It was five years ago today that my father walked into an operating room to have a kidney removed and died a few hours later. He bled to death in the recovery room when the clips on his renal artery came off. Our questions about how that could happen were never properly resolved.
I can still see him walking away with the nurse, that big childlike grin on his face as he made wise cracks designed to leave the hospital smiles in stitches as they both walked through that set of double-hinged doors. He loved to laugh -- and to make others laugh. We'd been told that even as he had woken groggily in the recovery room that fateful morning, and just before he slipped away forever, he had started joking with the nurses again.
He did his best, I suppose, to leave them laughing.
Five years and it still feels like yesterday. Five years and the pain is still just as fierce. Five years of wanting just one more laugh with him. Five years and I miss him just as much.I'll be tipping a beer back tonight, not in celebration of St. Patrick's Day, but in celebration of you, Dad. And I'll do my best to make as many people as possible smile or laugh as I can today.
6 comments:
Great post Mark. I've lost a parent and I can relate to the pain. It never seems to go away.
Good for you for celebrating him!
Sounds like our dads were very much alike. He too always had a smile and joked around. Like me, he liked to flirt with the girls, to make them feel good. I miss him a lot too.
I'm toasting to your dad right now.
i hope the laughter came easily and i hope it had a bit of healing in it.
What a lovely tribute to a clearly beloved father.
Sounds like my kind of guy indeed. It sounds like there's a great deal of him still alive in you buddy. I hope that beer went down well.
It's funny how time has the strange ability to make the good things blur a bit but the bad stuff seems immutable sometimes. Take care.
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