This Afternoon In Drama

Grief

Tomorrow is technically the year anniversary of my dad's death, except it feels more like today because it happened on a Saturday and probably the only potentially bullshitty spiritual thing I believe in relationship to my dad's death was about it happening on a Saturday.  With all the bizarrely insensitive hospice nurses coming through his house and pushing born-again agendas and various beliefs about the afterlife, the lone questionable pronouncement that made sense to me, spoken by my dad's wife, was that my dad had waited to die on a Saturday because he liked working so much and wouldn't quit until the weekend.  If doctors think that sometimes people can hold out for birthdays or anniversaries or some event that they've been waiting for through sheer determination, then I didn't think it was totally unlikely that my dad would have insistently finished out the work week.  

Last night was hard for me because it was Friday night last year that I took the shift staying up to watch my dad all night.  He was in a bed near the windows and sliding door out to his yard, and I was lying on the couch, watching him, with my dog curled up against my side.  I wouldn't say I believe in god, but god bless dogs.  This would be my dad's last night and obviously, I didn't know that, but I did, sort of.  His breathing had changed and the days had gone by without him eating or drinking, and the morphine was really accruing in his system.

While lying there, watching him, I thought a million times that I should go pull up a chair next to his bed and just start telling him a million things.  I think my dad knew I loved him, and I think he knew I was appreciative of how much he loved me, even though I would get exasperated with him for OCD-calling for the fifteenth time in a day and not leaving a message.  But I kept thinking that he should know more.  That he should really understand how thankful I was for how great of a father he'd been.

Except I couldn't do it because I was filled with terror that he'd hear how much I loved him and how devastated I was that he was dying (and dying so early), and then he'd be, even if just momentarily, woken to the unbearable sadness of this "being it" and the panicky awareness of the end.  In the past few years I've developed a pretty serious fear of flying and when people try to run stats by me and tell me that I won't even be conscious when the plane hits the ground or blows up, I have to explain to them that it's not the actual death.  It's the seconds or minutes of horror of knowing that something has gone wrong, and not the end result-- just the horror inside the capsule.  And that's what was gutting me as I tried to go tell things to my dad that night.  Not that he was dying, which was its own sadness, but it was the horror of him contemplating everything that was going down, having to live his last night feeling his grief and even worse, mine.  I was his youngest and his only girl and he wanted to protect from everything, and I knew that.

So I never ended up pulling over a chair.  I've thought a lot about that decision over the past year because I churn over whether he knew how important he was to me and then I churn over what happened when I began to do the summary of our relationship while he was still conscious in the hospital.  I tried to start telling him what he meant to me and how right he had done by me, and I made tears begin to stream down his face, and I think that killed both of us.  Friday night a year ago, I just half-woke him every few hours to administer the morphine and his eyes would open for a second and I'd say, "Hi dad" with a lot of love.  It crushed me to think about wringing anything more out of those moments. 

Candy Spelling Can Eat My Wrapping Dust

I've been away from the blog because we've been moving into our new place, and you know, moving takes a lot of emotional energy and at the end of each day, all you really feel like doing is watching people be broke ass idiots on Pawn Stars and dipping some cheese naan in the take-out chicken tikka masala.  That's it.  But now we're getting settled and I'm realizing that all the things I thought I was going to like best about this place maybe aren't even my favorite parts.  It's like how when you buy jeans, you never know which ones are going to be the jeans that, when they rip, you're going to consider spending $300-500 recreating via L.A. custom jean makers because the brand doesn't make that style anymore and you can't live without them.  In the store, you didn't know they were that level of jean.  It took some time together.

So while I'm still totally happy about all the things I was originally excited about in this place-- like it's still great that we finally have our own closets so that Brent doesn't have to keep his socks in the hidden part of the ottoman, sure-- some other hidden pleasures have really been making strides toward center stage (or center condo, if you will).  And so as of today, I've compiled my 3 favorite things about my new place of living.

1.  My wrapping bar.

Tori Spelling's mom can suck it because I have my own designated wrapping area now, and I heard she's putting her mansion with the wrapping room up for sale, so maybe she's going someplace where she'll have to wrap alongside, like, the washer and dryer.  How gauche!  Maybe to you the wrapping bar looks like a wet bar, but that faucet is actually for washing off my fingers when they get too sticky from handling the Scotch gift tape.  The bottles of wine are also there not because that's where we're going to serve people wine, but because those bottles are all gifts to us, and so they belong.  That's their home.  Especially the bottle with the gift card from Ben Stiller.  So maybe it's not actually written to me and it was actually given to Brent; sometimes Brent and I laugh because we're almost like the same person, except I'm the one who doesn't get all fucking nerdy in front of the History Channel for ten hours when they have a "Life After People" marathon or anything on about ancient Greece.

Anyway, I love this wrapping bar.  I'm going to do a lot of wrapping here.

2.  I had some kind of idea that once I moved, I was going to be swimming a lot because we live right over the pool and the pool is a very nice one, but I probably should have known better-- having lived in a place with a pool before-- that what I actually like about a pool is seeing it glow at night!  I believe there is no better color on earth than an electric blue.  I mean, that's the entire reason why I bought my truck and didn't care that the gas pedal can stick and kill you.  So one of the really beautiful things about the new place is that our big bedroom window overlooks the pool, and so when I go in there at night and the lamps are off and the pool is glowing, I have an incredible sense of well-being that stems from the fact that that color not only exists, but is lit up.

It's daytime right now and I'm too impatient to wait to get a picture of the pool glowing, so please just use your imagination.

3.  This third thing I don't have a picture for because it's an audio thing, so you'd need to hear it.  And I don't have a sound clip up because I have no idea how to put an audio thing up on the blog.  But it's this: our neighbor in the condo to the right keeps a fountain on her terrace, and she never turns it off.  THEN, additionally, there is also an artificial babbling brook down by the pool.  What this means is that when I'm lying in bed at night, there is always the sound of trickling water.  In my bedroom, it always sounds like it's raining.  And rain at night is probably my top favorite sound to go to sleep to.  Maybe if we had lots of huge bills and Brent liked to count them in bed at night, that would usurp rain's place.  For right now, though, I feel pretty confident giving it top position.

What's especially great about the illusion of the rain is that it's not generated by me.  Sure, I could have bought a sound machine or my own fountain all these years if I wanted to hear some trickling.  Except then I would have woken up in the middle of the night and been like, "Yeah, there's my fountain going."  But because I'm not responsible for either the fake brook or the fountain on my neighbor's terrace, I'm able to keep alive the illusion that the sound is natural and the world is right, and that's worth its weight in covered parking.

Someday I just might wrap up a gift on my wrapping bar and walk it over to the lady next door for being so giving with her fountain noise (and electricity).  It will have tiiiight corners.

UPDATE: My phone camera makes it look more greenish, so just adjust your monitor.