Head west, young (wo)man!; Need my family

Tonight I am packing up my car and starting the drive to Las Vegas from Nashville. Among a myriad of reasons for doing this, chief among them is that my father is extremely ill and I need to be with my family. As most of you know, he had a heart attack, triple bypass and two strokes back in September/October. I spent most of October in Las Vegas and have since watched from afar as his health failed even more.

My dad is back in the hospital. He went in a couple days ago after a routine follow-up visit to his doctor turned into a trip to the ER. They have, so far, removed about a liter of fluid from his lungs and the edema in his lower extremeties is off the scale. They are talking about another heart surgery as he has a valve or two they want to replace. He is also being put on oxygen as they do not see a "fix" of any kind for the lung issue, it's part of congenital heart failure and he needs the boost that a continuous O2 feed can give him.

The biggest kicker is (and the reason I want to wring his neck, LOL): my Pop is a bit on the morbid side, he loves to talk about how well Mom and us four kids will be taken care when he is gone. This time around he has instructed the hospital to NOT tell us, any of us, what is going on. All our information comes from him and he answers everything with, "I'm fine, don't worry."

Hell, he didn't want anyone to call me, he's more worried about me right now. He's lying in a bed two thousand miles away and he's worried about me. Talk about stubborn! Heh... Let's just say that I am sooooooo my father's daughter. Of the four of us kids, I am the closest one to him, like him, etc. He is why I am so damn stubborn, so damn determined, and so damn... me. He is the reason I fight, the reason I love. He is my everything.

The Big Gesture

And all at once she knew that he meant it. Every word.

She spent ten years vying for his attention, his love. She wanted so much to make him want her and be proud of her; she wanted to know that he couldn’t live without her. She wanted to be his desire and happiness. She never wanted anything more from him than to be his friend, his lover, and his wife.

He didn’t make it easy, which is probably part of the reason she tried so hard. She fought for what she wanted and worked hard to prove that she could win at anything she did. She thought many times about throwing up her hands and letting him go but she just couldn’t give up. The most difficult realization regarding all her efforts was that she knew he wouldn’t try to woo her or win her back if she left. He wouldn’t try to bridge the gap. He wouldn’t fight for her.