Monthly Archive

Those were the three numbers that showed up on my scale on Monday. In that order. Last time I stepped on a scale, it was a bit closer to… 18something. 3? 5? I have gained at least fifteen pounds. In approximately two months. That’s by far the fastest I’ve ever gained, I think at least. I certainly don’t question that I gained it. I am the Queen of Eating Crap and Not Exercising.

When I mentioned to Khalil how much weight I’ve gained, he said, “Hon?” and I said, “What?” He said, “It’s ok”. And I have to believe him. Am I sad? Yes. Am I frustrated? Yes. Do I have to let all of that go and focus on what I have to do? Yes.

I’m frustrated with myself. I hate the way my body looks. I’m still trying to squeeze my 1 9 9 body into my 1 8 3 clothes. The result is not cute. I do not recommend it. I had to pull out the big tub and pull out some of my 1 9 9 clothes. That was sad, frustrating, and a wee bit… humiliating? I didn’t do it in front of anyone, but still feel humiliated. I put those clothes away with the plans to never pull them out again unless I was losing baby weight. Instead I’m losing stress and baby weight. Which royally sucks.

I hate the way my body feels. I have a distinct recollection of not having all of this extra fat on my body. I remember when I had more energy. I remember not feeling this way. I remember not cringing when I looked in the mirror. Those feelings aren’t far away because time wise, it was only about a month and a half to two months ago when I felt that way. I remember being frustrated about gaining a little weight over Christmas. About not being able to get under 181. Now I’m back at almost 200.

Here’s the thing. In order to not feel my feelings, I’m still eating them. Also, I’m doing this in part because I just don’t yet feel like I have the energy to make the good food choices. So I’m still making the crappy food choices. Go me. Every time I’m presented with the option, I make a crappy choice. Choice A: (somewhat less crappy) sausage and peppers and onions, on a small roll, two slices of cheese. Apple. Small bag of chips. Choice B: (seriously more crappy) Quarter pounder with cheese, fries, diet coke, chocolate shake. What do you think I chose yesterday? B. Why? For the simple reason that I felt like it. And I couldn’t bear to deny myself food. Not yet. I feel so sad, so overwhelmed, so frustrated with everything else that I cannot. deny. myself. food.

On the upswing, I have been exercising. I have worked out the last three days in a row. I’m tired, and having a hard time getting through the workouts. But I’m pushing through. Making this positive choice, the choice to do something really and truly good for me feels oh-so-good. It feels right. It makes me happy. Then I enter the rest of my day. And that feeling fades away into the stress, sadness, and being overwhelmed.

I know that I will get there. I have no doubt that I will be back to the place where I can make positive choices about food. Where I can deny myself the negative choices and remind myself that I’m worth the better choices. And that what feels like self-denial is really self-praise, because it means that I’m loving myself enough to make the positive choices. In the meantime, I shall cross my fingers that the exercise helps, and I’ll give myself a little extra room and forgiveness. I will know that I will get there, and that time will be soon. It’s coming.

Since about Thanksgiving, when we first had the inclination that something was wrong with my grandma, my life has mainly been focused on the health of my father or grandma. There wasn’t alot I talked about at first, I didn’t want to talk about what was going on. The holidays passed, and grandma got her diagnosis and dad left to go start getting his clearances for the transplant. The intesity of worrying about them increased. At one point my sister commented, “It feels like it’s all anyone talks about”. And it was. All anyone talked about. What else was there to talk about?

Then came February. It feels to me a little like time has stopped since February. I went to sleep and am just now waking up from a nightmare. One in which I spent three weeks watching my dad’s health decline rapidly. A nightmare where I came home and said goodbye to my grandmother. Helped plan her funeral and then attended it. A nightmare where I got a phone call first telling me the good news about dad’s transplant. A dream where I started to hope that he’d make it. That he’d come home and live to tell the story. Where we could tell him what happened while his health declined, the things he wouldn’t remember. Then I got a second phone call, the day after burying grandma. That dad had 12 hours to live. A nightmare where I said goodbye to my dying father. And then planned his funeral. And attended it.

The funny thing about waking up from this particular nightmare? Is that I’m waking up to find that it’s all true. That my life is bereft of two very important people. That my future has lost their presence in my life.

Tomorrow I will wake up and go to work. I will plan the month of April and not warn my clients that I may need to leave again. I will plan to spend every weekday during the month of April at work. The weekends relaxing, cleaning. I have to start the serious business of grieving. Of becoming the girl who no longer takes grandma grocery shopping on the weekends. Who no longer has a father to call and ask a question about my car.

I have to move on. I have to wake up from the nightmare and start living my life again. I need to do this while giving myself the time to grieve. I just don’t know how. What do I talk about?

Things that kick you in the gut. And end your two day dry-eyed spell:

~Make a collage of your dad, with your sister and stepmother. Realize as you look through the collage that there will be no more pictures of your dad. Ever.

~Go back to the funeral home to pick up more boards (there are lots of pictures).

~Go pick out flowers for your dad’s funeral. While looking through the book, think: I don’t know. I couldn’t pick out wedding flowers, how am I going to pick out funeral flowers? And who ever heard of anything more sad than ‘funeral flowers’? Get to the part where the florist asks what to put on the ribbon. Stare at her, uncomprehending what she means, then realize… choke out “I’m his daughter” as you start to bawl. Bury your head in your sister’s shoulder and curse the world for the dry eyed spell ending today. Choke over the word “dad” as you realize that you are, in fact, buying flowers for your dad’s funeral. Dad’s. Funeral.

~The thought of buying an outfit? For the funeral? Makes me cry again.

~Go home. Call two of his old friends. Catch a sob in the back of your throat when you say, “I needed to call you to tell you that *catch* my dad passed away Thursday”. Do this not once, but twice.

~Have your sister call you on the way home. Cry with her because she usually calls Grandma when she’s almost home. Grandma isn’t there to call.

I can live in the land of denial. I’m somewhat… not happy, but… content? not devastated? in the land of denial. But there were moments today that I couldn’t ignore that meant that my father is, in fact, dead. As they added up, I was destroyed more and more by each one. Khalil and I were talking yesterday about why I hadn’t cried in a few days, why I was feeling OK. We talked about the fact that I didn’t see dad every day, and wait for holidays. When there’s no dad’s to go to. When I’m doing my yearly album and there are no pictures of dad to put in. It is the little moments. It’s not, for me at least, the big picture. The big picture devastates me, but it’s the little moments that kick me in the gut and make me feel like I just can’t breathe. And the tears come and I hate it when the tears come.

The further away I move, in time, from what happened with my father, the less it feels like reality to me. I feel like the pieces of my days that deal with my father dying are part of a dream, a nightmare. That I’ll wake up and go see him, and he’ll be laughing his ass off. “I got you guys!” Yeah. He would have thought it was funny.

I feel like it couldn’t possibly have happened. There is no way I stood at a hospital bed with my sister and cried and said goodbye to him. That memory feels fuzzy at the edges and faded. For the first day it was sharp as a broken piece of glass, digging into my heart constantly. The small amount of time has dulled it. I try to remember what happened and my brain will not let me go back there. I can grasp pieces of time, small words and pictures of the moments. I can’t think it through all at once.

I can almost pretend like it didn’t happen. I can pretend that it was a dream. That the time that I have spent since then has all been a dream, and I’m going to wake up. I’m going to wake up, and go to work, and accept the condolences for my grandma. And people will ask me how my father is doing, and I’ll tell them that he pulled through the infection and is recovering. I’m heading out there next week. I can almost pretend that might be true.

I spend lots of time away from tears. With dry eyes, getting through my day. I feel drained, it’s true. I feel like I have been scraped empty and there’s not much inside of me. I can feel that way without falling apart as long as I can pretend that it might be possible that my dad isn’t dead.

As Khalil and I drove home Thursday night, I kept saying it out loud. My dad died. My dad is dead. I kept trying to make that reality a reality. The pain felt real. The memory of him leaving us was still sharp and real. I just didn’t- don’t- know how to work that into my reality, into my life. I don’t know how to be a daughter whose father is gone. I don’t want to know how.

As long as I can pretend it might not be real, I can walk through my day. I can get out of bed. I can take a shower and get dressed. Eat and sleep. Do the things that need to be done. Get the details for an obituary. Find pictures of my dad. Tell people over and over that he died and then when ‘the services are’. I can do all of that as long as, somewhere in the back of my head, I keep believing this is all a nightmare I am going to wake up from.

It feels weird, feeling as if you are moving in a dream. It makes all of the edges a wee bit fuzzy, a little less defined. I still feel like I could wake up at any time.

I am fairly sure this is what they call denial.

I don’t even know where to begin, so I will start at the beginning. Of the end. The beginning of the end.

With a brief review of the beginning. A year and a half ago my sister and I started getting worried about my dad. He was looking sick. Last summer, him and my stepmom were over for dinner and he finally told us what was going on. He was in liver failure, and working to get on a transplant list. I got very, very scared.

In October, I had my stepmom, father, grandmother, mother-in-law, and grandma and grandpa over for dinner. I will forever be so happy I had that dinner. We had a wonderful time, all spending time together, reminiscing, chatting. Loving being family.

The day before Thanksgiving, my grandmother needed to go to the eye doctor because she started losing her vision. By the end of December/ beginning of January, she was diagnosed with brain tumors.

Wednesday morning I woke up. I was dreading the day. I’d been having a hard time getting out of bed since I returned from spending three weeks in Pittsburgh with my dad, and that had gotten worse since getting the word that Grandma had passed away. I had to get up on Wednesday, though, because it was the day that we were burying Grandma. I was dreading the day, it just felt so long. We had the graveside service in the morning. Then we had a luncheon. After that a memorial service in the afternoon. Later in the evening, dinner with family. When I thought about the day, I felt overwhelmed. We got through it, step by stepm. Between lunch and the memorial service, I snuck up to Grandma’s apartment and cried. And missed her. And cried. Khalil found me, and my sister came up. We looked through some of her old pictures. Between the memorial and dinner we took my niece and nephew to our apartment for a while. My sister and brother in law came by, and my sister was on the phone with my stepmother. Steve told me it didn’t sound like a good conversation. At dinner that night my sister filled me in. I don’t remember the details, but I didn’t like what I heard and started crying at dinner. I was worried. 

I got home. I was tired and worn out. Emotional. After the burial in the morning, I had felt completely drained, and that feeling didn’t go away. I finally got to bed at about 11:30pm.

At 12:30 am the phone rang. Recently, I’ve gotten more than my share of late night phone calls. I don’t like them. This one was no exception. My stepmom was crying. She was telling me that that hospital told her that dad had between 12 and 24 hours. That his heart was giving out. That they were still hoping for a miracle, but we might want to get to the hospital. Khalil went to the bathroom and threw up. I got directions. We were out the door by 1am.

The drive there was long. We were tired and drained. It’s a long drive there, longer at night. It was raining and foggy, which at least fit the mood of the drive, if it didn’t make driving easier. We took turns driving and each of us got an hour or so of sleep. Shannon and her family were on their way too. We texted back and forth for a while, then got quiet as we slept and drove. We finally arrived.

As we got back into Pittsburgh, where I spent what I had thought were the three hardest weeks of my life, my stomach tied up into knots. I didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t know what I would see, how I would react. I didn’t know if I could do this. How do you get ready to say goodbye to your father? Your father?? There’s no way to get ready. Khalil told me at some point during the drive up- that this moment, this being with my dad, saying goodbye, while he died… that it would change my life. And I would never forget it. He would know, he said goodbye to his own father. That stuck with me as we drove into the hospital and parked.

We went up and called the SICU. We spent an hour, maybe more with my father before he died. We said all the things we needed to to him. I made inappropriate jokes when the surgeon frustrated me. We cried. And cried.

And said goodbye.

I finally arrived home at 3:30 this morning. 44 hours from the time I woke up, and 27 hours from the time I left to go see my father. The longest day.  

This is too much goodbye. These are not see you laters, these are not talk to you soons. These are goodbyes, in that final and resounding tone that death has.

My dad is in the hospital. Yes, he got a transplant. No, he’s not 100% out of the woods yet.

My grandma just died.

Where are my emotions?

They’re shut off. I feel like I’m walking around in ‘off mode’. When I found out my grandmother died, it took about six  hours for me to have any reaction at all. I cried most of the night, then shut myself back off. I haven’t cried since.

I don’t usually react like this. I usually cry, and get moody, and cry, and have a teary and emotional response to both grief and stress.

This time, I’m turned off. I think that it’s just too much for me to absorb, so I’m not processing any of it. I’m just turning it off. I hear information and let it roll off of me. Dad has a fever and may be sick? Ok. Grandma died? Ok.

It’s not that I don’t want to deal with any of it. I do. I really and truly do. I just don’t know how to turn myself back on and not get completely overwhelmed by the amount of crap I need to process.

I am, of course, visibly eating through the emotions. It’s totally insane. Peppridge Farms has a new slogan I saw today, “Every taste has a feeling”. How apropo. Chips taste like boredom. Chocolate tastes like grief. Alcohol tastes like “please make it go away”. Overeating tastes like anger. It is in fact true that every taste has an emotion.

I need to start dealing with the emotions. This sounds like a job for a therapist.

My grandma is gone. She died today.

I miss her already.

We waited all day.

Kept recalculating the hours. Let’s see… if he went in at 3am, it’s an 8-12 hour surgery. That has him out between 11 am and 3pm. Let’s say noon to be safe, noon to 3pm.

Over and over.

Then it was 3pm.

Then it was 3:45pm.

Then it was 4pm.

Then my stepmom and my sister called, at the same time. I talked to my stepmom. He had been out since 1pm (YEAH!). The surgeon went to the wrong waiting room and just didn’t bother to find them after that.

Dad made it through surgery fine. His liver looked way worse than they thought, so thank God he got the transplant when he did.

The surgeon says he’s still not out of the woods, but that he did well and they are over the first hurdle.

One sigh of relief down. All morning I walked around with an exhausted grin on my face.

My dad is in surgery right now. Getting his new liver.

I’m finally hopeful he’ll make it through this.

I woke up Friday morning and said goodbye to my father. A part of me will continue to hope that I will see him when he wakes up from his transplant surgery.

I spent Friday driving home. I cried most of the way home, on and off.

Spent some of Friday evening with Grandma.

I’m finally feeling ‘at home’. I spent most of the first two days at home very disoriented. For me, three weeks away is a very long time. I didn’t expect to feel that way, but I did.

My dad is doing better. I finally feel ok being home, not completely beseiged with guilt.

We’ll see what the next few weeks bring.

They say it takes three weeks to form a habit.

Tomorrow I will have been here for three weeks and two days.

Tomorrow I will be leaving.

This feels less like breaking a habit and more like breaking my heart.

There have been times I have wanted nothing more that to get the hell out of Dodge, in this case Pittsburgh. But right now I want almost nothing more than to stay.

But I need to see my grandmother. She’s leaving. And I need to spend time with my husband, my cat… living my life. Maybe that sounds selfish, but I think it may be a matter of mental health as well.

So I will have my heart broken. Break my habit. Change up Groundhog’s Day. And head home. Hope for the best.