Dad
1941-2006
US Army, 1960-1963
I miss you, Dad
Happy, and respectful, Memorial Day.
Showing posts with label Grandpa Calvin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grandpa Calvin. Show all posts
Monday, May 25, 2009
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Update
Thanks to all of you for your kind notes regarding my dad. I still swing back and forth between bafflement and denial --- even when you know it’s coming, or suspect it’s coming, I don’t suppose anyone is ever ready to lose a parent. He never walked on the moon, or discovered the cure for cancer, or made a million dollars ….. but he DID honor his roles as loving husband, public servant, and devoted father and grandfather. If all men could do such things, this world would be a better place indeed.
Brayden and Kellen are taking the news well. I’m not sure if that’s because they never lived close to him, so haven’t quite realized what exactly this means, or because they’re the most egocentric kids on the planet. Which, given their ages, might be perfectly normal, or might be a sign we’re raising sociopaths.
Kendrie, on the other hand, is devastated. Again, perfectly normal, or maybe she has a greater empathy due to her cancer journey …. Who knows? She was inconsolable upon hearing, and the only thing that seemed to help was the suggestion she (and all the grandkids) draw a picture, or write a note, or find some small thing, to put in the casket with him. She immediately grabbed a ceramic angel that she had made with the intention of giving him this Christmas. She drew a picture and rolled it up inside the statue, and carried it around non-stop until I suggested she put it on a table to keep it from being dropped and broken.
Fast forward to late-yesterday afternoon. I have a cold, and had taken an antihistamine …. and being the lightweight I am, had gone to bed to sleep it off. I was laying there, in that just-before-you-drift-off-to-sleep stage, when from the other room I heard a CRASH, and then a blood-curdling scream. Frightened someone had hurt themselves, I sat straight up in bed, flung the covers off, and was half-way out the door when I heard Blaine yelling, “I can fix it …. Kendrie, I can fix it!”
Yep, you guessed it, the angel got knocked off the table and broken. I confess, I just couldn’t face the tears, and left Blaine to deal with it on his own. And we are now the much-more-careful owners of a cracked, glued, and fragile angel … but one which will be making the trip with us to OKC tomorrow.
Thanks, especially, to those of you that are keeping my mom in your thoughts. In the span of eight weeks, she lost her dog, her dad, and now her husband. The jury is still out on which one she’ll miss the most.
(In the event you found that to be a totally inappropriate comment, let me assure you that my dad would have laughed if he heard it. And if you still think it was inappropriate, I’ll just claim mental instability due to grief. But trust me, he totally would have laughed. And probably put his money on the dog.)
And so, under the “Bad Things Happen in Three’s” Umbrella, we are declaring a moratorium on crappy things happening to both our immediate and extended family for the rest of the year. Nobody else dies, nobody else gets cancer, nobody else gets trampled while trying to feed a circus elephant. (OK, so that last thing hasn’t happened, but the way things seem to be going for us, doesn’t it seem like it might???)
And lest any of you think we really, truly ARE shit-magnets, let me remind you of all the wonderful things that have happened to us this year:
Kendrie has been off-treatment for six months with no problems whatsoever!!! She had her bloodwork done again this week and everything looks fine. She’s swimming like a fish, and is reaching the point of desperately needing a haircut.
Blaine made it through his radiation treatments. Yeah, they pretty much SUCKED, but he did it while managing to avoid a feeding tube, and only losing fifteen pounds. He’s back at work half-days already and while I won’t deny there are days he feels like total dog shit, for the most part, he has done fantastic!
We got to be a part of welcoming Baby-Nicolas into the world less than two months ago …. A true blessing, for those hard-hearts who don’t think there are happy endings.
Our family might be dented and dinged a little around the edges, but we are intact and we’ll muddle our way through this as well.
In the meantime, think of us while we’re flying home. I swear I’ll have a breakdown if I meet up with Mr. Seat 17C again.
Best wishes to all of you as well.
Brayden and Kellen are taking the news well. I’m not sure if that’s because they never lived close to him, so haven’t quite realized what exactly this means, or because they’re the most egocentric kids on the planet. Which, given their ages, might be perfectly normal, or might be a sign we’re raising sociopaths.
Kendrie, on the other hand, is devastated. Again, perfectly normal, or maybe she has a greater empathy due to her cancer journey …. Who knows? She was inconsolable upon hearing, and the only thing that seemed to help was the suggestion she (and all the grandkids) draw a picture, or write a note, or find some small thing, to put in the casket with him. She immediately grabbed a ceramic angel that she had made with the intention of giving him this Christmas. She drew a picture and rolled it up inside the statue, and carried it around non-stop until I suggested she put it on a table to keep it from being dropped and broken.
Fast forward to late-yesterday afternoon. I have a cold, and had taken an antihistamine …. and being the lightweight I am, had gone to bed to sleep it off. I was laying there, in that just-before-you-drift-off-to-sleep stage, when from the other room I heard a CRASH, and then a blood-curdling scream. Frightened someone had hurt themselves, I sat straight up in bed, flung the covers off, and was half-way out the door when I heard Blaine yelling, “I can fix it …. Kendrie, I can fix it!”
Yep, you guessed it, the angel got knocked off the table and broken. I confess, I just couldn’t face the tears, and left Blaine to deal with it on his own. And we are now the much-more-careful owners of a cracked, glued, and fragile angel … but one which will be making the trip with us to OKC tomorrow.
Thanks, especially, to those of you that are keeping my mom in your thoughts. In the span of eight weeks, she lost her dog, her dad, and now her husband. The jury is still out on which one she’ll miss the most.
(In the event you found that to be a totally inappropriate comment, let me assure you that my dad would have laughed if he heard it. And if you still think it was inappropriate, I’ll just claim mental instability due to grief. But trust me, he totally would have laughed. And probably put his money on the dog.)
And so, under the “Bad Things Happen in Three’s” Umbrella, we are declaring a moratorium on crappy things happening to both our immediate and extended family for the rest of the year. Nobody else dies, nobody else gets cancer, nobody else gets trampled while trying to feed a circus elephant. (OK, so that last thing hasn’t happened, but the way things seem to be going for us, doesn’t it seem like it might???)
And lest any of you think we really, truly ARE shit-magnets, let me remind you of all the wonderful things that have happened to us this year:
Kendrie has been off-treatment for six months with no problems whatsoever!!! She had her bloodwork done again this week and everything looks fine. She’s swimming like a fish, and is reaching the point of desperately needing a haircut.
Blaine made it through his radiation treatments. Yeah, they pretty much SUCKED, but he did it while managing to avoid a feeding tube, and only losing fifteen pounds. He’s back at work half-days already and while I won’t deny there are days he feels like total dog shit, for the most part, he has done fantastic!
We got to be a part of welcoming Baby-Nicolas into the world less than two months ago …. A true blessing, for those hard-hearts who don’t think there are happy endings.
Our family might be dented and dinged a little around the edges, but we are intact and we’ll muddle our way through this as well.
In the meantime, think of us while we’re flying home. I swear I’ll have a breakdown if I meet up with Mr. Seat 17C again.
Best wishes to all of you as well.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Grandpa Calvin
It is with an extremely sad heart that I come to you tonight to tell you of the passing of my dad, Calvin Ray M. Although I realize 99.9 percent of you that follow along with this journal never knew my father, or met him, you have been a wonderful source of support for my family during good times and bad, so it wouldn’t feel right to keep this news to myself.
We knew he was terribly ill when we were home last month. He had been in poor health for years due to his muscular dystrophy, but still managed to get around pretty well at home with my mom. Although we had planned the trip before he became sick, I was so grateful, in hindsight, for the chance to be there and spend a little time with him; near what we worried might be the end. He had been hospitalized for several weeks and was on a ventilator when we arrived. Communication was very difficult, and I know he was frustrated attempting to talk to us. We tried to get him to write things down, but his handwriting is such chicken-scratch that we always joked he should have been a doctor. The grandkids also got to visit him, but couldn’t do much more than hold his hand and talk to him. What a blessing it was when our last day in OKC, they were able to remove the tube and I got to visit with him one final time. We shared about an hour together, and even chuckled a few times. The final words my father and I spoke to one another were “I love you” and “I love you, too”. I will cherish that until the day I die, and would wish that peace for everyone.
I could give you the typical obituary details: survived by his wife of forty-five years, Betty; two daughters, two sons-in-law, and seven grandchildren who adored him. Army veteran, serving four years in Germany, and physically there when they built the Berlin Wall. Twenty-year veteran of our local Fire Department before retiring.
But, I’d rather give you a few tidbits to pay tribute to him as the wonderful man we knew him to be:
Grandfather-extraordinaire
Lover of hidden word puzzles
Lover of country music (and not the current, modern stuff, either. We’re talking Hank Williams ORIGINAL!)
Sneaker of Pecan-Sandy cookies
Pack-rat
A sense of humor so dry it made the Sahara Desert look like a tropical rainforest. One of his favorite phrases was to respond to the question, “How are you feeling?” with a totally straight-faced, “With my hands”.
Devoted father. My sister played high school basketball, and my dad absolutely hated to miss her games. If she played a local game on a night he was on duty, it wasn’t unheard of for him to bring the fire truck to the gymnasium, just so he could watch and still be “on duty”. As for me? I was a band geek, and couldn’t tell you the number of hours my dad worked as a Band Booster Parent in the concession stand, serving up nachos and cokes at basketball games.
Proud landscaper. He loved nothing more than working outside in the yard, and was very proud of the fact our lawn was the nicest on the block. An older girl in the neighborhood was a cheerleader when I was in elementary school. She used to come to our house and ask my dad if she could practice her gymnastics on our lawn because we had the softest grass of anyone around. Do you have any idea how big his head used to swell when she did that?
My dad wasn’t in any community organizations or civic clubs. Didn’t serve on any boards or professional organizations. Rather, he lived a very quiet life, helping provide for his family. He would rather spend time with his grandkids more than anything else, and they were all seven his pride and joy. Whenever we would send him a new wallet-photo of one of the kids, he refused to discard an old photo. So he wound up carrying around this huge pile of pictures in his pocket, until I finally took them from him and made him a small scrapbook. My one regret is that my children have never lived near him, so their memories of him will be mostly photos, also.
I have two favorite quotes that I will always remember my father saying. One of them I can’t print here due to vulgarity laws, but it makes me smile every time I think it. The other, which is so quintessentially-Calvin, was what he would protest every time we caught him sleeping (and often snoring!) in his Lazy-Boy. One of us would holler, “Dad, go to bed if you’re going to sleep!” and his reply, every time, was a very indignant, “I’m not sleeping, I’m praying for the astronauts.”
And that, my friends, was my dad in a nutshell.
Daddy, I’ll miss you, and I love you.
We knew he was terribly ill when we were home last month. He had been in poor health for years due to his muscular dystrophy, but still managed to get around pretty well at home with my mom. Although we had planned the trip before he became sick, I was so grateful, in hindsight, for the chance to be there and spend a little time with him; near what we worried might be the end. He had been hospitalized for several weeks and was on a ventilator when we arrived. Communication was very difficult, and I know he was frustrated attempting to talk to us. We tried to get him to write things down, but his handwriting is such chicken-scratch that we always joked he should have been a doctor. The grandkids also got to visit him, but couldn’t do much more than hold his hand and talk to him. What a blessing it was when our last day in OKC, they were able to remove the tube and I got to visit with him one final time. We shared about an hour together, and even chuckled a few times. The final words my father and I spoke to one another were “I love you” and “I love you, too”. I will cherish that until the day I die, and would wish that peace for everyone.
I could give you the typical obituary details: survived by his wife of forty-five years, Betty; two daughters, two sons-in-law, and seven grandchildren who adored him. Army veteran, serving four years in Germany, and physically there when they built the Berlin Wall. Twenty-year veteran of our local Fire Department before retiring.
But, I’d rather give you a few tidbits to pay tribute to him as the wonderful man we knew him to be:
Grandfather-extraordinaire
Lover of hidden word puzzles
Lover of country music (and not the current, modern stuff, either. We’re talking Hank Williams ORIGINAL!)
Sneaker of Pecan-Sandy cookies
Pack-rat
A sense of humor so dry it made the Sahara Desert look like a tropical rainforest. One of his favorite phrases was to respond to the question, “How are you feeling?” with a totally straight-faced, “With my hands”.
Devoted father. My sister played high school basketball, and my dad absolutely hated to miss her games. If she played a local game on a night he was on duty, it wasn’t unheard of for him to bring the fire truck to the gymnasium, just so he could watch and still be “on duty”. As for me? I was a band geek, and couldn’t tell you the number of hours my dad worked as a Band Booster Parent in the concession stand, serving up nachos and cokes at basketball games.
Proud landscaper. He loved nothing more than working outside in the yard, and was very proud of the fact our lawn was the nicest on the block. An older girl in the neighborhood was a cheerleader when I was in elementary school. She used to come to our house and ask my dad if she could practice her gymnastics on our lawn because we had the softest grass of anyone around. Do you have any idea how big his head used to swell when she did that?
My dad wasn’t in any community organizations or civic clubs. Didn’t serve on any boards or professional organizations. Rather, he lived a very quiet life, helping provide for his family. He would rather spend time with his grandkids more than anything else, and they were all seven his pride and joy. Whenever we would send him a new wallet-photo of one of the kids, he refused to discard an old photo. So he wound up carrying around this huge pile of pictures in his pocket, until I finally took them from him and made him a small scrapbook. My one regret is that my children have never lived near him, so their memories of him will be mostly photos, also.
I have two favorite quotes that I will always remember my father saying. One of them I can’t print here due to vulgarity laws, but it makes me smile every time I think it. The other, which is so quintessentially-Calvin, was what he would protest every time we caught him sleeping (and often snoring!) in his Lazy-Boy. One of us would holler, “Dad, go to bed if you’re going to sleep!” and his reply, every time, was a very indignant, “I’m not sleeping, I’m praying for the astronauts.”
And that, my friends, was my dad in a nutshell.
Daddy, I’ll miss you, and I love you.
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