I was filling out my leave slip for the four days I was away preparing for, attending and recovering from Dad’s funeral, and just discovered that federal employees don’t receive any special bereavement leave. We can use our sick leave for that purpose, but I’d used all but 12 hours of sick leave over the […]
On Friday, we began with some of our difficult responsibilities. Dad already had purchased a number of cemetery plots–in fact, the receipt for their final payment had arrived while he was in the hospital–though he hadn’t yet chosen which one he wanted. Our first stop, though, was to the funeral home, where we had to […]
As I noted in the previous entry, after nearly ten years of hell and until his sudden illness and death from an unrelated cause, my dad had about eight glorious fully active months of good health again, because he received a kidney transplant. Please, please, please consider filling out and carrying with you an organ […]
After getting off the phone with my sister Thursday morning, I had to find a way to get to Richmond and then to my family’s home (as I had reported, my car had become undrivable again after my return from Richmond the previous weekend). I immediately thought of my friend Craig, who’d loaned me his […]
I knew, of course, as soon as my brain woke up enough to realize a phone was ringing and my eyes simultaneously took in the bedside clock display of 4:55 am: it could have been a wrong number, of course, but I knew. Still, it wasn’t supposed to happen this time. Yes, Dad was very, […]
“Mrs. Watson? This is the hospital; your husband has expired.” These were the cruel words, so cavalierly delivered, that greeted my mother at 4:30 a.m. last Thursday and changed her life–and mine, my sister’s and the rest of our family’s–irrevocably. The nurse used just those words, and didn’t ask if my mother were alone or […]
hear the clip Transcript follows:
Today is my parents’ forty-second wedding anniversary; my dad now has spent both his 65th birthday two weeks ago and his anniversary today sedated to unconsciousness in the hospital.
I‘m back from Richmond, and I’m beat, after only two days. I’m not sure how Mom deals with the stress as seemingly well as she does, being much more directly faced with Dad’s hospitalization on a day-to-day basis; she does break down in tears every now and then, but I don’t see the same kind […]
Unless I find something worth audblogging over the weekend, I’ll be incommunicado on the net this weekend. I’m travelling down to Richmond again this weekend to keep my mom company and to visit my dad who remains hospitalized indefinitely. I’m taking the laptop to leave behind with Mom, but at the moment she’s still without […]