One year ago today I got the call.

It happened in a less than ideal fashion. I was at work on a conference call with a vender who was giving us a hard time. I did not want to be on this call. My dad was doing much worse, he had gone from 250 pounds to about 130, maybe 140 in a matter of weeks. I should have known the call from his blocked number would be important, but I usually talked to him everyday — everyday for the last six years… I’d call him back I thought.

I went through the damned meetings and then checked my messages. It was my grandma, telling me that he was gone. Even though it was long expected, my heart still sank to a new low it had never known…

I had seen him just two days before. For the first time in a long while he was in high spirits. We were watching TV, which is what we did and was certainly all he could do in his weakened state. By then, he was on a gurney Hospice had provided him, but he wasn’t hooked up to any tubes, just sort of doped-up because of the constant pain.

It was a marathon of one of his favorite cartoon network shows: The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. It was actually a movie they’d made called “Billy and Mandy’s Big Boogey Adventure” which was co-written by my friend Nina.

Dad was in such high spirits that he actually sang along with the fart song, which he found hilarious.

After the movie, it was time for me to go. I don’t remember if I gave him “the last hug” — I’d given him so many in the past couple weeks (that’s the thing about slow cancer, is every time you say goodbye the last?), but as it turned out, that was the last time and I never saw him nor heard him alive again.

The next day was Monday and when I called him, Grandma answered and said he was sleeping or just too woosey to talk. The next day, the day he died, I called in the morning and again, Grandma answered and said he was sleeping… then I had my meeting a couple hours later… and then I got her message that he never woke up.

I’m not sure why I waited an entire year to really tell this story publicly. I still cannot believe it has even been a year, everything for the past year has sort of gone numb.

Then there was dealing with his extremely messy room, going through his stuff, finding old love letters to my mom, old wallets and trash — the man never threw anything away.

Grandma wanted to wait until January for a wake of sorts… she wanted some time I suppose. Grandma is one helluva woman. She still works, she’s tough as nails and hilarious as all hell. And yet, this is the second child for her to lose. She’s outlived both of her children. I can’t even imagine how that must be.

Mom had lost her father not one month earlier and the date, October 16, the day I’ll always remember (and yet, I put it in my calendar for some reason), is to my mother, the most significant date in her life. Her mother, whom I never knew, died on October 16, she was married to my dad on October 16, and now, the father of her child and I’d venture the love of her life despite them being divorced, died on October 16. I cannot imagine how she must feel today. I’m afraid to call her.

For me, well, I’m callous, logical and calculating. My great-grandmother (”GGMa”) died and I don’t remember being too sad about it. She was definitely in my life and I remember crying about her impending death when she got diagnosed with some degenerative tumor in her gut or whatever it was. But she carried on for a few years after they said she’d be gone. So when the day finally came, I felt more relief than sorrow.

In a way, I feel the same way about my dad dying. He was diagnosed, now, seven years ago. They told us it would be slow and indeed it was. What they didn’t tell us is how we’d basically be robbed of the man we knew and loved for those six years. Sure he was still alive and still my dad, but the disease changed him — not so much physically, thought that certainly happened, but rather emotionally and psychologically. The thought of dying terrified him and totally changed him.

The days and months that followed I was very aware that the memories I had of him were hardly from the previous six years. Those years were ignored. I wanted to remember him the way he was before he was diagnosed. I’m still angry at the world for taking my father away and teasing me with six years of a half life. I’m probably exaggerating, but it’s how I remember it.

From this day last year, that sense of relief and sadness turned into a need to flee. A need to just get out of here. True, even in his half-life, my dad would get scared if I left town and wanted me to be near him. When he died, almost immediately, and it’s hard for me to admit this, but I felt a sense of new found freedom. But maybe that’s only convenient and maybe what I really want to do is just run away…

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