The Hitchhiker, Part 1: The Gift of the Story

As I have learned since my dad went on ahead, one of the greatest gifts that can be given to someone in grief is talking to him or her about their loved one: telling a story that involves the person who has died, sharing something you remember about that person, or talking about a quality that person had or a deed he did that you appreciated can be a priceless treasure.  It doesn't have to be a significant account; sometimes something funny or unique that person did is just what the person who is grieving needs to hear.

Not long after my dad died, my mom, my husband, and I went to the Mid-South Grain Association meeting in New Orleans, or simply "Mid-South," as my dad called it in general conversation.  Dad was in charge of organizing the convention there every February, and we went after he died to represent him in a way.  My mom kept up with the administrative duties that she had assisted Dad with for many years, but, as I came to find out, it was as helpful for us to be there amongst many people who had known Dad for years - some for decades - as it was for them to have Mom filling in at the registration desk.

The highlight of the trip for me was listening to one of my dad's long-time friends and previous coworker talk about some of Dad's antics from "back in the day."  Some of the tales I had heard before, mostly from Dad himself, but others I had never heard, and I felt comforted by all of them; it felt almost as if I was getting a piece of my dad back for just a little while.

Like a lot of people, Dad was a work hard/play hard kind of guy.   But the thing that I think made him unique in that area - at least from what I have gathered from seeing him interact with people professionally and from listening to what others have said about him in a business context over the years - is that he was often able to make the work environment fun for himself and for others.  For starters, he never hesitated to laugh at himself, and his interest in everyone around him was genuine.  Never did he miss an opportunity to say hello to or to compliment or express interest in someone else; the way he assumed that pretty much everybody had good intentions somehow seemed to result in that becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.  He delighted in clowning around when time and the situation allowed; I don't know that he learned about the benefits of fostering a positive work environment in a formal setting, but he certainly applied the principles all the same and always seemed very popular with his employees because of it.

"Cotton Row" on Front Street in Memphis, Tennessee

Here's the story that my dad's friend told us from back in the early 70's, when my dad worked at a company with an office that was located in downtown Memphis:

One Friday, some of Dad's clients had come to Memphis from out of state, and he was in charge of entertaining them that night.  My mom had driven with my sisters and me to her parents' in Nashville for the weekend, and Dad was planning to drive to meet us there late that night after he had taken the customers out on the town.  He worked until closing time and then met them at a restaurant down the street from his office.  As the story goes, the dinner turned into more of a party than Dad had expected, and when it was over he returned to the office since he had parked nearby.  Evidently, he was trying to ward off the headache he thought he'd be getting the next morning and so he walked over to his desk to get to his bottle of aspirin.  Unfortunately, though, the floors were in the process of being redone, and Dad left footprints on the adhesive backing that had been laid down in preparation for the tile that was going to be installed the next day.  Apparently there was much laughter the next morning and later some friendly ribbing about the fact that everyone could tell who the culprit had been since the tracks lead straight to his desk, where several aspirin tablets were spilled on the desk, and then back to the exit door.  

As Dad himself later told the story to his friends and coworkers, after he'd gotten into his car and then started driving on the interstate headed towards Nashville, he realized that he'd had too much to drink to be driving.  As luck would have it, soon after that he saw a hitchhiker on the side of the road. Necessity being the mother of invention (and of innovation), Dad pulled over and rolled down the passenger-side window to ask the guy if he could drive and where he was trying to go.  "Sure, I can drive," the guy said, and then he added, "I'm hoping to get to Nashville tonight."

"Well, get in, then," Dad told him, probably smiling from ear to ear and thinking he had struck gold. "I'll be asleep in the back; wake me up when we get there!"

I doubt he told my mom about the details of that trip for quite some time after it happened, and it wasn't until after his death that my sisters and I heard the story.  I could picture it happening though, and hearing the tale was a much-appreciated gift, one that I will always treasure.  And it wasn't Dad's last interaction with a hitchhiker either, ...

To be continued ... 

Missing Him

A couple of weeks after my dad died, a friend of mine who had lost her mother a couple of years before that told me that the thing that left her with the most sadness since her mom's passing was thinking about the senses associated with her mom.  I didn't really understand what she meant at the time; I wasn't able to isolate what the worst or the most difficult part of all of it was because it all seemed so unbelievable and so horrible at that point.

I know now what she meant.  Thinking about my dad's hands, his legs, his wrinkles, his face, his voice, his laugh, his smile, his eyes - all of his physical presence - and how I'll never be able to be around them again makes me feel so sad, so lonely, and so very desperate.  

Sometimes I get a little glimpse of what I think for a split second is my dad, and in that moment I am like a drowning person struggling to get back to the surface of the water for air.  

About a month after my dad died, I was driving to work and saw a man that resembled him driving a car just like his.  I had to pull over to the side of the road and catch my breath.  

For months after he went on ahead, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I'd heard him calling my name, just like he did so many nights when he was sick.  

As I sat crying on the night of the six-month anniversary of his death, I picked up my cell phone and impulsively texted "I love you" to the cell phone number by his name in my list of contacts.  A few minutes later, I got a response that read, "Who even is this?"  I felt like I'd been sucker punched.  Part of me wanted to text back, "Dad!! It's me! Are you ok?"  but I just kept sitting there crying, and after a few minutes another message flashed on the screen that said: "I think you have the wrong number."  

Several times when I've heard a group of people singing, I've thought I could pick out the sound of his voice singing above all the rest.  Each time that has happened, I let myself look into the crowd, just to make sure.

About six months ago, I posted the last part of the Behind the Scenes Story on this blog.  The song I chose to link to at the end of that entry was Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."  My husband, who, incidentally, doesn't usually read this blog, invited me to take a spur-of-the-moment trip to Natchez, MS, with him a few days later.  While we were there, we asked around to find out where a cool bar was and ended up in a bizarre little place that was literally built into the side of the levee, a pub called Under The Hill.  

Only a few minutes after we walked in and sat down on our barstools, a guy started playing his acoustic guitar, and his first song was that exact Pink Floyd song.  Luckily, the darkness of the room hid the tears that rolled down my face as I sat there and listened in awe to the music.

This past summer, we had an accidental "iCloud" syncing of all of the Apple devices in my household, and all of our Contact Lists were blended together.  I didn't think too much about it until a few days later when my phone rang and I looked at the screen to see that it was showing up as "Dad" calling.  Evidently, my daughters had my husband's phone number listed under "Dad" in their Contact List, and so the iCloud sync had added that into my phone so that my husband's call showed up that way on my phone.  In the split second it took me to realize what had happened, part of my brain actually believed it was my dad calling me, and I felt my heart sink into my stomach when the reality of what was really happening dawned on me.

On the night before we left to take my older daughter to college for the first time, I was sitting outside on my deck and noticed that the wind was blowing through only some of the branches of one of the many trees in my backyard.  It was kind of eerie, and the words, "Hi, Dad," went through my mind.  About 15 seconds later, an owl hooted from in the woods behind my house.  I couldn't see it, but I exchanged a "Hello?" with the owl several times before the hooting and the isolated wind-blowing stopped.

A couple of weeks ago when my family was in New Orleans, I took my younger daughter and her friends to see the hotel where my parents stayed every February when they went for a business convention.  There, by the fountain in the lobby of the hotel, I thought for a split second that I saw my dad out of the corner of my eye, but, when I turned to look more closely, there was no one there.  

On the surface, it seems like getting a tiny glimpse or feeling a split-second connection to a loved one who has gone on ahead would be soothing, and maybe one day it will be for me - but now it mostly feels like salt (or something even worse) being poured in a wound. 

"Although their physical form is gone, you are not living your life without him or her. To live truly without them would be to never have known them. Instead, you continue to live with them infused in your heart, in your memories, in your spirit. You live with their love etched into your being. They will always, now and forever, be a part of you."

Part 4 – Numbers

Continued from Part 3

On the evening of the day before Dad’s surgery, which also happened to be his 67th birthday, he alternated between being in good spirits and being confused, agitated, and anxious.  In what became a pattern for him over the next ten weeks, he was puzzled by the concept of time; over and over again, he asked if the numbers on the big clock on the wall in his room were right, and each time he was astonished when we said that they were.  It seemed like time was moving so slowly to him; he could hardly believe what time it was whenever we told him, and he sometimes thought it was “p.m.” when it was “a.m.” and vice versa.  To us, though, the time of the surgery was barreling down the tracks; we couldn’t slow things down and we certainly couldn’t stop what was happening. 


My mom, my sisters, and I wrote lots of lists in our Notebook about people to contact, things to remember, and questions to ask the doctors.  We were very worried about Dad’s anxiety and what might be said to him just before or after surgery when we couldn’t be around to screen the information or to protect him.  We wanted so badly to control some aspect of what was happening; it was like putting a penny on the train tracks in front of a runaway train, though.


We wrote in the notebook in capital letters “MAKE SURE THE SURGICAL STAFF KNOWS HE IS LEFT-HANDED AND THAT HE IS AN ATHLETE” because we were concerned about what they might not know or not remember during the surgery.  Dad’s sensation and his movement and strength on his left side was very poor at that time, and I had visions of someone waking him up in recovery and asking him to do things right-handed (thinking that was his dominant hand) and then marking down in the chart that he was A-OK.  Or, even worse, of the neurosurgeon saying to himself, “So what if I cut a little too much on that right side of the brain; it controls the left side, so this guy will still be able to write and feed himself just fine with his right hand.”   We wanted the surgical staff to be aware that
Dad’s "numbers" weren't in the typical range but that that was normal for him - his pulse at rest was around 40 beats per minute and his respiration rate  (the number of times per minute that he took a breath) was around 7, both of which were much lower than for the average person.  During the first couple of nights in the ICU, the alarms on the monitors sounded frequently to alert the nurse to the fact that his pulse and respiration rate numbers were low, as compared to the average person.  We wanted to be certain that they understood that this was normal for Dad; it didn’t indicate a need for more medication or more intervention.  We wanted to underscore the fact that he was exceptional, he was in excellent physical condition, and he was up for the fight - and so were we.


At least one of us continued to stay right by his side every minute to watch over him; he usually knew to ask for whatever he needed, but he couldn’t remember whom to ask.  Several times, he asked the custodian for medication.  We showed him the call light and explained how to use it, but, if we stepped out into the hallway for even a minute, he persistently either yelled out about what he wanted or just tried to get up out of bed to get it for himself, which was not good since his left side wasn't working properly and since he was hooked up to lots of wires and tubes.


Dad’s blood sugar level numbers had been going wild since he had been started on the mega-doses of steroids.  Oddly and very frustratingly, different doctors and different nurses had different ideas about what number on the blood sugar scale indicated a need for insulin.  We recorded every blood sugar level check and the corresponding treatment (or lack thereof) in our Notebook; it became something that we stressed out about because it was a concrete number that measured something that we wanted to be kept in the normal range and because of the inconsistency in how the medical staff addressed it, which held true for the entire duration of Dad’s illness. 


Several members of the surgical team came by that evening for pre-surgical checks, including the physician’s assistant who worked for the neurosurgeon.  I asked her to step into the hall with me and then started to ask her some of the questions on my list, things we thought we very important.  She answered a few, deflected a few, and then said she had to be somewhere else then but could talk to me later on the phone and gave me her cell phone number.  That seemed like an ok plan, except that a few hours later when I dialed the number that she had written down for me a recording told me that the phone number had been disconnected.  Grrrrrr.

 As part of the pre-op procedures, Dad had stereotactic markers glued to his head; they looked like little white footballs affixed to his skin.  They were going to be used during the surgery so that a portable MRI could show the exact location of the tumor when the surgeon was preparing to cut.  One minute, Dad jokingly asked the nurse, "Can I if get a discount on this brain surgery since they won't have to shave my head since I'm already bald?" but the next minute, he had forgotten what the markers were and kept trying to pick them off. 




After a double dose of pain medicine that night, Dad finally got into such a deep sleep that we felt that we needed to stare at his chest to be sure he kept breathing.  Several times he jerked sharply in his sleep, and a few times he had the hiccups, both of which we were told by the nurse and later by the doctor were related to the tumor and/or to the steroids.  Dad mumbled things like “I don’t feel good” and “I don’t know why I have to be here” in his sleep that night, which broke our hearts.  We wanted so badly for him to be pain-free and to not be scared. 


I made a big mistake that night.  My middle sister and I had taken a middle-of-the-night shift, and, once Dad was asleep, she offered to watch over him while I went next door to the waiting room to get some rest.  Once in the other room, I couldn't stop the thoughts that were racing through my head, so many what-if's, why's, and how's. I took out my cell phone and entered "GBM" into the internet search box to see what the web had to say about glioblastoma multiform, the type of cancer the neurosurgeon had told us that afternoon that he thought Dad had.  Words like "aggressive," "deadly," "incurable," and "poor prognosis," and then the worst of the worst, the Numbers … "average life expectancy of ten months."  I started coming apart at the seams.  It was late, but I was desperate, and so, sobbing so hard I could hardly talk, I called my husband.  He talked me down off the ledge, and I was eventually able to get myself together enough to go back into Dad's room.  Luckily, it was dark in there, and so nobody noticed the redness of my face from crying.  I kept repeating to myself inside my head, "That's not us.  That's not us,"  in an effort to convince myself that either (a) the mass wasn't a GBM, or (b) if it was, that prognosis didn't apply to Dad.  One thing I had learned for sure, though, was that not knowing is not always the worst thing.

 Very early the next morning, Dad started mumbling a string of numbers in his sleep that we could only identify as being a phone number.  He recited the numbers over and over, always the same numbers in the same order, and, finally, I did a Google search of the series on my cell phone.  It turned out that it was the phone number to The Royal Sonesta, a hotel in New Orleans where my parents headed up a business meeting every February, and for some reason Dad must have been thinking about that hotel in his sleep.  He was very worried about missing work and wanted to get started on organizing that meeting; we, on the other hand, had more of an indication of what was coming, and all of our worries were directed toward the mass in Dad’s head, which we desperately hoped would be ousted completely in the next few hours during the surgery.

Next in our story … Part 5 - Surgery

New Orleans On The Mind

My dad loved New Orleans.  He thoroughly enjoyed the food, appreciated the people, delighted in the music, and, of course, he LOVED the Street Beer!

 

Dad, making a presentation to some of his clients at a meeting

When people asked Dad what he did for a living, he said that he was “in the grain business."  During his career, he managed several grain elevators, supervised the opening of a rice processing plant, and, in 1993, joined an agricultural marketing consulting firm as a principal commodities broker.

Not long after he graduated from college and got his first job in the field, he joined the Mid-South Grain Association, a trade organization for people in the ag-marketing business.

During the course of his career in the grain business, the Mid-South Grain Association was a constant for Dad.  He served as president of the organization for several years and was secretary-treasurer for the past 18 years. He was always so appreciative of the numerous friendships he developed through the group and enjoyed organizing their semi-annual conventions, one of which was always held in February in New Orleans.

My sisters and I and our spouses tagged along several times when my parents went to the convention in New Orleans, always a fun time for all of us and a good opportunity for us to see Dad “in action” with so many people he had known professionally and personally for years and in some cases for decades.

When Dad got sick in late October, he had just begun planning for the convention the following February.  He still had to line up guest speakers, get people registered, and coordinate with the hotel where the meetings were always held, the Royal Sonesta.  He had quite a long To-do list going, and this became one of the things about which he worried while he was sick.

After Dad was admitted to the hospital, while he was in the Neuro-ICU for several days awaiting surgery, he was on several different medicines, including a massive amount of steroids to address the swelling around the tumor in his brain and a type of pain medication that we later learned resulted more in increased anxiety and talkativeness than it did in pain relief for Dad.

My mom, my sisters, and I took shifts, often in pairs, to be with him 24 hours a day, and, as I’ve mentioned, we took careful notes about everything that went on.  One of the things we wrote down was what he said, especially when it related to things about which he was concerned. 

During those long, scary nights in the ICU, he talked endlessly, often about not feeling well, having a bad headache, and being very tired, all of which made sense given what we knew about what was going on with him medically.

Just a few hours before his surgery, he seemed to finally be getting some rest, but he kept talking in his sleep, saying things like “I’m bored,” “I’ve got to know when I can run again,” and “I don’t know why I have to be here.”  He also said some things that weren’t in context, like “I’m going to the oyster bar,” and “I’m going to eat a dozen.”  In between comments, he kept repeating a number that didn’t make sense to us, and, after hearing him say that same number over and over, I decided to use my cell phone to Google it.  It turned out that the number was the telephone number to the Royal Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans.  Apparently, he had New Orleans on The Mind.

Over the course of the next several weeks, we made lots of notes of things that Dad told us to write to complete the Convention-Planning To-Do List, and then we passed it on to someone else in a leadership position with the organization.  Dad still worried about it frequently, but we tried to reassure him each time he brought it up that it was being taken care of. 

After Dad went on ahead on January 5, Mom was asked to continue taking part in the convention and with the organization, if she felt up to it.  She had worked side-by-side with Dad for all those years in planning for and putting on the convention, and she definitely knew the ropes.  Because Dad was so concerned that the convention go smoothly, Mom felt that carrying on with that task was a good way to honor his wishes and to uphold his legacy in the professional realm.  She did get the job done, coordinating the planning for the event, and, with my husband and me, attending the convention to represent Dad as he would have expected us to do. 

I’m sure that Dad was watching over us during our time in New Orleans and that, although he might have missed being there, he was proud that we honored his commitment and that the show went on.