Time Passes

Generally, it's always been my intent to keep the tenor of this blog on the light side, with the occasional rant about topics I am passionate about.

Earlier today, I had written a blog entry about a Planned Parenthood clinic facing some legal challenges in my current hometown of Aurora, IL, from a pro-life group out of Chicago. However, I later chose not to use that posting because I felt it was just too serious.

So it's ironic that tonight I'm using the blog to write about my father dying at age 69 from a massive coronary. I found out about 30 minutes ago when I went down to my car to fish out my cel phone, and put it on the charger. When I picked the phone up, there were five voice mails on it: four from my mother (my parents divorced in 1982), and one from my brother Scott.

When I contacted my mom, I was told our Dad had gone into the hospital today near his home in Fort Myers, FL, to be looked at for pneumonia and had his heart-attack during the visit. Doctors attempted to revive him, but they were not successful - all of this word via our stepbrother Mike.

Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel right now - I'm kind of shell-shocked. Part of me feels like I have to go into all-business mode, and help Mike (who also lives in Florida and was very close to my Dad) with the funeral arrangement - which is to say there are none. A while back, my Dad said that when he dies he wants no part of a funeral or wake; he considered both to be "barbaric." Instead, Dad wanted the family to charter a fishing boat, takes his ashes along, dump him into the sea, and then go fishing (one of his favorite pastimes).

His father taught him how to fish, one of the rare things they enjoyed doing together, as my Dad and his didn't get along. But they are together now.

I can just see my Dad in Heaven now; ten bucks says the first word out of his mouth when he realized he'd passed on was "Shit..."

He was a softie, but also a man's man - going by the nickname "Butch" in his teenage years on the northwest side of Chicago, before getting into hot rods and bikes, and joining the Army after graduating Lane Tech High School (in roughly 1956), then traveling Europe and Japan on leave when he wasn't stationed at Scofield Barracks in Hawaii. After he mustered out of the military, my Dad lived in Monterey, CA, for a while before coming home to Chicago, where he met my mother in the early 1960s at a party she crashed.

They married in 1963.

I came along in 1968, and my brother in 1971 - shortly after which we moved from Oak Lawn, IL, to Lisle (about 30 miles away). In 1976, Dad ran for mayor (ironic since he hated Civics class in school) and beat a longtime incumbent. He was re-elected twice, and retired from office in 1988 - during which time, (at the risk of repeating myself) my parents divorced, and Dad remarried in 1985 to a woman with four kids. I went off to college and my own thing, and Scott did his thing as well before Dad and his wife (Dot) moved to Florida to retire.

In looking at he and I, it's now easy to recognize how much my dad and I had in common. We both hit line drives versus long fly balls. Our politics were also similar (anti-Bush). But at the end of every phone conversation (dating back to last Thursday), Dad would always tell me two things: that he missed my brother and I, and that he loved us - a sentiment I always returned.

Tomorrow, I have to figure out how to get to Florida, and resolve all the loose ends of my Dad's estate.

Sooner or later, the gravity of his death will hit me (right now, it's still a blur), and I may cry. But I have zero regrets about our relationship.

I will miss him terribly, but as half of my Dad's DNA rests inside my every fiber, I can take heart in knowing he's with me all the time.