The Series of My Quarter-Life Crisis Pt. 1 - Dad

You know what is scary? Like, more scary than laying in your bed at night with a storm whirling outside, with the occasional weird, creepy noises happening around you that match your imaginations visuals of someone creeping into your house to kill you and you swear you locked the door but you're too scared to get up and check because someone might already be inside lingering in the staircase....or any other suspenseful situation you've encountered will do. Feeling like everything around you is falling into place, or already is in place and is just getting better and better. You've come out of the rubble that was your stent of trauma and bad luck and you're finally back on your feet. And then....it happens again. Everything crumbles. Your whole reality gets rocked, once again. This is a fear I regularly have and I wonder if this plays a role in my unfortunate, yet profound, capabilities to distance and detach myself from things before they can truly hurt me.

This one is going to be a lot to unpack and will probably have several small rabbit holes I go down. Or, I may just get mentally exhausted and this end up being a multi-part blog. Who tf knows. Not I and I'm the one writing this shit.

I feel like the stent of my year and a half+ quarter life crisis really damaged me. Too many things went way too wrong and I kept drawing the shit end of the stick over, and over, and over again. It just wouldn't stop. My dad had been sick for a long time. Seven whole years before he passed. The disease was very rare, Primary Progressive Aphasia, and the only reason it is even a blip on the map now is because Bruce Willis passed away from it. There still isn't much research on it, doctors still don't know how it begins, and it is still this weird diseased categorized under Alzheimers that just bamboozled doctors and speak pathologist. I know, I've been to them with my dad. No one has a fucking clue. And they just look at you like you're so helpless and they feel sorry for you. Why did he have to be one of the guinne pigs for this disease? Why were we one of the chosen families to go through this? Is it genetic? (So far, no, they say). How do I know if myself or future kids won't get it? So many questions.

I watched my father go from a successful business owner and CPA, coach, community leader and father, to someone who couldn't even cut his own food.  Let that shit sink in for a moment...

My biggest fan, my coach, my usually-on-my-side-over-mom's-side-which-really-pissed her off, person. My best friend. We spent every weekend together growing up. It was always me and him on the softball field, at practice, at camps, dying seven games into the day because, by God's grace, we fought out of the losers bracket all the way back to the championship to beat the team to put us in the losers bracket. Yes, he pissed me off a lot because it's hard having your dad as your coach but I knew he cared so much and just wanted me to succeed. All the throwing of the hands, the pissed off expressions, the "we've practiced this 1,000 times, Madelyn, why tf can't you do it in the game!" speeches. All of that, gone. No more coach, no more softball and life lessons. The roles had changed. Drastically. I now took care of him.

To witness the decline of a loved one in this state, and so young in both his age and mine, is....unfathomable. I remember the first time I noticed him declining. It was his speech that started to go first. The loss of basic functions and capabilities came later. He struggled to find words and finish sentences. There we're a lot of long pauses where I knew he was trying his best to say what he had to say, he physically just couldn't. His brain wouldn't let him. As time progressed, conversations with him got harder and harder. I remember about 2-3 years in to the diagnosis, I used to get mad when he would call me while I was away at college. I got so frustrated that we could barley even have conversations. They went no where because he truly couldn't finish a sentence. I remember always trying to guess what he was saying or use terms and relevant context clues to figure out where the conversation was going. It was so hard. But now, many years later, I realize my anger at this time, was sadness, hurt and frustration taking control. I would ignore his calls just because I knew how they would go and how upset I would end up.  When all he wanted to do was hear my voice. Even though the conversations went no where, he could hear me, and that was all he wanted.  I hate myself for getting so upset with him for calling me. How stupid of me to be so selfish in a time like that.  But, that is how I channeled my emotions. I kept them to myself, talked to no one about what was going on (because how tf do you talk to a regular college kid about these types of things? No one could understand how I was feeling. Not many people ever will) and let the sadness and frustration build up inside of me. And I JUST starting fixing this issue about myself a little over a year ago. I started therapy shortly after dad passed and got to let a lot of this pent-up guilt out. It felt nice. I got a lot of insight and clarity from my therapist, who also lost her dad at a young age. Nice to have someone that has an idea of what you're going through and can relate to my feelings.

The next five and a half years were a constant battle of me making myself go to my parents home to spend time with him. Seeing him absolutely crushed me every single time. But I noticed that I grew to appreciate our time together. I grew more patients. I figured out his "code" as we called it. It's like we developed this whole new language as a family to communicate with him, his wants, his needs and we just knew and/or could figure it out fairly quickly.  That is still amazing to me to realize we built that as a family.  It was just our little code no one else knew. It was special and almost felt secretive.  

Dad was never the most emotional person before his diagnosis. He never said "I love you" to us (neither of my parents did. I realized later on that we were a very non-emotional, non-communicative, besides screaming, type of family...) and a hug was very rare. But that smile he had - when he smiled you knew he was happy.  That smile was contagious. I still picture it in my mind when I think of him. As his diagnosis got worse, dad became more emotional. I think because he was kind of forced to. He couldn't use his words anymore toward the end, it was just a bunch of mumbles and sounds. But wow, did his emotions ramp up. Both good and bad at times. I always think about how he would get so excited and smile and hug me big when I would come down to visit, but that I would see him tear up and begin to cry when it would come time for us to leave.  It broke my heart to witness that every time. He gave the best hugs. I can still feel them now when I think of them. So soft, warm, engulfing. You could feel the love coming from his chest every time.

Leading up to his passing, shit got real messy - in and out of hospitals and psych wards. Him so drugged up he isn't even present because he had an outburst of anger toward mom or the nurses and for his safety and their, he had to me medicated. Seeing that and hearing those incidents made it really hard to go see him. I didn't want to see him that way. That wasn't my dad. I remember waking up everyday for about four months just waiting on that call. I was stressed out for him, my mom, my family, (who was his full-time caretaker while working full time and taking care of my grandma w dementia for three out of the seven years she took care of dad. I don't know how she did it all, she's incredible. It still blows my mind to this day she did all of that) everyone. Really, I think it all came to the fact that my biggest fear, my whole reality, my own life as I knew it, was being rocked and that ship was crashing down faster than I could process.

Over the course of the seven years,  I had distanced and attempted to detached myself from this whole situation. Which, yes, I believe was helpful when knowing that there was no positive end to any of this. It helped me cope. I realized that my time with him was dwindling fast and I needed to be the daughter he taught me to be. Strong. Loving. Caring. Supportive. Empathetic. So I began cherishing our time together. Embracing all the attributes and emotions I got from him in those final months.

I made the decision to not go and see my dad in the hospital during his last few months. I couldn't bring myself to do it. To see my father in a hospital bed, so drugged up he's not even functioning. That wasn't my dad and that sure as hell wasn't the last image I wanted of him. I remember getting that fateful call. It happened so fast. I think it was a Tuesday, towards the end of January, 2022. My sister called and said "Madelyn it's happening..." and I just immediately knew. I held myself together until I hung up the phone. Then, I completely lost it.

No amount of distance or detachment makes that call easier. It is a feeling I have never felt before in my life. Shattering. I felt my whole body crumble to the floor. I was sobbing endlessly. I remember feeling completely numb for about two weeks with the occasional (more like real often...) burst into tears. My chest and mind we're so heavy with grief they felt like 4 elephants sitting on top of me. I couldn't focus or think about anything, besides him and my shattered soul. I remember beating myself up for not going to see him but I also still felt that I did the right thing for me by not going to see him during that time. I know he would have wanted me to, but in order to cope and become who I am today, I couldn't. I couldn't have that be the last memory I had of him. Because my last memory of him, is the best one possible.

My last memory of my father was when I was leaving my parents house and he walked Keeks (my mini weenie girl) and myself out to the car. My last memory was a big, warm, engulfing hug from him, that I can still feel to this day. It is one of the most frequent recurring memories I have of him and is the one that helped me connect with his spirit later on (that's another blog for another day). That memory brings me such joy. I smile every time I think of it. That final hug is how I will always remember my dad. That is a feeling no one can ever take away from me. My final memory of him and I.

This was one of many events to occur during my continuous year and a half long downfall, obviously the biggest one too. And throughout this multi-blog series on this topic, you'll hear about each and every one of them and in the end, it will all tie into why going through another down-spell like this one, scares the fuck out of me and is more scary and anxiety inducing than the imaginary killer lurking in my garage staircase when I swear I locked the doors.