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Has it only been three years?

Has it already been three years?

So much has happened that it has to have been that long since the last time he was with us, since the morning we spent around his bed, holding his hand, waiting, watching. So much that it must have been that long or longer even.

In some ways it seems like decades have passed.

In others, it seems like he was just here.

This is the first time that this day has arrived when my mind hasn't been occupied somewhere else, worrying about her, my mother, nervously wondering how she would cope with it all this time around. The first time without the phone calls and messages left and awkward exchanges and wondering if she really was okay and her never being even a little bit concerned about me and her minimizing whatever I was feeling because she always felt more, hurt more, needed more.

This is the first time that I can grieve for me.

Without the distractions.

Without being worried about someone else.

Without being told that my grief wasn't big enough.

It's calming, actually, this place that I am in now.

It still hurts, but the edges of the pain are dulled a bit. The memories come now and they wash over me and leave me with a smile on my face rather than the heartache they used to leave behind.

I have learned a lot on this journey through life without him. He taught me so many lessons, some of which I did not even realize at the time. Some of them are still coming back to me now, all these years later, like the one about spilling the milk. 

He taught me to be strong, to be resilient. He taught me to speak my mind, to lay out my arguments so well that people couldn't find the holes in them. He taught me to love music, to love the time I spend behind the wheel in the car, to love with my whole heart. He was the first to call me a writer, and I know he'd be prouder of me right now than anyone else could ever be.

I miss him. I miss him every day.

As I begin a new journey in my life, a familiar one, but one that I'm embarking on this time without him, my heart aches.

It hurts for all the things he won't be here to see, for all the moments without him. It hurts for the times he won't share with us.

Then a part of me knows that he is still with us.

He lets me know from time to time.

I have a feeling I'll be seeing a lot of him in the coming years.

I will welcome those moments. I will drink them in when they come. I will let the memories in, I will learn the lessons, I will be grateful for the chance to have been his little girl.


I miss you, Dad.

I love you.

Yesterday was World Cancer Day.

This past Sunday, as I was watching the Superbowl, a commercial for World Cancer Day, paid for by Chevrolet came on the screen. I fought back most of the tears but couldn't hold them all. What I wouldn't give for one more drive with my Dad. He was a car guy. He taught me to be a car girl. Some of the best times I had with him in those last weeks were on a drive.


I was with him the last time he sat in the driver's seat...
the last time he gripped the steering wheel...
the last time he felt the accelerator grab...
the last time he rolled the window down...
the last time he shut the door...

Last week, the Surgeon General released a comprehensive report on the use and danger of tobacco over the past 50 years. Since the first report was issued, more than 20 million people in the United States have died from tobacco related illnesses. Smoking continues to decline, sitting at 16% of the population today. There are more former smokers than current ones here in the US now.

A week before the report was issued, Eric Lawson became the fourth Marlboro Man to die a tobacco related death, succumbing to COPD caused by a three pack a day habit stretching back decades.

Tomorrow is my birthday. That morning in 2011, though he was getting weaker by the moment, my father announced that we were going to breakfast to celebrate. He was the one dying, I was the one having the birthday, and he told me that it all seemed wrong because I'd given him the gift that year by coming to help him at the end. Around the table that morning, him and I, my mother (also gone now, in part because of cigarettes), my brother, his wife, their son and my virtually adopted brother. I had no idea it would be the last time. I had no idea he'd be gone four days later.

February 10th will mark three years here without him. Without his wisdom, his guidance, his love. Three years since I have heard his voice, his laughter. Three years.

My father didn't saddle up and ride off into the sunset.

Neither did The Marlboro Men.

I don't care what the ads promised.

They lied.

My father, these ad men, thousands more each year, all their lives ended too soon, ended painfully.

Gasping for air.

Quite often still addicted to the very thing killing them.

For my Dad, it was lung cancer that spread to his blood, his bones, his liver...and then everywhere.

The Marlboro Man was invented in the mid 1950's, when smoking was advertised to every man, woman and child as something sexy, something desirable, something social. The Marlboro Man was created as an advertisement for Philip Morris in an attempt to sell Marlboros, which were filtered cigarettes and at the time, considered feminine. The reason they started pushing the filtered cigarettes was a simple one, really...they knew that cigarettes were dangerous, they just mistakenly believed that filtered ones were safer. 

The tobacco companies knew cigarettes were dangerous then in the 1950's. They knew it before they created this advertising icon. They knew it before they packaged it, distributed it and sold it. They knew it before they told an entire generation of men that the only way to truly be rugged, manly men was to do it with a piece of paper containing addiction and poison rolled up between their lips.

The executives knew cigarettes were addictive before smokers and their families started suing the tobacco companies. They suppressed documents, they escaped liability in countless lawsuits claiming that cigarettes were safe, that they did not cause cancer, that the smokers assumed the risk anyway.

How that all wasn't deconstructed just doesn't make sense to me. If there was nothing dangerous, what exactly could the smokers be assuming the risk of? The companies themselves said their products were safe.

And an entire generation of smokers believed them.

By the time smokers realized just how dangerous smoking was, they were addicted. Hooked. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin and cocaine.

And the tobacco companies knew.

And they denied it anyway.

They denied it because they made money from their lies. They became rich at the hands of people crippled by addiction to a product they vowed was safe. They profited from sickness, from death, because even in their last days, most smokers can't quit.

The companies weren't able to completely escape liability in later cases and have been forced to pay out billions of dollars to compensate states for health care costs.

That won't bring my father back.

Nothing will.

If I sound angry, it's because I am.

I want to go on another drive with my father.

I want to sit around a breakfast table one more time.

I want to hear his laugh, see his smile, just one more time.

Most of the time, I am a writer who vigorously advocates for others, who tries to raise awareness, who shares stories, who exposes injustices.

Sometimes I'm just a girl who misses her Dad. 



I love you, Dad.

I miss you every day that goes by.

I miss you more right now.

I'm not high.

Promise.

I've still never used marijuana. AND I LIVE IN COLORADO, YOU GUYS.

You know what though???

I love Taco Bell.

Love it.

I'm not in college anymore, though I have fond memories of being crammed with far too many people into far too small of a car to make late night runs...only to have us all wake up the following morning telling crazy ass stories about the dreams we had with bellies full of tacos.

I don't love it because the food is good, and certainly not because it's anything close to the authentic Mexican food that I grew up loving in Southern California - you know, the kind where you walk roll out of the restaurant having gained ten pounds. Ahhhh.

Let me just have this moment, you guys.  (I've been trapped in the land of green chile sauce for 9 years)

One of the great downsides to moving away from SoCal is that I moved away from places like that. It took us eight years to find a decent Mexican restaurant here and the honest truth is that my cooking is damn close to even that one decent restaurant.

Y'all haven't lived until you've had my beans. For serious.

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about Taco Bell, and it will be. I just needed to have my moment of culinary reflection.

The Bell.

Aside from being hella cheap, I love it. I especially love the Doritos Locos tacos with Fire sauce. Nom.

Most recently I found a reason to adore the Bell because my teeny tiny son, the one who has fallen off the growth chart on for weight a few times, discovered the crunchy Taco Bell taco. He loves the crunchy Taco Bell taco. I feel less guilty about letting him eat them as a parent since they have to put actual meat in there now instead of whatever the hell it was before.

Please don't tell me. I'd really rather not know.

My love of the Bell is longer standing than this recent adoration of the crunchy taco though. It goes back over fourteen years now.

You see, Taco Bell did something no other place could do.

It made my husband eat. It kept him from dropping too much weight too fast.

When he was diagnosed with cancer and learned that he would have to go through fairly intense radiation to his abdominal cavity, we knew right away that it was going to mess with his entire digestive system. He'd already started dropping weight, weight that he didn't really have to drop back then, and it was going to get worse in a hurry. The nurses gave me all kinds of weight boosting ideas, gave me coupons for nutritional drinks, I tried everything I could think of and he wouldn't touch any of it.

A few days in (radiation was daily), we adjusted to the fact that he'd have a one hour window every afternoon, right after his treatments. That was the only hour of the 24 that he'd be even close to hungry. And he wanted Taco Bell.

Specifically, he wanted bean burritos.

He ate one a day for the rest of the time he was in radiation, and most of those days it was the only thing he kept down. I didn't argue with him too much because I figured there were worse things in the world he could eat. It had protein and carbs and cheese, and most importantly, it sounded good to him and he kept it down.

It became so routine that the car just drove itself there every day and the employees started to anticipate when we'd be by.

Ten years later, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. The chemo was hell, the radiation on top of it made everything worse, but that glorious neon bell in the sky came to the rescue again.


He didn't want to eat much, but he craved Taco Bell.

We'd learned not to ask questions long before then.

When we were there to visit, every time we went out, I just brought some home. When I left to take care of him at the end, any trip I made out included a loop of the drive-through. I tend to support the theory that he had digestive fondness for it because when he first started his business and was broke as hell, the lab was right behind a Taco Bell.

Like the muscle memory of a well trained athlete, his body craved what it knew.

Or something like that.

I know it's fast food. I know that calling it food probably isn't entirely accurate. I know it's terrible. I know that the meat wasn't entirely meat for like ever. I know that the shells have GMO corn. I know all that.

I know. So please don't preach at me. I know.

And you know what?

I still freaking adore the place.

Always will.

I'm pretty sure that the food is laced with magic fairy dust....but I'm still not asking any questions.

Dear Dad,

I've been thinking about you a lot lately. It always seems like this time of year makes me think about you more than I ordinarily would. Your birthday, the holidays, the drama.

The garbage disposal that always stopped working when there was a house full of people, like clockwork, and how you'd have to put in the very expected emergency call to the plumber, a family friend, and how he'd always end up eating just a little bit and taking some more home with him.

There are times that I wondered if you did that on purpose, you know.

I know that his life wasn't easy, that he never had enough to make the ends meet. I know that he wasn't a great plumber, but he was lucky to have a friend who always needed him in a pinch, then sent him home with something more than money.

He was lucky to have you.

We all were.

I miss you, but you already knew that.


This year has been a tough one. I'm hoping that you and Mom are together now and that whatever hurts were in the past are gone. I hope that all the rest of it has dissipated now and that the good is left. I hope she's finally at peace now.

I hope.

I hope that I didn't let you down. I don't think I did. I don't think you would have ever asked me to do what I did, what I felt like I had to do. I think that you would have told me to walk away sooner than I did. I believe that to be true. I don't know, though, and that unknowing hurts.

The wondering.

I know that you wouldn't want us to feel like we failed you. Or her. Or anyone.

I try to push it away, really, I do.

This grief thing, it's hard. I see it now. I knew that you weren't in a good place when you lost your father. Your brother. Your mother. I understand it now. You spent so much time being the strong one, and I feel like you passed that on to me. I have to be strong because I just have to be. It's not worth discussing because there's nothing to talk about. It just is.

This week has been hard. It won't get easier. I know that.

I won't have the anxiety about waiting to catch you or Mom on the phone, of waiting for it to ring, of timing it right. I won't feel torn about where I should be anymore.

I'll just be.

Here.

I know that is all you ever wanted for me. To be fully present in my life, to live in the moment, to stop fussing over the past, to stop worrying about the future.

I'm here now, but without you.

And that's not fair.

Life never is. That lesson you tried so long to teach me, I've learned more now than ever.

When you came to visit us here, you spent so much time wandering around outside, staring at the sky, at the mountains. You told me that you hated that I moved away, but that you understood. You knew me so well, back then. Better than I even knew myself, I think.

Thank you for that.

Thank you for everything.

I'll be here this week, right where I should be. I'll be fully present and I won't feel any guilt anymore about where I'm not.

At some point, though, I'll talk a walk outside and stare at the sky, look towards the mountains, and say hello.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

I love you.

Yesterday, little boy dropped a full glass bottle of milk on the tile floor.

It shattered, and the spill radius of milk fairly sufficiently covered most of the kitchen and dining room.  It took a good long time to clean it up. The whole time his little feet were running back and forth to the laundry room to grab more towels.


Every so often, he'd stop and stare at me for a second, fidget with his hands behind his back and quietly ask me if I was mad.

I always told him no. Of course not.

Then I'd ask him in return to make sure that he didn't have any cuts on his feet and to stay back so he didn't step on the glass.

He was afraid he was in trouble.

I was afraid he was hurt.

As I sat on the floor in the middle of the afternoon using the light streaming in from the windows to make sure I got every tiny shard of glass, I remembered.

When I was a little girl, as Mini-Me is now, I tended to overreact about little things just like she does. I would spill milk, rarely, and the first few times I remember doing it I cried. Literally, I cried over spilled milk. 

One night at dinner, my Dad spilled his milk on purpose, just to make a point.

He waited and watched for my reaction. 

He didn't react at all. He just sat there. I was confused. I was probably about the age Mini-Me is now.

After a while of this bizarre silence, us sitting around a table pooled with milk, he shrugged his shoulders then got up and grabbed some towels. He asked me to help him clean it up.

Mom, on the other side of the table, held the plates up and wiped everything down with a wet dishcloth.

When it was all cleaned up, they both just said that sometimes life is messy. There's no point getting upset about little things like this, just clean it up. 

They didn't freak out. They didn't cry. They weren't angry. They just fixed it.

How much in life is like this? How many things do we spend time worrying about, being upset about, being angry about, but do nothing to fix them? How much energy do we waste on the things that don't deserve it, how many things can we just seek solutions to instead of over thinking?

Probably a lot more than we realize.

As I sat on the floor scavenging for the last pieces of glass under cabinets, it all came back, this lesson my parents taught me so long ago.

Sometimes life is messy. Don't worry about the small stuff. Just clean it up.

You never really appreciate how right they are in the moment, maybe not even for years or decades afterwards. These people, though, they had far more wisdom than we realized. Those lessons, whether we realized we learned them at the time or not, they're in there. Sometimes it just takes spilling the milk to remember.

Mom always said that if it wasn't going to matter ten years from now, then it shouldn't be a big deal now. There is a lot of truth in that, and it's something I try to remember as I parent my own children. Far too often we get caught up in the minutia of life, spend too much time worrying about the stuff that isn't worthy of so much attention.

I finished wiping the floor down, thanked my parents for the lessons they taught me, scooped up my little boy and went on with my day.

November is an emotionally loaded month for me, always has been.

I do okay for the first couple of weeks, still coming down off my Halloween high, then the end of the month starts to get closer and closer and closer.

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays filled with family drama and emotional baggage. All the feelings.

This year will be different though, because it just will.

I know that going in.

It will be different because both of my parents are gone. The guilt about not being where I feel like I should is gone. There are no more heart wrenching phone calls. No more wishing I could be in two places at once. No more regretting moving far away, no more second guessing what things might have been like.

It's just, well, over.

Thanksgiving is always hard anyway because my father's birthday falls during that week. He wouldn't want us to be sad, so we try not to be. We tell stories about the silly things he did, we eat cherry cheesecake, and we usually break out National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation since it was always one of his favorite movies, and one that we got the green light to watch once Thanksgiving was over and done with.

Thanksgiving is also hard because it was the holiday that motivated my mother to get out of the hospital after her first amputation. She wanted to be here, with us, and she was. Nothing else about that time, the years before, or the years after would be simple and easy, but for that moment in time, she and I wanted the same thing. We both worked hard to make it happen. She was here, with us, around the table that year.

I'm not conflicted about where I should be anymore. There's no one left to tug at my heart to go other places. No one that I need to try and call over and over and over again until I can get through. No messages I am waiting for.

I won't have to explain to the kids why we couldn't be somewhere else with someone else right now.

We can just be here.

We can just be.

Maybe this is the silver lining in the clouds of grief. Maybe this is the reprieve from the sadness and loss. Maybe this is the thing that comes in and fills the void left by those who are gone.

Maybe this freedom to live fully in the moment without second guessing myself, to be fully present instead of wishing I could be in another place, to be entirely here and now, maybe this is the gift hidden in grief.

We spend so much of our lives trying to do the right thing, to be the right kind of people, to make the right choices, to please those we love. We do this for many reasons, not the least of which is that as a child, no matter how old we are, we never want to disappoint our parents.

I don't have anyone to disappoint anymore.

It's freeing, in a bizarre way that I sense only those walking the earth without parents anymore can understand.

I can just be here.

I can just be.

Without regret.


I can be where I should have been all along, where I needed to be, where I was almost all the time, but I can be here without regret now. 

That is a gift.

It's one I didn't want, this is true, but it's one that I am grateful for anyway.

Not actually, of course.

Before this gets weird, I must remind everyone that the man I am married to bears absolutely no relation to anyone in my family except by marriage, and that my father died two years ago.

And yet, a few nights ago, when my husband took the kids upstairs at bedtime to help brush teeth and tuck them in, I heard my Dad.

Someone had left a window open for the sole purpose of air conditioning the outside.

Someone else had left all the lights on just to run up the electricity bill.

I laughed, because I grew up hearing the same things from someone else a long time ago. Posted a status to that effect on my Facebook page, which elicited many comments from people experiencing a similar phenomenon.

My 24th birthday - 2001 My Dad on the left, husband on the right.

At some point yesterday, my husband said something about how my comment upset him.

A bit confused, I asked why.

He assumed that any comparison between him and my father was bad.

I shook my head. Quite the contrary.

Then I looked him in the eyes and asked him a few simple questions, ones that he should be well equipped to answer having known me over twenty years, most of that time having my father as a presence in my life.

Have I ever acted like anything my father did was wrong? Have I ever talked about things he did in a negative way? Have I complained about him?

He replied that I hadn't.

Then I asked him another question. Then why would you assume it's a bad thing that you're like him?

He understood. Or at least I think so.

My father was a good man. He was far from perfect, this much is true. There were rough times in my childhood and adolescence with him. Sometimes he drank too much, sometimes he yelled too much, sometimes he wanted me to stay young and naive so badly that he tried to control me too much.

Looking back on it all now, with the knowledge and perspective I have now, not just as a parent myself, but with a fuller picture of how his life actually was, I understand. Considering all the things he had to deal with, not just in an episodic way, but on a daily basis, I understand.

He was actually quite remarkable once you put the pieces together, once you see everything he had to do, everything he had to live with from his past. The fact that he was able to keep it together almost all the time says something profound about who he was.

We never fought for long, him and I, not even when I was a teenager. We both had tempers, we both argued, we both fought, but we both would wake up the next morning knowing that it was a new start and that at the end of the day we struggled so much because we were so alike.

My father had a much greater sense of family,of duty, of obligation than I ever appreciated when he was still here. I see it now because of how much things have changed in this world without him.

I've had more than a few moments since he left us that I realized just how amazing he really was.

All the same could be said about the man I built my family with.

And so, I hope that when I say something about how my husband reminds me of my father, he understands that it comes from a place of love and respect. It comes from a girl who misses her dad, and smiles when she hears something her father used to say to her come from a different voice. That the comparison can never, and will never be anything but a compliment.

It seems at times that I'm officially married to my father, and that's not a bad thing.

Not at all.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that somewhere out there, because of this, my Dad smiling right now.

Do I believe in ghosts? Maybe.

I definitely think that when some people go, there are things left unresolved, an energy that lingers long after they are gone.

If you don't believe in ghosts and are completely sure they are imaginary, then I dare you to get locked in the boiler room of the Queen Mary alone at night. That actually happened to a friend and I, when we were there for a haunted house on Halloween one year. Somehow we got separated from the rest of the group and ended up somewhere we weren't supposed to be.

I don't recommend doing that on accident, by the way.

I've had a few very vivid dreams of my Dad since his death, the kind where you wake up and are totally convinced that whatever just happened was real. In one of them, he was warning me that something was going to happen, and that thing he warned me about actually happened the next day. There was an urgency in his message, such a forced communication that I woke up drenched in sweat and crying.

If it wasn't something that I had accurately been warned of the night before, I could just dismiss it as a dream and nothing more.

Then there are all the times that something happens. The song, the silver Camaro, the heart in the sky. Sometimes they all happen at once, and I become overwhelmed because those are the times when I need them the most.

I never used to believe in signs until I started to see them around me.

Does that mean he's a ghost? I don't think so, per se, but I think there's pieces of him still here sometimes.

Through the strange magic of the Internet, he's still here too. Literally.

He's over there ====>

He was the 20th follower on the blog. He had to create a gmail account just to follow me, and for anyone who understands my father's limited understanding of technology, it was a big deal. Except he didn't tell me he was doing it. He didn't ask me what he needed to do to follow me, or how to set up a gmail account, he just did it and appeared in my sidebar one morning.

He read everything I wrote from that moment forward.

He was the one who made me believe I was a writer.

If a day passed when I hadn't written, he'd call to make sure everything was okay. He didn't just read the posts, he read them. He figured out what I meant when I was being elusive and cryptic. He saw through the humor and wondered if I was alright. He could feel my worries and concerns, from a thousand miles away through a computer screen.

He's still there.

He's still there because when you die, you live on forever on the Internet. His email accounts, his Facebook page, all of it, his personal property.  I alerted Facebook of his death over two years ago They were supposed to somehow change the account after confirming he was gone so that he doesn't show up in searches anymore and people can't friend request him, but I don't actually know if that was done....because Facebook can't tell me anything about his account.

Every once in a while, I still click on him.

His profile picture was one of him and my mom with my four kids, on the steps of my house the day that my son was baptized. It was the last picture I would ever have of him here.

yes, the oldest is giving his sister bunny ears.

It was the last time he would visit. The last time I would sit with him in my kitchen and drink coffee. A year after that date, we were on our way to see him in California, just weeks after he was diagnosed.

I wonder sometimes if it's better not to know when a time like that will be the last.

I just know that I miss him, even if, in a strange virtual way, a piece of him is still here, cheering me on from the sidebar.

Three years ago on Easter, I was back home in California with my parents and my children.  Dad was still here and he was fighting the cancer.  He'd grown his mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore cancer beard.

He looked so good that week.  So good.


I spent a lot of time yesterday reflecting on the past. I looked up at the sky and saw a heart shaped cloud.  Knew he was there.

He tends to do that when I need it.

Then I started to think about how giving he was at the end, how much he cared about everyone else, how much he went out of his way to help other people through his death.  It really was remarkable to watch, and I consider myself blessed to have been a part of his life.

I've written before about what he did in those last few weeks, mostly before many of my readers were here.  I'll share this piece of him with you again.

I went home for his last three weeks.  Once he was put on hospice, I left to go back.  I knew it wouldn't be long, and so did he.

He had very clear ideas of what he wanted to take care of before he was gone.  Some of it he did alone, some of it he needed help with.

Some of it will stay with the people he touched forever.

Almost eleven years before my father died, he lost his oldest brother Donnie in a freak car accident.  A girl, high and drunk, crossed the center median and hit him head on one morning while he was driving to work.  From one second to another, he was just gone.

He was laid to rest under weeping cloudy skies, the 21 gun salute piercing the morning stillness. Military funerals really are the worst.

My dad, with the white shirt in the middle. Uncle Donnie, second from the right, next to Grandma. I want to say this picture is from '93?

His death hit everyone in the family hard.  So sudden, completely unexpected, totally unfair.  He was young and handsome and strong, then he was just gone.  No opportunity to say goodbye to anyone.

When my dad was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, he refused to accept the death sentence he was given.  He fought and fought and fought, until he knew it was time to let the fight end.  I had many conversations with him those last few weeks, and we talked about Donnie a lot.  He didn't want the family to go through that again.

Under false pretenses, we asked them to come to the house and visit with him.  He was running out of time and he wanted to see them all, we said.  His sisters and brothers, his nieces and nephews.  Almost all of them made it.

Some came individually, some came together.  Some came more than once.  Others moved in and camped out in the living room with us for a few nights. On one day, we gathered in the garage with almost everyone around a cooler of beer and told the same old stories over and over again.  We laughed and laughed and laughed.  It was as though it was just another reason to celebrate, another party, another holiday.  Like old times.

He talked to them all, he smiled and thanked them all for coming to see him.

There were a few tears, but not too many.  He told them jokes, he shared laughs, he told them not to be sad.  He mended fences. He buried hatchets. He said things to people that had gone unsaid before, he listened to what others told him.

He held their hands, asked them to take care of one another, look out for each other. Told them he loved them.  Reassured them all that he was okay.  That he was going to be okay.  That they were going to be okay.

He kissed them goodbye, hugged them for the last time, waved to them as they pulled away in their cars.

He didn't do it for him.  He did it for them.

He was exhausted and worn out afterwards.  It took everything out of him for a few days.  For the vast majority of them all, it was the last time they'd ever see him.  The last time they would hear his laugh and see his bright blue eyes.

He was glad to see them, of course, but he did it for them.

He did it for love.

His last, greatest gift to them all.

It was beautiful to watch.

It's snowing today.  There is already about 4 inches on the ground, though it is hard to tell exactly how much.  It's one of the sideways snow days with high winds and huge drifts.

We were originally planning to go down to Denver today, hit one of the museums.

Instead, I'm sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee, watching the pre-race festivities for the Daytona 500.

This is a big deal you guys.

I haven't watched NASCAR since my Dad died.

It was his thing.  It was never my thing, but it was something I would happily sit with him and watch whenever I got the chance.  We knew that if we were with Dad on any given Sunday, there would be cars driving 200mph around a track on a tv somewhere.

He left us a week and a half before Daytona two years ago, and I'm sure he would have rather held on to see it one last time.  Daytona is the first, the biggest, the best of them all, though he always liked watching Sonoma almost as much because it requires the drivers to turn right - something they don't do so well with.

I used to give him a hard time about it.  I used to wonder aloud all the time how he could watch the same thing for hours and hours and hours.

He loved fast cars. He taught his daughter to love fast cars.  He took us to races as kids.  We wandered the pits together.  He opened it up on empty roads. He laughed when I told him about racing cops in marked cars in the T-Bird we had when I was a teenager.  He laughed even harder when we took the governor out of my daughter's Barbie Powerwheels Jeep and she spun the tires bald.

This isn't a picture of his, but the closest I could find to his Camaro.

He cringed at the wrecks, and losing Earnhardt was rough on him.  We watched that accident as it happened on television together, at this race in Daytona in 2001.  Like most people who know anything about the sport, that accident just seemed wrong to him.  To me. It wasn't that bad.  It didn't seem that dangerous.  There were so many others, so much worse.  Then just like that, Earnhardt was gone.

My Dad wasn't a big sports fan for much else.  He never waited for opening day of baseball with anticipation, he could take or leave professional football.  He loathed the NBA.  There were three things sacred in his living room.

College football, PBA & NASCAR.

Today, I'm letting NASCAR back into my house.

Rooting for Dale Jr. to get it back.  Watching Danica make history.  Trying to make small talk about the drivers with my husband.

Missing him.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.

NASCAR is back.

There are portions of the year that are just a bit more emotional for me.  The second half of January and the first half of February fall into that category.  They'll probably always stay that way.  I am grateful that I came upon the story I wrote about yesterday for the simple, selfish fact that it distracted me from what I was really thinking about. 

Two years ago, yesterday, I woke before sunrise.   I arrived at the airport just before dawn and watched as the sky grew full of magnificent colors and light from the bridge to the terminal.  I knew where I was going, and I knew why.  I'd spent the prior two weeks making the preparations to leave.  I knew that the time was near, and I knew I would have to go.

My father was dying.

Though I was never able to fully explain it to anyone then or now, I just knew that it was time for me to go.  He had been told the day prior that the cancer had grown far more aggressive, that the tumors now infiltrated both his lungs and his liver.  That the chemo he'd just been given hadn't made a difference. 

He had two oncologists.  One was a realist.  At first my parents hated that man, with his somber talk of staging and time.  They didn't ever want to hear what he had to say, because they wanted to cling to whatever tiny piece of hope they could, even when it became obvious that the hope was slipping away.  The other oncologist, different.  He was the guy who never let you believe it was over.  The one who gave unending hope, let you hang on to that chance of making it, even if it was less than 5%.  He was the guy who'd let you keep fighting even when your body screamed at you to stop.  He was the guy who'd let you go out in a blaze of glory, even if he knew it would never make a difference.

I am grateful, so grateful, that my father had them both.  They balanced each other.  Sometimes he needed one, sometimes he needed the other.  And then, one day, the first told him the fight was coming to an end.  The second offered to load the cannons again. 

And he was done. 

He was ready to stop fighting.  He was tired of being sick.  He accepted that his time with them was done, and hospice was called.

I flew home the morning that hospice came.  The flight was hard, harder than the one I'd made the year before when he was in respiratory distress and in the ICU.  Harder than the flight I'd made home after he was discharged and settled.  This one was harder, because I knew it was the last one.  I knew.

I knew that even though they said he might have six weeks that he didn't, and I knew I had to go now.

I had always known this day would come.

My brother picked me up that morning, and the look on his face told me that it was bad.  Worse than it was when we'd left just two weeks earlier after spending Christmas back home.  He was right.

Dad was curled up in a ball when I got there.  Almost catatonic.  I suspected that it wasn't the cancer, but the medications.  I talked to the hospice nurse, and we devised a plan.  We'd take him off all of it, save the pain meds, adjust the dosages of those, and see what happened. 

The next day, he was back.  He was alert.  He was talking and laughing.  He was smoking pot in the garage and eating entire jars of peanuts.  He was drinking margaritas with us on the patio. 

He spent some time most afternoons out there, oxygen tubing snaked through the house.  Out there, he could just be.



I had some tough conversations with him that first week, some of the hardest discussions I have ever had in my life.  I had to sit him down and witness the DNR paperwork.  I had to be the one in the room when he asked the doctor what it would feel like to die.  I had to ask whether he wanted to be alert or knocked out.  I knew that to keep him alert, he'd have to exchange some degree of pain, as the cancer had progressed so much, but I left that in his hands. 

He asked me to do whatever I could to keep him alert for as long as I could.  And so, the dance began. 

When cancer affects someone's liver, it completely changes how they metabolize everything, including medications.  Every day required adjustments.  Sometimes tranquilizers, sometimes anti-anxiety meds, sometimes sleeping pills, sometimes more pain meds.  All of it changed, every day. 

I was a walking alarm clock, sometimes with ten different alarms set a day for medication.  I took him to work, then hung out in the parking lot until he was ready to go back home.  He wanted to go, but he wanted me there.  So, I did it. 

I carried nausea medication, ativan, oxycodone and morphine in my purse as if that's something normal people do.

I slept in fifteen minute increments, I kept my glasses on all the time so I could peek across the room and check on him.  The agitation always got worse at night, and it made me nervous.

He wanted to see his family, so we made that happen.  They all came, save a few.  The night two of his sisters spent the night and we all camped out in the living room is one I will never forget and will always be grateful for.  He made time for the people he needed to.  He made one last delivery run for work.  He made amends for the past, he held the hands of his brothers.  He comforted them, he comforted us all.

He worried that I was missing my family back home, he urged me to leave if I needed to.  I told him that I was there to help him for as long as he needed me.  We had an understanding.

The morning of my birthday, even though the night before had been a rough one, he got up and showered and dressed, then announced we were going out for breakfast.  Told me that even though it was my birthday, I had given him the gift that year.

He was gone four days later.

I had been home less than three weeks.

I miss him every day, and this experience changed me in so many ways.  The lessons I've learned I have tried to pass on to anyone starting down this path.