How has it already been 6 months? Considering it feels like a lifetime has passed.

I feel like getting a tattoo that reads March 26th, 2012 somewhere on my body. It’s a day that’s going to haunt me ‘till the day I die. Well, maybe not haunt. But I don’t think I’ll forget it anytime soon.

I really thought that I’d be over the whole thing by now, especially since there has been so much that’s happened in the last 6 months. I finished school, I got a real job, I graduated college - in that order. And for some reason, every month around the 26th, something inside me breaks for a day, sometimes two, and I think “how did that happen?” Then, of course, I have to relive the whole weekend in my head. The phone calls, the hospital visits, the doctors weighing the options.

I was watching The L.A. Complex the other night and Kal’s dad had a stroke. The show ended with Kal looking through the hospital door at his dad, laying in a hospital bed, tubes down his throat, in a coma. Automatic tears, just from picturing my dad in the same scene.

He, unfortunately, never woke up. I never had the chance to say goodbye, to tell him I loved him, nothing. I don’t even remember what the last thing I said to him was. We’d just finished watching the Jets game and I was on my way out the door. He probably said something like “Don’t stay out too late” and I would have said something back like “Uh, yeah, okay, dad. Whatever.”

On the one had, I’m almost thankful I wasn’t home when my mom and sister called 911. I can’t imagine having those visions running through my mind. It’s bad enough that from the stories I’ve heard I’ve managed to piece together what happened in my own dramatic reenactment.

On the other hand, I wish I had been home. Maybe then I wouldn’t be kicking myself for missing what turned out to be my last chance to say goodbye, I love you, anything.

Is it weird that I still have dreams about him? Nothing even related to his passing. Different things, though. I can see him, hear him, talk to him even. I don’t think it’s that crazy. It’s just worse when I wake up, even 6 months later, and want to tell him about the dream I’d just had.

“Hey, dad! I just had the craziest dream! You were in it and…”

I lost a lot of motivation for a lot of things, which I didn’t think would happen. For a few weeks, I just stopped caring. About everything.

Finally I feel like I’ve gotten my motivation back, and for the most part my sense of humor feels back to normal but I still feel… “sensitive” which just might be my inner girl talking.

John Connolly wrote in his book The Book of Lost Things “The loss of a parent is a child’s greatest fear.” I’m not sure if that was my greatest fear - I fear a lot of things, like heights and bees. Losing a parent is never something I wanted to think about. As a little kid I always worried myself silly whenever my mom was late coming home from work. Every minute she was late felt like an hour. “Where is she? What’s taking so long? What if something happened to her?” 

I’ve had to deal with death before. I’ve lost all 3 of my grandparents, 1 of which I was very close with. And by very close I mean I was with her every weekday since before I started kindergarten up until grade 10 when she passed away. I’ve been to several funerals over the past few years. The first was for one of my uncles when I was very young. The second was for my grandma and the third was for one of my managers. 

When the doctor told me what had happened I knew he wasn’t going to make it. He showed me the x-ray of his brain and how much blood there was and that’s when I knew. An aneurysm? Just like that? No warning, no sign, nothing.

I keep playing that night over and over in my head to the point where I’m starting to believe I was actually there when it happened - even though I wasn’t. I can just see everything so clearly. I’d just watched the last of the Jets game with him before leaving for the night to hang out with friends. He was helping my mom with the dry the dishes before heading into the bathroom. But before he did, he asked my sister to check his Tim’s card to see how much money was left on it. And that was it.

The doctor said patients don’t recover from something like that and if he did, he’d live life as a vegetable.

An aneurysm - an abnormal widening or ballooning of a portion of an artery due to weakness in the wall of the blood vessel. In his case, it burst. And there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it. Not him, not us, not the doctors. No one.

I was not expecting to, at 21, have to plan to tell the doctors to take my father off life support, plan a cremation - something my parents had never discussed - or go through his belongings, piece by piece.

It’s been over a month now. At the beginning I tried telling myself that he was on vacation. Because where else could he be? He’s just having so much fun that he hasn’t come home yet. I guess that’s the little kid in me thinking something like this would never actually happen.

I guess I’m just wondering when I’m going to actually be okay with everything. That he’s really gone and that he’s really never coming home. Ever again.

He retired in September 2011. And I’d told him not 2 weeks before he passed, “Dad, you’re retired now. You’re supposed to go and do all the things you never could before.” He laughed.

The parents from back in the day. (Taken with instagram)