambulance came, but there was nothing anyone could have done. I drove like a maniac for the half hour it took to reach her house - Mum's friend having told me nothing, just to come - making bargains with G-d all the way...to no avail. And sat with her, as you sat with your dad, feeling all those things.

    There is no road map for this experience. But I can offer you one thing that an extraordinary funeral director gave me when he called me about a month after the funeral. He said that grief is like being dropped without notice into a foreign country, where you don't know the language or local customs, you don't understand how the money works, and you have to start over while living your life as usual. That was the first thing anyone said to me that actually made sense of just how lost I felt.

    Ten years on, it still hurts. I still find myself talking of my mother in the present tense when I see or hear something I know she'd have loved. I miss her every day. On the other side of that, the sense that she's still present in my memories means that there are times that she can feel uncannily close.

    Be good to yourself. Take things as they come, and try not to have too many expectations of yourself about 'getting through' this... Life is here to be lived, how and as we make it on a daily basis - some days are easier than others, and this is a time in life where you're probably going to feel that most acutely.

    Sorry for my tome! I hope it's helpful in some small way.

    K

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  9. Kaz- This was such a wonderful thing to read. It absolutely helps to hear other people's stories and know that they have been in that same alien world of grief. That is the best description I've heard of the place in my head where my dad is gone. Thank you so much for the tome, I needed in more than you know:)

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    1. I'm glad it was helpful. At the time my mother died, two other women in the opera company where I as singing lost theirs as well - but given the fog we were all in at the time, none of us realised or perhaps we may have been able to help each other. There was also a woman in my masters program who lost her dad around the same time - her I knew about because we both took the same block of time off and had huddles of friends gathering us up when we returned. She used to ask me, "How are you travelling?", which was also a useful analogy and MUCH easier to answer than, "How are you feeling?"

      We don't do death well in the west. Within my own community - I'm Jewish - it was easier. Outside, I faced all the platitudes that are so hard to deal with. I often wished I had a t-shirt that said "My mother died. Don't ask me how I am." printed on it. It would have made the mix of queries about the dramatic weight loss, lack of returned phone calls, non-appearances at various social events, etc, redundant!! Bit anti-social, but that's how I felt for a long time.

      I can't tell you it will get easier, but I can tell you that you will find a way to live with it - how that might be for you I couldn't say, it's different for all of us. My partner lost his 16 year old brother when he was 14, and that grief has simply become part of who he is and there are days he just takes himself off because he needs to do that.

      Take care of yourself. x

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