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Back in America for about three weeks now, and so far it’s been pretty shitty. My father died.

#Whataburger celebration. More at
https://www.facebook.com/carol.wartenberg

This, I guess, wasn’t a total surprise, but it was unexpected. He’d been in kidney failure and on dialysis (at home) but in the roughly 10 days I’d been home, he’d been doing better. He had been getting up and making me a little bacon biscuit for breakfast each day.

He died on Monday, 7/9. On Saturday, Zippy and I went to Gainesville to pick up Zac for the next week. He didn’t have a camp to go to so he was going to hang out with us, so we headed down there, met the family for an $80 Red Robin lunch and turned around and came back.

Since the new house has considerably less space than the old house and there’s no Den of Sin, I opted to go over to L&D’s house for the week. They were headed on a road trip to celebrate their 20^th anniversary so I accepted the offer to house-sit and get some peace and quiet.

At midnight, Zippy called and asked me to meet her at the ER because Daddy couldn’t breathe. She’d called 911. I jumped up, got dressed and waited and then she called back because she couldn’t get my car started. I was driving hers and in my car the clutch has to be pressed in all the way.

Anyway, I said never mind, that I’d pick her and Zac up since I felt she had no business driving. She said the ambulance still hadn’t left, but by the time I got there, there was one paramedic-ish vehicle left. Apparently there had been at least three and seven people.

One at the hospital, we were taken to the trauma ward, where we learned Daddy had lost pulse twice up to that point. They’d done CPR and brought him back, but upon arriving to the hospital and checking his records, realized he had a do-not-resuscitate. So it went downhill from there. The first doctor came in and told us about the CPR, stressing that only 3 percent of people who have CPR recover, and warning us that since he’d lost oxygen to his brain twice there was no telling what would happen should he recover.

Who could turn down this face for a tummy rub?

So we waited for a room in ICU, not really able to do anything. Daddy was completely unresponsive and had no idea who was there.  At some point, I took Zac back to the house because all he was able to do was play video games, I brought Daddy back a new shirt because his had been ripped during CPR. Around 4 a.m., a different doctor came in and started talking about “in the days ahead” and listed different doctors Daddy would need to see. At that point, I wondered if I’d misheard the first doctor (whose shift, I guess, was over) because it sounded to me like there would be a tomorrow.

Since that felt a little better, I went back to Leanne’s, reasoning Zippy would stay there and then I’d get some sleep and take over, but, about an hour and a half later, she called and said his heart was failing. I rushed over there but missed – he’d died.

For us, this is really the first death in the immediate, local family and we had no idea what to do, but Zippy had lined up someone at a funeral home so she called her and got that ball rolling. We opted for just a visitation since Daddy really didn’t do much outside the house.

Zippy, though, does, and the visitation was like some kind of reunion for old GCA teachers and ERS employees, plus softball and pickleball players left and right. I mean, I think we overwhelmed the funeral home; we just took over the place.

Since there were so many people and we just wouldn’t leave, someone proposed heading to Whataburger, Daddy’s favorite restaurant, after the visitation. Twenty of us went, which I think freaked them out a bit – a line out the door that came out of nowhere – but the staff was so nice.

Since then, it’s been one thing after another, just trying to get a grasp on what’s going on. Fortunately, some stuff made sense and has fallen into place. Unfortunately, some other stuff hasn’t.

Finally, though, I’m starting to do some of my originally proposed home leave stuff. Last weekend, I went to a martial arts competition to watch Little Bit in her first tournament, which happened to be Tiger Rock’s national event. (Her dojo.) She kicked butt, literally.

Next weekend, I’m doing the crown jewel of home leave – a visit to Universal Studios Orlando to see Harry Potter land, or whatever it’s called. I’m not a fanatic, but I do like HP and I’ve never been to Universal.

In the meantime, I’m fulfilling what Batgirl assumes to be my purpose on earth – rubbing her tummy.