Part 28 - Friends

Continued from Part 27

Dad, with Mom and friends on a camping trip several years ago

My dad was always one of those people about whom it could be said didn’t meet a stranger.  He honestly considered every person with whom he came into contact to be a potential friend, and he was consistently and genuinely kind in every situation.  He once told me that he didn’t see why everyone didn’t make an effort just to say hello to every person with whom they crossed paths.  “Even a dog knows it’s better to wag his tail to greet people he passes on the street,” he said.  

During the time that Dad was sick, we received many cards, emails, Care Page messages, and phone messages of concern and love, and we appreciated all of them.  On the front lines of the war we were fighting, we were frantically trying to keep our heads above water, plugging the holes in the dam for as long as we could, though, and the daily challenges and the shock with which we were have to cope were so overwhelming that it was all we could do to get it together to post on the Care Page every couple of days or so.  Returning individual phone calls and emails was just too much, both because our time was spent focusing on Dad and the things that needed to be taken care of as part of taking care of him and also because it was just too much to even consider detailing the tragedy of it all out loud outside of The Bubble of our immediate family. It was just one of the cold hard facts about how it was when Dad was sick; our propensity to reach out was thwarted by the outrageousness of what was happening, but unfortunately the closing of the ranks ended up being something that we later learned had affected how Dad felt about himself and his views about the impact and the quality of his own life.

Not long after the second round of chemo, Mom got a phone call from one of Dad’s best friends from the small town in Missouri where my parents used to live.  Dad’s friend said that he was going to come over to visit Dad.  Other friends had offered to visit many times since Dad had gotten sick, but up until that point we had declined their offers for several reasons, most notably that we were concerned that contact with others could impact his health both physically and emotionally.  We’d been warned by the oncologist about the dangers of germ exposure for a person on chemo.  Another concern was that Dad’s problems with memory and reasoning would travel like wildfire through the gossip lines and reach his coworkers and his clients, which would be a source of embarrassment to him.  Because of the logistics of caring for him while he was sick, Dad didn’t have a lot of privacy, and we felt strongly that we should do what little we could to protect him.

But this friend wouldn’t take no for an answer.  He insisted that he just wanted to check in but assured us that he wouldn’t stay long.  We were worried that Dad’s friend would not be able to hide his shock when he saw the changes that were so apparent in Dad.  As much as possible, those of us who were around regularly were striving to act as if it was no big deal that Dad had to use a walker to get around the house and that he needed reminders about what day of the week it was or the fact that he wasn’t going back to work the next day.

On the day of the visit, Mom and my sister helped Dad get ready, and he was seated in his chair in the den when his friend arrived.  The conversation flowed without too much of a hitch, and, after about 30 minutes, Dad got up to go to the bathroom (of course, without waiting for help).  He used his walker to slowly make his way down the hallway, and his friend didn’t miss a beat; he expertly disguised the shock and sadness he must have felt to see such drastic changes in the man with whom he used to share the course of their weekly Saturday morning twenty-mile runs.  When Dad resumed his position in his recliner, they visited for a while longer and then his friend said he had to go.  Dad was both exuberant and exhausted afterwards; he lied down on his bed to “rest his eyes” with a big smile on his face.

Of all the memories I have from during the time surrounding Dad’s illness and subsequent death, this is one of the ones that is guaranteed to make me sad to the core every time it pops into my head:

Late one night when I was sitting up with Dad several weeks into his illness, he abruptly changed the subject from whatever we were talking about by saying “I don’t even have any friends.”  

“Oh Dad, you are wrong,” I said, with tears in my eyes, “and I wish you knew just how wrong.”

With his eyes wide in amazement, he said incredulously, “I am?” 

“Yes, Dad,” I told him, “I know you are usually the one who knows best about a lot of issues, but you have to believe me when I tell you that you have more friends and more people who love and respect you than anyone else I know.”

“OK, I hope you’re right, because it’s really important to have friends,” he said, and then he drifted off to sleep.

I’ll never know if he fully believed me or otherwise realized the depth of the truth to what I said that night.  In something that I think we could only have seen in hindsight in our situation, I wish so much that we had encouraged any of Dad’s friends who were so inclined to visit while he was sick.  Being a true friend was one of the many things at which he excelled, and he needed to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that his friends were rooting for him as he fought, that the many people who cared about him were there for him in the shade as well as in the sunshine, and that those who knew him were changed for the better for having known him.

Up next ... Part 29 - A Slippery Slope

Part 21 - Erring on the Side of Hope

Continued from Part 20

Part Four of Our Trip To Duke/Our Journey of Hope 

One of my all-time favorite books is Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.  In the story, the main character, Charlie Gordon, decides to participate in a research study in which he undergoes an experimental surgical procedure in an attempt to increase his IQ.  

When I first read this book in high school, I spent a lot of time thinking about the thought-processes of the characters in this book, and even then I wondered why Charlie Gordon was so eager to have the operation knowing there was such risk to it, risk of side-effects and risk of his hopes being dashed if the treatment didn't work.  I get it now, though:  He did it for the same reason we took Dad to Duke - to err on the side of hope, to leave no stone unturned.  We took Dad to Duke and were eager to sign on for him to get the Avastin because as much as we knew that the possibility of having that plan fail would be hard to live with, we knew that the result of not having a plan that we could believe in would be much more devastating.  And as much as there was now Avastin and chemo running through Dad’s veins, there was Hope running through mine for the first time in what felt like a really, really long time.

Our third night in Durham, the one after our second day of appointments for Dad at the Brain Tumor Clinic at Duke, the first night after Dad’s first dose of Chemo/Avastin, was fairly anti-climatic.  Dad didn’t get sick (sicker), he didn’t sleep much (and neither did we), but all in all, nothing big happened.  We got up and got Dad going as early as possible the next morning, which was Thanksgiving Day.  We didn’t think we would make it back in time for the extended-family turkey dinner that had been planned by my aunt and my cousin, but we hoped to make it to my parents’ house before dark so that Dad could wind down before too late in the day.

My brother-in-law took the wheel for the drive home, and Dad volunteered himself to ride jump seat, although he pointed out, “Someone in the back seat had better co-pilot!”  Dad seemed more conversational, less anxious, and – maybe this one was my imagination – more “on-task,” at least for the first part of the drive that day.  I had already begun my newest job as Microscopic Improvement Recognition Specialist, and I was on the lookout BIG TIME for any signs of Avastin "The Magic Bullet" kicking in.

As I had commented to the team at the clinic at Duke, our drive to Durham had been an education in many things, among them the inaccessibility of at least the part of the country that we had covered on our long journey that day.  Simply put, Dad needed help to make it safely into the bathroom, and he needed on-the-spot reminders to use his walker even when he was in the bathroom.  Those things are hard to arrange when a man’s Support Crew is composed of all females.  We were way too desperate and too concerned about Dad’s safety to worry about embarrassment, though, so we just did what we had to do along the way, from blocking off the men’s restroom to yelling reminders to Dad through a closed bathroom door to asking a friendly-looking stranger going into the Men’s Room to check on Dad when he went in there.  One gas station didn’t have a curb-cut (ramp), and so I just parked right on the sidewalk so Dad wouldn't stumble getting up and down the curb on his walker.  It was stressful for all of us, and all of the in-and-out’s from the car to use the “facilities” were quite time-consuming on the way to Durham.

On the return trip, though, my brother-in-law was there for guidance, and he figured out that it was much easier for Dad to use the wheelchair than the walker to get in and out of places when we stopped.  We orchestrated the routine of the wheelchair retrieval and set-up/getting Dad situated/maneuvering into the building and into the restroom in a matter of minutes, and the process went much more smoothly that way.   Riding shotgun in the front seat, Dad was in a good mood for most of the drive, talking guy-stuff, business, and sports - including the newest addition to Dad's Revised Bucket List, going to an NBA game - along the way.  

That was the Good News of the Return Trip; the Bad News was that it was Thanksgiving Day, and, at least along the route we were driving, nothing was open except for gas stations.  We were trying to keep Dad eating so that the nausea we had been warned about wouldn’t set it, and it was a difficult challenge to find something for him and for us to eat besides complete junk food that day.  About two-thirds of the way along, Dad started talking about wanting a strawberry-banana smoothie from McDonald’s.  We thought that The Golden Arches would surely be open, but when we got off the interstate and went through the drive-thru at one that had lights on inside, a recording said, “Sorry!  We’re closed!”  Dad was uncharacteristically angry; we could tell that the strain of the trip and everything else was wearing on him.  

Dad’s level of confusion and agitation seemed to be inversely proportionate to the number of miles left to go until we got him home; the closer we got to my parents’ house, the more anxious and less mentally clear he appeared.  Thinking it would encourage him, I reminded him that the rest of his family – my other sister and my brother, their spouses and my middle sister’s husband and mine, plus all six grandchildren would be at my parents’ house waiting to see Dad when we got there.  That threw him for a loop:  he said he thought that he was on the way to get chemo; he didn’t remember having gotten it the day before, and he said he wanted to get it right away so he could feel better.   At that point, he was really out of sorts; he said over and over that he just wanted to go home and have peace and quiet so he could rest and get better.  I texted my husband to try to explain; the family members that were gathered to celebrate the homecoming were very disappointed, but everyone cleared out in hopes that he could rally when he was back on his own turf.  

We were in the beginning stages of figuring out the intricacies of a new pharmacological routine; in addition to getting Avastin and CPT-11 (chemo) by IV the day before, Dad had begun to take the one-pill-per-day type of chemo as part of a 5-day per month cycle per the new protocol.  The chemo pill was relatively simple to administer as far as those things go, but there were a few important guidelines we had to adhere to like only giving it to Dad on an empty stomach, washing our hands thoroughly after touching the capsules, and not coming into contact with any of Dad’s bodily fluids while he was taking the pills, which included having to be sure the lid of the toilet was closed before the toilet was flushed each time (yet another reminder to shout to him through the closed bathroom door).  He also had a finely-tuned anti-nausea pill regiment, and that, coupled with the strict chemo rules and regulations, made me want to stay right with Dad after we got home that night.  I was so afraid that one little mistake would negate the progress we had been promised, and, after witnessing Dad struggling so much on the trip that was so very difficult on him, I wanted to do anything I could to protect him and to comfort him.  

It seemed like a lifetime had passed in between the time we had backed out of the driveway to go to Duke only 3 days before and the time we pulled into the driveway at the end of the trip.  So much had changed, not in Dad’s condition but in what we knew and in what we thought was reasonable to hope for.  It felt like our free fall was finally coming to an end because we had found a ripcord to pull so that our parachute could open.  It seemed like we could round up when we counted our blessings because we could believe that more of the good stuff was just around the corner.  It appeared reasonable to lean into the curves and just wait and watch for improvements.  As I said on the Care Page that day, “the trip was tiring but very worthwhile;” as a result of our journey, we now had something to believe in, and that seemed to be exactly the kind of medicine we all needed.

Coming soon … Part 22 – Bumps In The Road 

Part 16 - Holding On

Continued from Part 15

The uphill climb continued during Dad’s homestretch in rehab; he was counting down the days until he could go home, and so were we. Dad was very bored and frustrated with the therapies and the routine there.  He didn’t see the point of 99% of what was going on in the therapy sessions; he hated that he had to work on simple arm and leg exercises and even just walking with a walker, and so did we.  There was so much unfairness and turmoil, and having to swallow his pride on a daily basis was rough stuff.  When I was there to observe, I noticed that the therapists didn’t explain to Dad why they were having him work on the things that they were, things that seemed far beneath the pre-tumor person that he was.  It’s possible that he wouldn’t have paid attention or remembered or appreciated the explanations had they been forthcoming, but I thought it was a shame that they didn’t even try to make things clearer for Dad.  Dad didn’t see the point of many of the activities; he thought they were a waste of time and childish, and in many cases, I didn’t disagree.  It’s hard to be motivated when you don’t see the point, and the point is much more unclear when a person has suffered a brain injury.

Progress was slow and inconsistent.  I wanted to believe that it was because of the lack of sleep and/or the persistent headaches and pervasive fatigue that Dad suffered from; I wanted to avoid finding out otherwise, although I knew there was a possibility that something much more detrimental and sinister what would eventually be unveiled.  

The uber-early morning wake-ups by the staff continued, as did the seemingly fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants rulings on how (or if) Dad’s crazily fluctuating blood sugar levels and the headaches should be addressed.  Several days would go by without Dad’s blood sugar level being checked at all, but then a nurse would check it and find it to be abnormally high, after which it would sometimes be treated and sometimes not.   Dad’s eating habits were erratic; he frequently requested sweets and junk food, which was very out of character for him.  We asked the nurses and doctors many times if we should limit the sugar he ate, and each time we were told not to worry about it because the out-of-control numbers were related to the mega-doses of steroids he was having to continue to take.  At best, it was frustrating; at worst, it was alarming.

On the morning that we began Dad's last week in rehab, a nursing aide helped Dad into the shower and then stepped out of the bathroom for a couple of minutes, during which time Dad got up from the shower bench and tried to use his foot to dry water on the floor with a towel, which resulted in his falling.  Luckily, Dad was unhurt, but the fall highlighted the fact that there had really been no improvement in his safety awareness since he had gotten to rehab.

After this incident, I called the rehab director to assert that Dad should not be left alone, even for a minute, and to inquire again about getting recommendations and orders for things that would be necessary after discharge, including home health equipment, a handicapped parking permit, outpatient therapies, and insulin training.   I never got a phone call from the social worker, the woman whom we had been told was our Case Manager; very obviously, the onus was on the patient’s family to figure out what needed to be worked out before the patient went home.  I thought it was absurd that I was having to make a list and chase down the support we needed on this; I shutter to think what would have happened otherwise.  Dr. Rehab informed me when I called that Family Education Day would be two days before Dad was discharged.  I told him that was going to be tough to work out for most of Dad’s family; we were all traveling from other cities and were piecing together what needed to be done in between working and taking care of what needed taking care of on our own home fronts.  There wasn’t another option available for this, though, and so I took the day off work and went to the training.  During the training, I inquired about getting an order for a wheelchair since Dad was unable to cover long-distances without totally wearing himself out.  I asked AGAIN about insulin training and seizure training, and I brought up my continued concerns about the need for emotional support.  To all of it, we were told that the recommendations would be given to us in the discharge paperwork, which we’d be given when Dad was on his way out the door.  (**Side note:  I called the oncologist and explained about the wheelchair, and one was delivered, which was nice, but it was an extra-wide!  My 5’10” 155 pound Dad did NOT need an extra-wide anything; in fact, pre-tumor Dad would have been highly insulted at the width of the wheelchair that was rented to him.  I was half-relieved and half-saddened by the fact that he didn’t notice the size of the wheelchair and that he didn’t mind that I’d insisted on getting him a wheelchair.)

Besides the tediousness of the therapies, the lack of privacy, the boredom, and the early-morning wake-ups, something else that Dad really hated at rehab involved eating.  As I posted on the Care Page during this time, “Contrary to what we usually hear about hospital food, Bill says the food at the rehab center is actually pretty good.”  What he didn’t like was having to eat in bed or sitting in a wheelchair with his plate of food on the rolling hospital table for every meal.  He still could not feel much of anything on his left side, which made the motion of plate-to-mouth difficult.  More often than not, he ended up with food spilled on the table, on the floor, on himself, or any combination of the three.  He frequently got very annoyed with himself when he spilled; we tried to clean it up quickly and convince him it wasn’t a big deal, but he was irked and dispirited nonetheless.  

Dad’s buddy the neuropsychologist came by a couple more times that last week; Dad still thought the guy was great, but the guy was getting on my nerves.  At one point, Dad wondered aloud how he had gotten brain cancer, and I heard Dr. N tell Dad that there were some studies indicated that “there could be a link to excessive cell phone usage.”  Great – let’s add Guilt to the other mess of emotions Dad is trying to cope with.  (**Side note:  His saying that would have been bad enough if it were true; it was all the worse because to date no valid studies have conclusively linked cell phone usage with brain cancer.  Jerk.)

Mom asked Dr. N what we should do about finding a neuropsychologist for follow-up after discharge, and Dr. N gave us the name of someone whom he said was a friend of his and was "very good."  Coincidentally, she was affiliated with the practice where our oncologist worked.  That sounded like a good plan, except that when I called to schedule an appointment with her, I was told that she was out on maternity leave through the end of January.  Dr. N himself saw patients on an outpatient basis, but his practice was located even further away from my parents’ house, which would’ve meant about an hour drive each way for them, which didn’t seem reasonable.  He offered no other ideas, and so I added that to my list of things to figure out after discharge.

My mom and I worked our way through a stack of paperwork that we had to FedEx to Duke, and Dad got another MRI scan which was sent to the Brain Tumor Clinic there too.  Dad had another appointment with the Radiation Oncologist; this time he got fitted for a special face-mask which he would wear to hold his head still during radiation treatments that were planned to begin soon after the Duke trip. 

The promise of a nightly Foster’s was a powerful reward for Dad; each evening he savored the beer while he made plans of what needed to happen so that he could sleep better that night (“I need total darkness in here!”  “I’m going to read for 30 minutes and then no talking!”  “I’m going to make myself stay up until 11 p.m. and then I’m going to eat some peanut butter crackers to help me sleep!”)  Every night was a hopeful strategy, none of which worked.  Like Dad, we were all just holding on until Going Home Day.

Coming up next in the Behind The Scene Story ... Part 17 - Going Home

Daughtering - Part 1 of the Behind the Scenes Story

The term parenting is technically defined as the act of being a mother or father to a child; it means to take care of the person or people to whom you serve as the parent.

So why isn’t there a parallel term for taking care of one’s parent – sonning, or, in my case, daughtering?

The way I can daughter my dad now is by telling his story.  Not just the one from the ten weeks when he was sick, but his whole story, or at least what I know of it. 

During the time my dad was sick, I posted updates regularly on CarePages for friends and family members to keep up with what was going on with Dad.   As I said here, for the first nine weeks after Dad was diagnosed with cancer, we chose to view his illness as a challenge instead of a catastrophe. The CarePages updates focused on what was going right and on the Hope for which we were so very desperate.   But there was lots going on behind the scenes and on the sidelines besides what was posted then, and I feel like this may be the time to begin to tell that part of the story.

This is a sad story, to be sure, but it is also one of Hope and Spirit.  It’s about tenacity and courage and toughness, not just tragedy.  It’s about Love and, of course, Perspective.  It’s about what we learned, not just about cancer but about my dad, about each other, and about ourselves.  It’s about how cancer sucks – it really, really SUCKS! – but WAY more than that, it’s about the strength of a man who wants to protect his family and of a family that wants to protect that man.

 On October 23, 2010, my 66 year-old dad was out on an eight-mile run.  About halfway through the run, he became disoriented.  He stopped at a traffic light but was unsure of which way to go to get home from there.   Fast-forward through a helpful couple who noticed Dad’s distress and called an ambulance, to a transport to a small hospital where a “mass” was detected during an emergency CT scan in his brain, and then to another ambulance ride to a large hospital that was equipped with a Neuro-ICU.   During that flurry of activity, our lives changed forever, and we didn’t even know it was happening. 

My mom was out of town, but luckily her two sisters were contacted and were nearby, and they raced to the hospital to be with Dad while Mom scrambled over the next few hours to get there.  When Dad arrived at the second hospital, he was fast-tracked for an MRI.  Once inside the MRI tube, Dad had an extended grand mal seizure.  The medical team got him out of the tube and performed CPR for several minutes before Dad was intubated and hooked up to a ventilator.  He was transported to the Neuro-ICU, which is where he was when my mom and my youngest sister arrived.  He was sedated and stayed hooked up to lots of IV’s, monitors, and machines overnight, and they stayed by his side, in shock, watching and waiting, a rough beginning of the uphill battle to come.

I think a lot about what went on inside that MRI tube that day.  I’m not sure why; I feel like thinking about that is something I should be moving past by now in the grief process.  But it was such a turning point for Dad, and for all of us who love him, like a Time Machine of sorts.  He went in looking like, acting like, and living like a person many years younger than he was, with a little numbness and confusion, and came out decades older, with a malignant brain tumor and many problems with motor skills, sensation, visual-perception, and memory and reasoning.  On one side of the tube he was a competitive athlete, working full-time, traveling and enjoying his life; on the other side he needed assistance to walk and was unable to perform the tasks necessary to work, drive a car, or live independently. 

Maybe those deficits were already bubbling at the surface and Cancer was like a bandit in the night that just uncovered them all at the same time.  Maybe the changes weren’t as defined as I remember them being at that point in time; perhaps they came in a few days later when he had brain surgery or over the upcoming weeks when the tumor was continuing to grow.  From my perspective, it just seems like a watershed moment, a time when we learned that a hurricane was coming but we couldn’t evacuate, a time when the future was being written, a time when things began to spin out of control, a time when Daughtering took on a whole new meaning.

Next ... Part 2, I Don't Know What's Happening

Family Connections

Family is defined in the dictionary as “a group of people related to one another by blood or marriage;” “a person or people related to one and so to be treated with a special loyalty or intimacy;” or “a group of objects united by a significant shared characteristic.”

From my current perspective, though, a more accurate description of the institution of family is a hybrid of these:  to me, family is a group of people who are connected by circumstances, cause, and choices.   The people that make up a family may or may not be related by blood or marriage, and they often play a vital role in dealing with serious illness and grief.

During the time that Dad was sick and in the months since he went on ahead, I have seen the makeup of our family change.  Actions and lack thereof have resulted in the forfeiture of the inclusion of some people whom I fully believed would have supported us in our time of need, some of whom I would have even bet the farm on because I thought they were included in the group I defined at the time as my family.  I stand corrected, though, in some cases, as well as disappointed, hurt, angry, and full of even more grief for the loss of those relationships as I thought they were.

The surprise, the transference, the thing that allows me to keep my faith in mankind, though, has been the outpouring of love and kindness from many of our friends who have become family to me.  Those who have suffered a loss and know the devastation, even those to whom we weren’t “close” in the past, as well as those who don’t know a loss like this first-hand but have made every effort just to be there and to listen - all of them have been such a comfort to us, and that is something I will never forget.  

I will forever value the lifeguards who guided and supported us, who kept us afloat, when we were thrown into the deep end when Dad was first diagnosed, as we treaded water while he was sick and in the throes of grief, and as we struggle to try to make it back to shore without being pulled under by the current.

As part of his training program for the upcoming Ironman triathlon, Dad trained with a swim team at a facility near my parents’ house.  The majority of the people on the team were years younger than he was; some were even half his age.  Like he so often did, he made an impression on these people just by being himself - genuine, dedicated, positive, and kind.  Before he got sick, Dad had mentioned to me a few times that he really liked being on this team, and he talked about how cool he thought it was that Ashley, the coach, was a gold medalist on the U.S. swim team in the 1996 Summer Olympics, which, coincidentally, Mom and Dad had gone to as spectators.  

During the time just before and after Dad’s surgery, he told me to contact Ashley to let her know why he wouldn’t be at swim practice that week.  He said he didn’t want her to think he was “slacking off” at the end of his Ironman training schedule.  After she found out what was going on, she offered to help with anything we needed, and, from that point on, she became one of Dad’s cheerleaders and a support on the sidelines to the rest of us.  She organized a schedule of meals to be provided by members of the swim team on an every-other-day basis.  She sent cards and checked in regularly to find out about Dad’s progress.  She did research to find out which Physical Therapists did aquatic therapy when I mentioned to her that he really wanted to get back into the pool as soon as possible after he finished his inpatient rehab stay.  And, when Dad was on the decline that sent him to the hospital the second and final time, she stopped by the house for a visit and ended up helping my sister get Dad up after he had fallen.  Dad admired Ashley as an athlete and as a person, and it was obvious that the feeling was mutual.  Before his diagnosis, Dad was the only one in our family who knew her, but, through her efforts and her kindness, we all came to think of her as a great support and a friend.  She and the other swim team members cared so much for Dad and were so compassionate that they continued to bring meals to the house for many weeks after Dad died, feeding both our bodies and our spirits with their kindness.

Something that was therapeutic for me during Dad’s illness was writing updates for his Care Page.  Word spread quickly about his illness, and within a couple of weeks, we had 375 “visitors” checking the Care Page for updates.  Over the 75 days of Dad’s illness, those online supporters viewed his Care Page more than 6,000 times and left over 1,000 messages for Dad and for us.  We read many of the posts and comments to Dad, and we have read and re-read them many, many times since and have found comfort in the concern, the sentiments, and the messages over the past ten months.

I saw an editorial recently in which the author said he thought it was “crass” to announce or to discuss serious illness or death through social media like Facebook.  I couldn’t disagree more!  I don’t know what I would have done without the connections and support I have gotten through Facebook over the past months.  Many people shared stories of their own losses with me and had great advice about how to get through the day, the weeks, the months of grief.  Others just checked in here and there and let me know they cared about how I was doing.  A few told me about how they loved Dad and let me know that they missed him and would always remember him, too.  Some posted thought-provoking and inspiring quotes, photos, and statements that have influenced my perspective.  And still others provided me with welcome distractions and laughs, all of which have played a valuable part in pulling me through the murkiness.

As much as I will always carry with me the pain of the loss and the suffering during this time in my life, I will forever remember and treasure the friendships and the generosity, consideration, and affection of those in what I consider to be my newly formed family.

We don't accomplish anything in this world alone ... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.  ~ Sandra Day O'Connor