Tag: Family

Busy Day Ahead

My father’s wake is tonight. His funeral is tomorrow. It’s going to be a tough couple of days, but we’ll get through it. My step daughter is home. My step son expects to be home later tonight. My wife has been my rock. I love my family. If I hadn’t made it clear 10000 times before, I love my family and I am honored that they have accepted me into their lives the way they have. I couldn’t be happier.

I don’t know what I want to do with my time before the wake starts this afternoon. I think I am going to see about getting a hair cut. I have to iron a couple of shirts even though we don’t have an ironing board anymore. I already played some guitar this morning. I recorded leads for three songs and now I don’t have any songs that are ready for guitars. Gotta get on that and add some new ideas.

I’m sure I’ll add some nervous posts between now and the end of the wake. For now though, enjoy today’s photo a day pic. 5/365 (and also a bonus pic). Guitar, of course.

5/365
DSC_2834

More Playing Time

I was able to sneak in my full day’s worth of exercise after work tonight. It was borderline miraculous and my legs are killing me.

I also snuck in more guitar. I put rhythm tracks onto one song and leads onto two.

Bonus. Now I am going to hang out and wait for my step daughter to come home. She’s on her way.

Bonus indeed!

DSC_2831
4/365

Oh yeah, and I also uploaded those photos I forgot to upload this morning before I left for work. That second one is 4/365 for the photo a day thing. Let’s just call it a complete day and pat ourselves on the back a little.

Which Me is Real?

My sister in law started a shared Google Photo Album where we can all add pictures of my father. One of my brother’s friends is going to make a slide show out of them that we will have running at the wake on Thursday.

I was looking through the album and I had a weird moment where my memory and reality sort of broke apart from each other. There was a picture of me from a couple of years before I had my weight loss surgery. I wasn’t even close to the 450 pounds I weighed when I finally decided to go under the knife, but I was probably 380 pounds or so. I was huge, though not quite as huge as I would eventually get.

Seeing that picture didn’t phase me in the least. I kept scrolling through the album and I eventually got to a photo from earlier this year. Father’s Day, to be precise. There was a picture of my father with my brother, my sister, and some other guy. I did a double take. The other guy was me. I didn’t recognize myself. It was the same me that I see in the morning now. It was post-surgery, 215-220 pound me. The current me. The new normal, real me. I didn’t recognize me.

I did recognize the dangerously overweight me as if it were the “real” me.

That didn’t bother me quite as much as being asked about my mother while talking about my father’s funeral did (as mentioned in a post from earlier today), but it disturbed me a bit.

Like… who am I? Who is the “real” me? Do I even know? Will I ever know?

Well, That was Painful

I did a little funeral planning today. My step daughter, Bellana, is going to sing a song at the service and I had to call the parish musical director to get a copy of the arrangement. I mentioned whose funeral it was and she got all sad. She knew my parents and extended her condolences. She said she hoped my mother was doing okay.

Well, in her defense, my parents stopped going to this church when they moved out of town about three years ago. The music director hadn’t seen or heard from them at all over that time. While my mother’s funeral a year and a half ago was in this very same church, I did not expect her to remember that.

Still… I’m already feeling pretty low over losing my father but then to have to share that my mother’s been gone for over a year. Yeah, that was a bit of a gut punch. Ouch, babie. Ouch.

Dad’s wake is the day after tomorrow. The funeral is the day after that.

Who Needs an Oven

Really, an air fryer, an induction thingie, and a toaster oven. Who needs the big kitchen oven?

Jen does. She’s roasting veggies in the oven and cooking quinoa on the stove while I cook chicken in the air fryer and instant mashed potatoes (heaven’s gift, indeed) on the induction thingie on the other side of the kitchen.

We are kind of a team in this house.

Friday Ramblings

Is ramblings the right word? Should I have called this masterpiece of literary genius “Friday Mumblings” instead? We may never know.

Has anyone else found that they have become chemically depended on GPS apps while driving anywhere? We have a meeting scheduled for 4:00 today at the funeral home to start going over the arrangements. I know where this place is. I grew up less than a mile from it (Google maps tells me it is 0.8 miles from the house I grew up in) and I could probably find it with my eyes closed in the middle of a blizzard. Why then did I just email the address to myself so that I can plug it into a GPS app on my phone when I head over there in about 80 minutes? Why can’t I just… ya know… go? Why do I need a bunch of satellites in orbit of the Earth to tell me when the next turn is coming up? What did I do to my brain?

A year and a half ago, when my mother passed away, we had a similar meeting with the funeral director booked and we all went into it without the faintest clue of what we were in store for. Now? Today? We know exactly what’s coming and somehow that makes this whole experience more depressing. It’s a little less stressful and a lot less intimidating, but it is so much more depressing. Of all the things to be pro’s at… yeah, this shouldn’t be one of them.

Complete and total change of subject… When the forth and final season of The Umbrella Academy came out a couple of weeks ago I jumped right into it. It was only six episodes (the previous three seasons were all 10 each) and as I was watching the fifth episode I declared to myself (and no one else because why would anyone else care) that when I finished the finale I was going to immediately go back and watch the whole series from start to finish.

I did exactly that, and I finished it yesterday. Just in time for new seasons of Rings of Power and Only Murders in the Building to launch. I watched the first episode of each show (there are two more Rings of Power episodes available and I’ll get to them shortly). While I was waiting for Rings of Power to come back I started reading The Silmarillion and woah babie, is that puppy a slog. I’m on chapter 19 and so far the entire book has been 100% exposition. It’s like a textbook only less interesting. I know at some point it’s going to tie into the Lord of the Rings at least a little bit, but good heavens is it tough to get through. Maybe had Tolkien lived to finish it himself it might have been more readable… then again, maybe not. Yikes.

I’ll tell you what though, Rings of Power is making me want to grab the third Lord of the Rings book and read the appendixes. I’m sure I’ve made it through them at least once before, but maybe I should pay closer attention. It’s tough to read through a couple of hundred (or however long the appendix is) pages of a book that come after the book ended, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

What else should I write about before my lunch break ends and I get back to work for an hour before leaving early to go to the funeral home? I don’t know. Retail therapy… that might be a thing. All of the sadness and stress of the last few weeks. It’s possible that some new camera gear, or a new guitar, or a trip to Manhattan or the mountains might be the only things that can straighten me out. Just a thought, you know? The punchline to this joke is that I am not joking. I’m being serious. Oh well… it will be okay. We’ll get through this together. My father would not have wanted any of us to be all sad. He’d want us to focus on the good rather than stress over the bad. Although having said that, he was an Olympic level, world class worrier himself so… yeah. I love you, dad.

Dad

My father passed away last night. My brother and sister were in the room with him. He went at almost the exact moment that the Red Sox finished off a win. That is literally the best way it could have happened. I didn’t say anything to anyone about it but I had been hoping for the last few days that when he did go, he would go with a Red Sox win.

My brother called when it was getting very close and Jen and I ran over there. He was gone when we got there, but that was okay. We were there earlier in the day and got to say our goodbyes.

I miss him already. Love you, Dad.

No Change

I’m at home. My stomach has been a mess the last two days, probably because I’ve had protein bars for almost all of my meals for over a week and now it’s fighting back. I had to go home and eat something real, and I’ve just been dealing with an acidy stomach that is churning and bubbling and a little nauseous and being weird. Last night I had a full on foamies as well. Tonight was a little better but I am afraid to be too far away from a safe and secure bathroom. Sorry about the TMI, but there you have it.

I was planning on going to work tomorrow but now I don’t know. They are not expecting me to come in (thank you for that) but I might work a little in the morning. Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. I simply don’t know what to do. Maybe I’ll just wake up and go back to the hospice place and wait for however long it takes. I just don’t know.