United in our Grief Forum.

It's still a surreal feeling to me. I think mostly because it was all unexpected (mostly) and they all just felt like 1-2 punches. In October of 2012, my dad was sick. It didn't come across as anything bad, though my dad was one of those "I'm sick, therefore I'm dying" kind of men. He also didn't really say much in the extent of things either (if this makes sense). It ended up falling apart seemingly all at once. He tried to get in at his doctor and there wasn't any room for an appointment. I told him that on my day off (two days later), I'd take him to urgent care to at least get him looked at and get something into him. He didn't make it that far. The next day (day before my day off), he suddenly couldn't make it to the bathroom on his own. He needed my mom's help because he didn't have the energy. He sat down on the couch to sleep and it got to where we couldn't wake him up.

Long story short, he had an incredibly bad case of pneumonia. He was in the ICU for a week and a half and after that, it devolved into... chaos. My dad wasn't coming out of the haziness of having been using "milk of amnesia". He seemed very disoriented and dizzy. Found out that he had two frontal strokes. He didn't know where or when he was. He recognized everyone who was important in his life, but the nurses were often some part of his mismemory, like a bartender. It kind of seemed to go downhill incredibly fast from here. Because my dad was on Medicaid (for the hospital stay, otherwise he just had his Medicare), he ran out of time and they were trying to usher him off into a nursing home. They gave us a list and told us we had 24 hours to make a decision. We had no idea what to do or how we were going to handle this and before we had even a moment to digest that, they were suddenly telling us that he had no control over his airways and that we had two options: 1) strap him to a hospital bed and give him a feeding tube or 2) he was going to need end of life (hospice) care. Either way, they would be surprised he'd live out the week.

...what.

All of my dad's kids were there. He had five kids from his first marriage, plus me and my younger sister (although the latter wasn't there) with my mom. But, everyone, sans my younger sister. Even my older sister from my mom's first marriage who was only a step-daughter, was there as well. We had a decision to make. One of the hardest any of us had to make. We knew immediately that option one would've just upset my dad, so we had to settle on option 2.

We left the hospital feeling empty. How had this happened? How were we standing here at this moment?

Since my dad was a veteran, we moved my dad to the hospice at the local VA and realized what a beautiful decision we made. He went in on a Friday and by the following Monday, my mom received a call asking if it was okay that they feed him. An eye, nose, and throat doctor had looked at him and said he indeed had control of his airways. And it continued to get better from there. To the point where there was talk of my dad moving out of hospice and into a nursing home.

BUT, during all of this. The weekend after Thanksgiving, my mom ended up in the hospital as well. She was at the store I worked at, picking up some groceries and had used the bathroom. She had a hemorrhagic stroke. I was working the day she was there and heard the call over the walkies as I worked in the backend of the store. I hadn't thought anything about it at the time. Not until I was told I had a phone call and to tell me that it was my mom.

By the time I got to the hospital (just a few minutes after my mom had arrived) (also different hospital than my dad had been at prior to the hospice), all I knew at the time was that she'd had a stroke. Not what kind, just that she'd had one. I was hearing all kinds of good things, that people come back from strokes all the time and that she'd be fine.

She would never be.

After we found out the type of stroke she had, we were given two options: 1) Remove a piece of skull to allow the brain's swelling to go down. She would be "alive" but she wouldn't know anybody or know anything. She'd have really, no memory. 2) Don't do the surgery, but try medications in the hopes that it would relieve the swelling. The percentage wasn't high for a positive effect, but it was there.

We went with option 2 and my mom lived the rest of her life in the neuro intestive care unit. It was almost a week to the day she was admitted when her body just couldn't handle it. Her blood pressure would skyrocket to incredibly dangerous levels. We pulled her off life support and I watched my mom die.

We decided to not tell my dad. He wouldn't know any better. We just told him she was working whenever he asked and he never realized how often we said that and how he never would see her.

A month and three days later, I would end up getting a call from a sibling's significant other that my dad had another stroke. This time it had been fatal. I had been visiting my boyfriend out-of-state and was on my way back. I was just outside my state's border when I had gotten the phone call. The toll booth which was basically the entrance to my state was there, visible to my eyes. I cried because I had lost my dad and cried because I wasn't there. I had been there for my mom and I had wanted to be there for my dad. I felt guilty because I had left. I had enjoyed myself. The first time in months I hadn't lived at a hospital or eaten hospital/fast food. I hadn't fretted or worried or stressed. I should've been there with him.

Two months later, I'd receive a call from one of my dad's children from his first marriage, telling me that I had lost a brother. He had always been a very...emotionally powered person. He felt so much more. He'd gone through a lot, losing one girlfriend he had planned on marrying because she left him. Another in a car accident. He'd gone on to be a chef and meet famous people. He partied and drank...a lot. I suppose it was his outlet to not feel. Anyway, he'd been in and out of rehabs a lot. The last one, he'd felt so good about because he felt like they finally got to the core reason of his problem. I guess he thought he was cured. He had one last hurrah and ended up falling down a flight of stairs. Because of the way he hit, he'd have seizures for the rest of his life. He was living with his mom to get himself back together. He ended up having a seizure while going down the stairs in the home and...died.

It's hard to express how much this affected me. It was like...I wanted to cry (and I did), but it was hard to? Like, I felt so disconnected and angry and confused all at once. I'd lost my mom and my dad and now my brother.

It wasn't until I'd experienced all of this that I realized just how final death is. How harsh it is. How badly I want to talk to my parents, ask them questions, ask them how they're doing. I still feel as though I'm a bad daughter and just not talking to them. That all I need to do is pick up the phone and there they will be. How I expect to talk to my brother and have him tell me about his adventures.

The following autumn, a year after everything had started, I lost my uncle too. My mom's brother. The baby of their bunch. He'd had cancer, but it had been looking up and he'd been doing so well. We had believed he was going to kick it. Then it had reversed so harshly and he was in so much pain almost all of the time. It had seemed so quickly too.

It's so hard to talk about sometimes, because it's SO MUCH at such a small time frame, that I feel like I'm only asking for sympathy or sometimes that's all I feel I get when I talk about it. I just want them to feel alive still. To talk about them as people. Though, when I do, it's some of the hardest and guttural emotions that I feel. I want to talk about them, but I hate it at the same time. I can talk about what happened a lot easier than I used to, but to talk about them like they're alive hurts. Reading people's memories of them or hearing them talk about memories brings the tears so quickly.

I've gotten to where I don't start bursting into tears at random times of the day as frequently as I used to. I moved away, out of state, to where my boyfriend is originally from. Which has helped a lot. I used to help take my dad to appointments (he got macular degeneration quite a few years ago and was legally blind) and other errands he needed and all of those places seemed to haunt me. Even where I worked seemed to haunt me. Everything seemed to haunt me.

Now, it's more of a missing. I just miss them. Part of me wishes almost to moving back there. I miss the rest of the family. All of my siblings and extended family. My friends. It's harder though, since I've got my boyfriend who is in the budding part of his career. It's something we've talked about, but not seriously.

I'm really glad this place is here. To talk with others who have felt the same one way or another in their lives. If I could hug you all, I would.