Dad

When I was 3, my mom remarried.



My siblings and I were the product of her first marriage. It ended before I can remember and was upgraded by a willing father figure and an older brother, and we were all much happier for it.

I remember the first time I called Danny “Dad”. He was backing out of the driveway and I called “bye Dad!!”; he slammed on the breaks and ran up with the biggest, goofiest grin on his face and asked, “What did you call me?” I thought I was in trouble until the threw me up in the air and caught me and spun me around.

Dad is a mechanic. At our house in Argyle, he had a shop that was a safe haven of warmth and sunshine and rock n roll. Mom banned music in the house except Christian and country, but looked the other way when Dad introduced us to AC-DC, Collective Soul, Queen. He would work on cars while I read manuals he didn’t need out loud to him, halting and faltering over technical terms. If I didn’t feel like reading, I crawled on the cherry picker and rolled around on the creeper, getting in the way and handing him tools. I loved the smell of fresh lumber, so he’d take me with him to Home Depot to pick out scraps for my projects. With a tennis ball cut in half and glued to a piece of sandpaper, I would smooth my little chunks of wood, hammered nails in crookedly.



Through Dad, I learned a lot about practical knowledge—how to work with your hands, finish what you start, use your manners, and be a good person. Danny had firm expectations of how we ought to behave and enforced them strictly, from coming promptly when called to proper table etiquette to respectful attitudes to everyone you meet, but he allowed a great deal of space for us kids to be individuals. He wanted us to think for ourselves, come to our conclusions on matters. When I asked him about baptism, he gave me a factual definition of it, explained how different denominations viewed baptism, and told me, “you can’t make this decision for anyone else. Not for me, not for your mother, not for your grandparents. Only you can know when you are ready and what you believe.”

I knew that Dad was sick. He hurt a lot, every day, especially after eating. Some days were worse than others. Still, none of us—even him—knew how bad it was until he collapsed while working out in the garage.

The doctor at the emergency room gave him a diagnosis and prognosis.

Hepatitis C.

Dead man walking.

They had little hope for Dad to get better. There was no cure, and by the time Dad was diagnosed, he had been living with it for ten or fifteen years. It had already scarred and damaged his liver horrendously. Several other doctors agreed, but Dad found a doctor that was hopeful.

I don’t know a lot about that time except as it affected me. Dad was in and out of the hospital with increasing frequency. Sometimes he would be gone for months, come back for a weekend and have to be picked up by the ambulance again. Several times our school bus would pull up with EMTs and a rig with flashing lights sitting in our driveway. We learned how to tell based on the paramedics’ behavior how serious it was.



They moved Dad’s bed to the dining room so we could spend time with him during the day, and so he could be close to the pot belly stove in there. He was cold all the time. His hands shook so much he couldn’t write. I had to have him sign an absent note one day because Mom had already left for work; it was so illegible, just scribbles on the paper, that they wouldn’t accept it and I hid in the band room to cry.

Mom was the sole provider for the six of us, so she worked from 6 am until well after dark. She spent nights at the hospital, came home to change clothes and go back to work. Royce or Jarrod would drive us up in the afternoons after school to visit—we’d sneak food from the family waiting room, read medical pamphlets, play games on the elevators, and generally pretend we were anywhere else.

A couple of times, the doctor would call us at home and tell us to come and say goodbye because he was vomiting blood. His blood transfusions were measured in the gallons. The toxins backed up in his body so he couldn’t see as he stroked my hair and told me he loved me; he had multiple brain bleeds, and his skin and eyes were yellow with jaundice.

It was a dark and horrible time for our family. There was a complete and utter dearth of hope. None of us expected it to get better.



And then...it did.

Three in the morning September 11, Dad called to say he was getting a liver transplant.

I remember sitting up there all day, waiting. Mom had to watch this outdated video about liver transplants; I can’t imagine it offered any useful information. When he came out of it, he had a huge incision shaped like a wishbone, down his chest and splayed across his ribs. With a functioning liver, he was nearly half the size he was before—he looked so small and fragile and happy, standing up for the first time in a long time, with wires and tubes and monitors attached all over his body.

That was 15 years ago. Since then, he has had to take anti-rejection medicine that suppresses his immune system and allows his new liver to reside unimpeded in his abdomen. An experimental treatment brought his hep-C viral load to zero, but it was free to scar his new organ for ten years before it was stopped.

Dad was having trouble lately and went in for testing, which is how we got a new diagnosis for him: liver cancer. There were a lot of questions surrounding it, a lot of tests to be run because the tumor wasn’t acting like it was because his immune system is suppressed. He was supposed to undergo six months of chemo. If it was successful, he would qualify for another transplant.

The cancer could have been caused by his former illness or his anti-rejection medicine or some weird combination of both.

It felt like the transplant pushed the “pause” button, and someone pushed play again. Delayed pain—it didn’t go away, it was just put off. This hit us all in a very sensitive place of our hearts, a door we had quietly closed and tried hard to not look in.

My heart hurt for Dad though. He hates the hospital, says he’s been inside enough for one lifetime. I did as I had before—my best to keep him in good spirits, to keep him company like when he was working in the shop all those years ago.

We were hopeful—we had a plan, it was hard, but we did it before and we could do it again. His condition was causing him to retain fluid so he had to undergo a simple procedure to drain it. The wound got infected with MRSA, which became septic, and was rushed to Baylor hospital. As before, we gathered around him and tried to keep track as different specialists, those concerned with his liver, kidneys, cancer, transplant, or infection came through the door and each gave us part of the puzzle. We weren’t able to piece together all the information to make a clear picture, didn’t know how optimistic we should be, how much we should prepare ourselves.



After several days, he was released home on hospice with liver and kidney failure.

Last week, he got another infection and his condition deteriorated rapidly. Once more, family gathered to pray and hunker down in the storm. It became more and more clear that there wasn’t going to be another 3 am miracle phone call, no more pause button.

Dad passed away yesterday morning. He was fifty-five.



It is hard to explain how it feels. Part of me is...grateful. Thankful that we got another 15 years (and ten days) with him. That God answered his prayer from 2003 to keep him alive long enough to meet his grandchildren—all ten of them. That he isn’t in pain any more, because he was in a lot of pain all the time.

As grateful as I am for all of that, it still hurts. A thousand things a day make me think of him—fruity pebbles (which he would never share with us) and hole-in-the-wall Mexican food, low-budget science fiction, classic cars and classic rock, and 100-degree days. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t and was quite vocal about it. I haven’t much experience with death. I don’t know if I should avoid those memories so I can keep moving forward, or if I should immerse myself in them. Make a big bowl of Spanish rice so spicy it brings tears to my eyes, crank the thermostat up to 80, and watch reruns of M*A*S*H* and just cry for the man that chose to be my father.



Benjamin and Dad had a special bond, forged out of common interest (eating candy or spicy food, watching monster cars, and working outside) and a shared loneliness. Helping Ben through this has been the hardest part—his behavior problems and frequent outbursts. He doesn’t understand and he’s so sad and so angry. I feel like I’m leading him blind because I don’t know how I’m supposed to go, so I don’t know how to guide him through it.

So I tell him what my dad told me:

Dad was best in times of crisis, particularly after there had been a death in the family. He told me, “however you feel is okay. If you want to cry, that’s okay. If you want to laugh, that’s okay, too. There is no right way to mourn; you have to go through it the way that feels right to you. And Andra, I’m so sorry you have to go through it.”

--Andie