Life happens...

The title of this blog can't nearly contain all of the craziness and insanity, but at the same time, it sums it up perfectly.

The crazy thing about life is that you can go from extremes in just a few minutes.  For example, hot to cold or dry to wet, blissfully happy to completely devastated.

That's where I am, completely devastated, but just a few hours ago, I was happy and life was great.  My sister and brother-in-law adopted 3 little boys and it was official on Thursday.  On Friday was the party, and it was a blast.  Saturday morning, they went through the temple and were sealed together as a forever family.

Now as I write this, I'm just coming home from the hospital where I just watched my dad die.

Words cannot explain the complete and total shock that I'm feeling right now.

Last night, I got to hang out with my dad and step mom at the party, today we had lunch together and then he came over to check out my apartment and chat, then he went over to my sister's house for a few hours.

Suddenly I'm getting a call that he passed out and is on his way to the hospital.  While I waited to hear which hospital, I really wasn't thinking this could happen.  A few minutes later, I got the call and headed over.  I just figured that he'd had a complication with his oxygen tank.  While I was sitting in the waiting room with my stepmom, sister and brother-in-law, we talked about what to do next, but we could only wait till we had news.

The first time the doctor came out he told us that there had been a heart attack and he'd gone into cardiac arrest but that they had been able to get his heart going again.  Fifteen minutes later they came back and said they it had stopped again and things weren't looking good so they brought us back.

I will never forget watching the extremely dedicated nurses and doctors do everything they could to save him.  There were several nurses and techs rotating doing chest compressions, trying to get his heart started. As I watched them and looked at my dad, everything was so surreal.  On TV shows they always show the hospital staff as frantic and I don't know how they were acting then, but by the time I saw them, they were calm and collected and very professional.

With my dad intubated and hooked up to all kinds of machines, he looked so small.  Part of me kept thinking, "he's only sleeping, he'll wake up any moment and we can go home, everything will be okay" while the other part of me was watching the staff and knowing that they knew he wasn't going to make it.

Surreal is the only way I can explain the feeling.

The doctor called his death at 12:01 this morning.

I'm not ready to be without my dad.

After he passed, they took us to another room for a few minutes and they cleaned him up and put him in another room so we could spend some time with him.  It was hard seeing him like that.  They hadn't been able to take the intubation out, so it was in him when we got into the room.

I touched his hand and arm and realized how smooth they felt, he did have really good skin.

It reminded me of when my brother passed away.  I never saw him until the funeral, after he had already been embalmed.  His skin was really hard, but there were two spots, one on his arm and one on his face where the skin was still soft.

I made one of the worst calls of my life, I had to tell my aunt that my dad, her brother was dead.  I've had a few of those calls, the ones that come in the middle of the night, waking you up from a perfectly good dream. I hadn't ever planned on me behing the one to make that call.  She was in shock and couldn't even understand what I was saying.  I know exactly how she felt.

21 years ago, when my brother died, I received that same call.

The call that you're life will never be the same.

How do you go on when all you feel is such complete sorry?  How do you get up each day and move forward?

Right now, I'm about out of tears for the moment, but I know there will be a lot of tears over the next little while.

I know that he wasn't a perfect dad, but since I don't know of any, he was in pretty good company.  I know that he loved me and I know that his last day was good.  He spent it with his family and got to hang out with all of his grandkids.

I don't know how I'm going to tell them that he's dead.

Life goes on and I know that I will be okay as I come out on the other side of this, but for right now I'm numb and in shock.

I was able to spend a few minutes in the room alone with him after everyone left and I got to say goodbye.  Leaving him alone in the room was the one of the hardest things I've ever done.  I'm just glad that I was there and able to say goodbye.  I know that he's having a great reunion on the other side right now and that someday, I'll see all of my family that waiting for me too.