Survival Mode

Ironic.

I just got home and now my Dad is back in the hospital. This time things may be worse than we thought. I am told my Daddy may have just months to live.

And I'm lost.

I feel confounded, if that's the right word. I just can't seem to get my bearings. I feel like I've switched into survival mode or something...I'm just numb all over, but feel this horrible ache in my heart that sometimes produces tears. I just sat in front of a picture of my Dad holding me when I was a baby in my hallway tonight and cried for what might have been ten minutes or an hour.

Here they come again.

Thank God Jeremy is home, but now, I may be having to leave him again. How can it be that I have to go through this alone? How can it be that my Dad will never know my children, that they will never know him? It just seems unfathomable to me. Invincible, unshakable, crazy, eccentric, maddening, tender, complex, renown, one-of-a-kind Dad is about to end (whether it be months or a year or two from now, it's about to end)...this presence in my life--this man so much a part of me--is going to leave me and pass into memory. Memory is such a poor composite for a man so full of personality and spirit and history and life. Where he will go in the life to come, I don't know for sure...the best I can do is have faith that God will answer my prayers to not let him die until he's heaven-bound. That's the best I can do--talk to the One that decides what happens. It just feels so helpless, all this talking.

I don't know what to say or what to do. I'm stuck here for the next two weeks unless I travel between weekends (I have committments) and that just seems so daunting to decide about when I can barely remember to eat and drink water.

I don't know what to say.

I'm just trying to survive this when I feel like I'm dying.