Dads Gone

My dad died late last week. Luckily I visited him the weekend before he died and got the chance to tell him that I loved him and how much I'll miss him. Knowing that I did get to do that has helped immensely. I wished my sisters and brothers had the same opportunity. You could tell who had the chance and who didn't during the funeral. Explaining the death to my daughter was tricky. A while back we had a guinea pig die and I had to explain that the guinea pig took a trip to heaven and liked it so much, that she didn't want to come back. So that is the way I explained my father's death to my daughter. I think that helped her a lot. I loved my father. He was a great man. He was respected by everyone I knew. He was suffering before his death, so it has been relatively easy to deal with his death because he is no longer in pain. He was sick for quite sometime and my mother and sister were taking care of him. I could see that taking care of him was really taking a toll on my mothers health. Plus my sister was doing the duties of being his nurse. It is one thing to nurse someone who you are not that close to. It is quite another to nurse your own father knowing that his health is going. The strain of keeping a smile on your face each day while your dad is slowly dying has to take a toll. In the last few weeks of his life, Hospice came in. Hospice was a god send. It made it so my father died peacefully in his sleep and without pain. I put this in this blog to let dads know a little about how to deal with the living after the death of someone close to them. It affects your kids, your family and everyone that knew the person who passed away. Now I'm trying to decide to go back into work. I just plain don't want to today. Yesterday I did some chores for my mother that my dad usually did. That seemed to have a soothing affect on me. Oh, another reason I put this into this blog, dads - go see your dad while you still can!