Saying goodbye.

Just thinking about what I'm going to say is causing me to tear up and see things all blurry. Ugh. My dad passed away on October 14, 2008. It was much more sudden than any of us expected. We all knew he had been sick for about six months, but the final decline only took a day or two.

Vasculitis is a chronic condition, and he was going to battle flare-ups for the rest of his life. On his third flare-up battle, he got a massive infection and it basically shut everything down. He was in bad shape at the very end and we made it to his bedside just in time to shut off the life support machines. It was awful to see him in that condition—the ventilator artificially pumping his lungs full of air—it was just his body at that point, not my dad.

I think I get most upset when I think of all the things that he won't get to do with Ava. He was never comfortable around her as a baby—during their visit in July we had to force him to sit down and hold her. Make no mistake, he thought she was an angel, I think he was just nervous about hurting her or not keeping her content. As I look back on my relationship with my dad, it was the years between toddler and kindergarten that I remember most fondly. We would roughhouse and sing songs and laugh a lot. I was beyond the fragile baby stage and too young for school, maybe things were just so much more innocent at that stage. After that though, Dad worked a lot. It seemed like he was only there for us financially; family vacations consisted of Mom, me and Bob, and usually included a soccer tournament. Anyway, I'm not upset about my own relationship with him... it's that Ava is turning into a little person, and my dad is missing it.