October

October. Easily one of my favorite months. It means hot days have been ushered out to make room for cooler days and warm clothes. It brings the excitement of Halloween with it. It means apple cider and candy apples. Pumpkin carving and Facebook posts filled with awful pumpkin spice recipes. Sweaters and boots. Scarves and my favorite, dark lipsticks! I love fall. It is the change that I desperately long for after an agonizingly hot summer on the Midwest.
But this year is different. This year I'm not driving down my parents street visioning the street being full of children dressed up, going door to door for candy. This year I'm driving down my Mom's street counting down the days until it's been a year since he left us. Hell, I've been counting down the days til October knowing that it would bring feelings that have been festering at the surface.
Today, October 2nd is exactly a year since I left for Little Rock. Exactly a year since my father was put in ICU and exactly a year since I realized the last time I had ever seen my Father happy without tubes in his body and in his own home, was the last time I ever would see those things. Those days were gone and they would never be back. It has now been a year since I left the room to gather myself because the man in front of me was not my father, at least not the one I had in mind when I left for my flight that day. He was sick. Very, very sick. And even if he got better, he wouldn't be the same. Did I hope for a miracle, sure. But I had already been jaded by the cancerous world we had lived in for so long now.
We did have a few moments of laughter here and there that acted like a pair of scissors to cut up the tension in the room. At one point we were talking to Dad and he started staring off into the hallway with a bewildered look on his face. When I asked him what he was looking at he said there was a camel in the hallway.
I looked and saw a stairwell door right across the hall and said, "oh Dad, I see what you're talking about. It's a door. It is big and about the same color as a camel, though!" Then he looks at me and says in an annoyed tone, "Rachel, I know there's a door, the camel just opened it to go down the stairs." Ha. What do you say to that? The man saw the camel go down the stairs! Can't argue with that!
That moment of laughter was a great way to end the evening. The next day proved to be much worse.
Kobe and I woke up, got around and stopped at Dunkin Donuts to grab breakfast. While we waited for our food, we got a phone call saying we needed to get to the hospital ASAP. We left with no food or coffee and sped off to find Dad hooked up to a machine forcing him to breathe. It was awful. The mask forced in air while he tried to fight it. This caused him to essentially choke on his own breath. I remember he looked so defeated. He looked like he wanted to fight the machine because he wanted to keep his dignity and breathe on his own. After just a short amount of time doctors decided they needed to intubate him. We left the room to find to come back and find our Dad in a medically induced coma. It was at that moment that I wasn't sure if I would ever hear my Dad's voice again. That was the day that we had to decide if we wanted to sign a DNR. That was the day that we had to decide if he could have a certain medicine to help him but that could cause him to go into cardiac arrest.
The next day would be the day that we sat there waiting for any sign that he might wake up, but none came.
The next two weeks are going to be filled with memories of a year ago. Each day will represent a bittersweet victory or a tough decision. They will remind me of a time when I was able to stand next to my Dad's side and talk to him, even if he couldn't respond. Each day will bring heartache back and an eerie feeling of past foreshadowing, if that makes sense. It's hard to believe that this month there will be one day that I think, Dad was alive a year ago, and the next day I will think, the worst day of my life was exactly a year ago. It will be hard to get through this month as each day is a reminder of what was to come. But if I could get through living it a year ago, I can get through remembering it this year. Ugh. October.