These Gray Days 3/1/2012

My Dad died a week and a day ago, at 11:42 PM on 2/21.  I was with him, my sister Ruth was with me, with him.  All of my siblings, except my one brother who lives near my Dad anyway, moved to Seneca, SC and camped out at his house, for almost a month.  It was a month lost to us and seared into us.  It was a month when the five middle-aged Hugh Little siblings would be together as we had not been together since the late 1960s in the old house on Powder Springs Road in Marietta, GA where we all, mostly, came of age. It was the first time we had all shared so much home space since the years before our mother's death of cancer at the rather young age of 47.

February 21, 2012, RIP, Hugh Little

It had been a little over three weeks since we got the call that our Dad had suddenly (though not really suddenly, more like gradually, except the finality was sudden) lost use of his legs while eating out with friends (though not really friends, just the girlfriend) on Saturday evening, 1/28.  I got the news that he had been taken to the ER at Oconee Co. Medical Center the following morning, on Sunday 1/29.  It was his heart, he was admitted to the Critical Care Cardiac Unit. We just knew, and expected, that it was his heart. So on 1/30, at 4 AM, I left my home in Mountain View, CA to board a plane at SFO to travel to ATL. I thought I knew what we were facing.  What we were facing was that our Dad would have to accept that his independent lifestyle, his living alone, and driving his car, would have to end. My return flight was for 2/19.  This was surely way more time than I would need for the decisions that would need to be made.
 
In the ATL airport, I was sitting outside of the baggage area, I was waiting for my oldest son from Dallas, TX who was flying in to be with me. He was on a later flight. We were being picked up by my daughter from Marietta, GA. The three of us were driving up to SC to see my Dad, to meet my siblings there, to figure this out.  All five of us siblings, there, and two of my grown children.

In the ATL baggage area, while waiting for my son, while talking on the phone to my daughter, that's when the call from my daughter was interrupted by a call from my sister, Ruth, reporting on the news that she had gotten in a call from my brother, Paul. It was a call that would transform my life and shape each day through 2/25, the day of my Dad's funeral.  It was the news that a CT scan had revealed that our Daddy's brain was filled with cancer tumors and that, indeed, his whole body was filled with stage 4 cancer tumors.  That was on Monday, 1/30 at 7:30 in the evening, in the ATL airport, near baggage claim.

On Thursday, 2/1, Hugh Little, my Dad, was moved to a room in a really beautiful hospice, the Hospice of the Foothills.  It is located next door to his church.  Both his church and the hospice are built in that nouveau Craftsman style, and they are a beautiful 15 minute drive down a two lane country road with just one turn off, that twice crosses over Lake Keowee, from his log home on Lake Keowee that he mostly built, to the hospice. It is a hospice that he had donated quite a bit of money to be built, after his second wife (not our mother) died with in-home hospice care, in the home where we were camping out.  It was a room he would never leave in this life.  It was a room where my life changed by the hour as I, we, stayed with him as he quickly and slowly slipped away from us.

So now it is over, he has safely crossed the River Jordan.  And it is chilly and cold.

This short story of the dying of Hugh Little is a long one.  This is just the beginning, the first installment.  It is a story with intrigue, and ins and outs, and days without hours, and hours without end.  This is just the overview, the explanation.  It is in this way that I will work out these gray days.