But it's been a particularly brutal summer for me and my family after my dad passed away.
It all started about 10 years ago, my dad had an aortic dissection (basically a tear was discovered in his aorta and it had to be patched up) which caused him to have a stroke. While the surgeons were in there, they gave him a double bypass and put an artificial piece into his aorta to fix the tear. After a long recovery, he was back to normal... or so we thought. About a year ago, we noticed dad wasn't his normal self - he struggled to make the Monday evening tennis matches that he loved so much, he was out of breath often, he became forgetful to the point where we all became frightened. Yet, his cardiologist claimed everything was fine. So we pushed my dad to exercise, eat right, and work harder at taking care of himself. Little did we know, the artificial piece in his aorta had sprung a leak.
My mom brought dad to every doctor - the gastroenterologist, pulmonologist, psychologist. The list goes on and on. But when my dad went to the neurologist, he noticed scary low levels of potassium in my dad's system and rushed him to the ER. With the correct amount of potassium being pumped into him through an IV, dad's memory was suddenly back but he remained so so so tired. A week's worth of testing at St. Francis Hospital on Long Island confirmed a really difficult to reach hole in the aortic replacement piece. The surgery was a complicated one, and for it, my dad was taken to Weill Cornell Medical Center (a place I am very familiar with). By then my dad's kidneys had started to fail and it was a cause for concern. His last words to me before he headed into that first surgery were: you're a very good daughter. And I'm eternally grateful for that.
Dad came back from the day long surgery in good condition. He was squeezing hands and responsive. But then things took a turn for the worse when they noticed he was bleeding and had to open him up again. He never really came back from that second surgery. My dad took his last breath with me, my mom, and my brother by his side praying.
The funeral was a blur. I read a eulogy that my dad had prepared months earlier - a beautiful poem about how thankful he was for the years he had that he entitled "Don't Cry for Me."
In the month since, I have struggled to keep it together. I find my mind drifting back to the winter when I was in Vermont, a state dad loved so much. Dad went to camp there as a kid and even attended UVM for his undergraduate studies. I long for the phone conversations with my dad about my growing love of Vermont. I wish I could call him and tell him about the retreat my work team is going on there this summer. My heart breaks every morning when I wake up and every night when I go to sleep.
Losing my dad has shaken the ground under my feet. I have never felt such a deep hole in my heart. I will always think of the words dad chose to live by, a little poem my grandmother used to recite for my dad as a kid: "Live for those who love you, for those whose hearts are true, for the heavens that shine above you, and the good that you can do." I try to live by those words too. I hope I make dad proud.
