Where I’ve Been

It’s funny, reading my last post – all that about wanting to freeze time, about knowing terrible things were around the corner, it’s almost like I knew something bad was going to happen. A few weeks later, my dad died.

When he died I basically had a six-week-long physical panic reaction. My heart raced, my chest hurt, I couldn’t breathe. I felt as safe in my own body as he had been in his. I was terrified to be home with my son all day, because if I too dropped dead then my kid was definitely going to hang himself in the curtains or get himself eaten by the dog. As I was emerging from that, Seattle was plunging into its annual Big Dark Season and my brain kind of put me in low battery mode. I did what I had to do, and not much else. I named this blog Denise Resting because I believe we should prioritize rest and we don’t. Well, I prioritized rest in the months that followed. I often took naps when my son did, even though I had other things to do, because it felt like what was needed most. Or it felt like the easiest thing, and maybe that’s what was needed most.

I stopped writing here because I felt like I needed to write something about my dad dying but I never did. I do intend to keep this space going, but changed. I’ve deleted most of my old posts. I’m wary of the “lifestyle blog” space and miss when people just blogged for fun, when they were about community, when personal websites were a little bit ugly. I’m not here to build my brand, to make a few cents selling some Amazon garbage and call myself a “small business owner.” No affiliate links. I’m just here for the beautiful, disgusting human experience.

Anyway, I wanted to post about my dad, so here are a few funny things about my dad dying:

• A playground opened in my neighborhood, a block from my house, and I had no idea it was even under construction. It’s kind of a dead end back there, so we never went that direction. It felt like the most wonderful gift possible, and we didn’t even have to spend months waiting impatiently for it to open. It simply appeared there! That’s where I was when my mom called, frantic, saying paramedics were trying to revive my dad. I saw her name pop up on my watch as it vibrated, and I was pushing my kid in the swing, and he was laughing, and now my mom was going to hear the sound of my kid shrieking with joy on the swing! We’ve probably been back to that playground two hundred times since then, and it still reminds me of that phone call.
• I spent that first night at my mom’s house, not wanting her to be alone. I remember I had just been thinking that Kyle should spend a night alone with our kid so he could see how much goes into keeping him alive a full 24 hours. I was imagining something fun for me, like all my friends piling up on the floor of somebody’s house and listening to Beyonce all night like we used to do when we all went home drunk all the time, but instead it was me sleeping on my mom’s couch because my dad died. Anyway, I desperately wanted to get my mom’s mind off things – impossible, of course – and all I could think to do was put on Love Island.
• Before my dad died he’d been hospitalized with pneumonia. He was very sick in the hospital, and I actually thought he was going to die while he was there. At one point he was septic and hallucinating, talking about dogs that were long dead. He recovered and was discharged, and for a full week my mom didn’t leave his side. Then she had to leave for her own doctor’s appointment and he was dead in his recliner when she got back. Anyway, before he was discharged from the hospital I went to see him and brought donuts for the staff. I did what Reddit said and brought a second box specifically labeled “for the night shift.” My mom was there too, and she was talking about this new donut shop they got in their town, and about how the best donut is called “better than sex,” but how she didn’t know if she thought it was really better than sex. I remember thinking, how wonderfully absurd to be hearing this, here with my parents. That was the last time I saw my dad.
• My mom had some bananas ripening on the counter because she wanted to make banana bread for my dad. After he died, she had no use for the bananas. She knew I made banana muffins for my kid, and wanted me to take them home so they wouldn’t go to waste. I didn’t get around to baking the muffins for a few days, the day he was cremated as it turned out. The muffins got cooked the same day my dad did! My dad would have thought that was funny, but nobody else did at the time.
• I needed something to do in the evenings that would keep my mind somehow both occupied and empty. My husband and I decided to rewatch Brooklyn 99, and it was perfect for that. Over the following months we watched it in its entirety. I was relieved to find that the final season, where they tried to reconcile being a cop show and Black Lives Matter, wasn’t actually as painfully bad the second time around.
• The thing I had really wanted to write about, regarding my dad, was about his teeth and how he had started saying he was tired of living. His parents both spent the final decades of their lives complaining about their various ailments, about how much everything hurt, how they just wished they could go to sleep and not wake up. When my dad started saying the same things early last year, I thought about his teeth. My dad had had several dental implants, and was in the process of getting a few more. I don’t know why he needed them. What I do know, though, is that that shit’s expensive. I remember thinking he must not really want to die, nobody’s going to spend all that money on new teeth if they don’t plan to use them for a while.
• On that same note: when he recovered from the hospital and got to go home, he seemed grateful to have made it through. He knew how close he had come to death. I got the sense he realized, through that experience, that he wanted to live. He acted like he wanted to live. I’m glad he got to be a person who was happy to be alive again.
• His last text to me, the day before he died, felt in retrospect like a goodbye. I had sent him a video of my kid doing something funny, and this is what he said: “I love the job of being a daddy, you don’t get to have that job long enough. Seeing joy on the little one’s face is the best thing in the world as far as I’m concerned.”
• To thank my mom for staying by his side that whole time at the hospital and after, he ordered her flowers. He loved sending flowers to my mom. They were delivered the day after he died.