Topic: Life
It's always been a mystery to me how I could be surrounded by people and feel completely alone... and lately, I have felt more alone that I ever have.
It isn't as though I don't have people close to me that I could pour my heart out to, yet it is my pen or keyboard that seems to be the ear I feel most comfortable to bend right now.
Our closest friends know that Ken's father died last Thursday, but don't know the depths of it. The unsurpassed ugliness of it.
Ken's father was not sick. He had not suffered a long battle with an illness. He spent that Wednesday with his eldest son, his namesake, working on a mobility scooter for a friend of ours whom he had never met. That night, he and his wife Bev went to bed like they always did.
We received a phone call around 4 am from Ken's mother that his father had stopped breathing. Within minutes of being on the road to his parent's home, we were notified that the paramedics had stopped working on him and that he was not going to be transported to the hospital. That it was over.
I'm 41 years old. I've received many phone calls over the years telling me that someone has passed away (By the way, I despise the phrase "passed away" as it sounds disingenuous and trite). There was always a somber voice on the other end of the line telling me when the viewing and funeral was. Typical really. But this time it would be anything but typical.
When we arrived at his parent's house, we were greeted with the sight of police cars and an emergency vehicle with lights flashing.
We did not walk, We ran as fast as we could through the front door of the house.
His mother looked so small and pale as she sat in her husband's chair in the living room in her robe and slippers. I'm not even sure that she saw us at first. Like us, she was completely in shock... but for her, I suspect it was much more vivid.
Ken and I were told in a very professional sounding tone by one of the officers that we were not allowed to go back to the master bedroom. It was at that moment I realized that Ken's father was still in the house.
Ken and I held his mother as tight as we could.
Blue uniforms marched in and out of the front door, giving hardly a glance to any of us. I could see the coffee table that usually sat at the end of his parent's bed jutting out like a splinter in a sore out of the bedroom door. Out of place and disturbing. I battled back the questions, but they were flooding my head.
After about 30 minutes after we arrived an investigator came over to talk with us. It's kind of a blur. I remember the words "standard procedure" and something about it being typical that police investigate when someone dies suddenly in their home. I do remember feeling a tinge of outrage that Bev was being made to go all through all this at the cusp of the unexpected death of her husband. Procedure be fucking damned.
I don't know how much time passed after that, but eventually that same investigator told us that a coroner had been called and would be arriving at the scene momentarily. He gave his opinion at that point that Ken's father had most likely died of some type of coronary arrest due to purpling that was on his chest and the small amount of vomit around his mouth. He went on further to say that he believed it to be sudden as his hands weren't clenched, but relaxed at his sides.
He told us that his people were finished and that if we wanted to we could go back and see him. Bev didn't want to. I asked Ken if he wanted to and he quietly made his way down the hallway and looked through the doorway at his father. It's not that I didn't want to see him, but in my mind he wasn't there anymore. Whatever remained in that room was only a shell.
I caught a glimpse of his bare legs and small feet from the bathroom doorway. His legs were already beginning to turn blue. I remember being amazed at how such a big man could have such small feet. But, he had contracted Polio as an infant. He had never walked without crutches and at the end he had been completely confined to his mobility scooter.
I felt ashamed at myself for seeing even that much of him. With just that brief glimpse, I knew that he was not dressed. That he was in nothing but his underwear. I felt like I was disrespecting him somehow by seeing him in that state.
I shifted my sight up from the floor and saw the bed. Disheveled, a pool of urine on his father's side of the bed.
I wanted to feel sick, I wanted to feel horrified... all I felt was numb.
The coroner finally came and after evaluating the condition of his father's body determined that he had suffered an pulmonary embolism. As a result of his inactivity, blood had pooled in his legs and feet causing a blood clot that most likely traveled to his lungs and into his heart. It had been instant.
We then had to wait for the funeral home to come and remove the body of Ken's father so that they could begin preparing it for preservation (embalming).
Ken's father was over 300lbs. Two men, one of them quite small were all that the funeral home sent over. So Ken, with the help of his cousins Mike and Mark, had to help them lift his father's uncovered body from the bedroom floor to the gurney. I was silently enraged that Ken had to be involved in such a gruesome and painful task.
They had to use Ken's knife to cut the sheet they were using to lift him because it got snagged on the bottom of the doorway and the one the funeral home people then used it to cut the breathing tubes free of his father's mouth.
The moment his father's body was removed from the room and covered up with a blue velvet shroud. I seemed to go into auto-pilot. I was overwhelmed with the drive to clean up the bed before more family arrived at the house. Bev was too fragile, and Ken needed to be near her as something solid to lean on. I made up my mind that I had to do it.
I set to stripping the bed and removing the soiled sheets, and used scrubbing bubbles to scrub every inch of the top of the bed. I didn't think about what I was doing, or mull it over, I just did what needed to be done.
Ken removed the balloon and tube that the paramedics used to try to resuscitate his father from the bedroom dresser. I don't know why it was left behind.
It was one of the longest days and quietest days I can ever remember. Even the periodic sobbing from loved ones seemed oddly muted.
Even though my heart ached for Ken and his family every time a tear was shed, I felt empty somehow. Like whatever it was I was personally feeling about a man I loved and respected was lost somewhere else. Even now as I write these words, I still feel that way.
I'm not a family member. I'm not a family friend. I don't know what I am.
The only feeling that seems to be overwhelming me at the moment is a sense of being utterly alone.
Ken is a part of a very big and very close, tight-knit family. If I weren't here he would have his siblings, cousins, and his mom there beside him in this very painful time. He isn't lacking for loved ones who would willingly and gladly offer their shoulder to him.
All of them are there if ever he needed to talk about his feelings and to share his grief with them,
On any other occasion I would talk to Ken about my feelings, my sorrow. A man who was my best friend long before we were ever romantically involved. But this time, I can't. He's too close to the situation. It is his father, the man he loved dearly and admired who is gone.
Since that horrible Thursday, I have felt like a reluctantly tolerated outsider from little things that have happened, certainly not spitefully or even consciously I don't think. To be fair I have been a raw open wound since his father died and I can't really trust my reactions to anything right now. Everything hurts, no matter how insignificant.
I don't feel I have a right to mourn or to cry. Every time I break a little and the tears start I feel like I am being selfish and inconsiderate and I get angry with myself, I feel like I should just suck it up and that me feeling whatever I am feeling is insignificant to what Ken and his family are feeling right now.
I tried once to talk to Ken about how I'm feeling, but it turned into an argument as he is understandably very protective of his family right now and he saw my hurt as an attack on them. I didn't mean for it to be, but we just aren't in the same place right now. Our view of the world right now is from completely different sides of the equator I think.
Realistically I feel like I am on a whole other planet all unto myself.
A very deep part of myself is afraid the pain and the confusion affecting both of us will rip us apart rather than pull us together. We just can't seem to be able to connect right now and are miles apart though we are in the same room together. It's horrible and I have been physically sick to my stomach for days.
If it breaks us, I suppose its not meant to be. But I cannot bear to even think about that right now. I'm barely hanging on as it is.
I feel like just one more grain of sand on the scale and I will completely tip over and everything will break apart.
Damn it! Why is it so easy for me to silently type all this ugliness out and hide within myself if anyone close to me encourages me to talk to them about this? I am such a fucking coward.
I tell myself its to spare them the discomfort of being drawn into my problems, but deep down I know that is bullshit. I know that after all these years of building walls around myself they've grown too thick and solid for me to build a door at this stage in my life.
I never meant to isolate myself, but that is exactly what I've done.
Thank Goddess hardly anyone reads my blog. I know how pathetic I am being right now and there just seems to be no end to it and grows more vivid with each passing moment.
Just shut up, Jade. Shut up.