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Whimpering Myself Awake   
04:06pm 01/02/2010
 
mood: discontent
Slowly but surely, I’m losing my grip on reality. For a while the dreams of Dad had slacked off, but last night one came full force. Perhaps it was because I analyzed myself so much about where I was in the grieving process last night before bed. I’m not sure. The only thing I am certain of is that this was beyond fucked up.

I woke myself up whimpering, attempting to cry in my sleep as much as I was in my dream. I was distraught.

Mom was dead. How recently she had died, I’m not exactly sure. And for whatever reason, my sister, Kandy, her 8 year old son, Cameron and I had decided to take a drive down to Bundick Lake. We ended up at Aunt Nancy’s house. We must have been there for a while, because my memory picks up in the middle of an argument between my aunt, Kandy and me. Voices were yelling like crazy. They were in the midst of remodeling the living room right off of the kitchen. The panelling on the walls were being taken down bit by bit and replaced with huge white ceramic tile on the walls. It reminded me vaguely of an asylum. Paint cans were strewn everywhere, amidst a ladder and other building materials. The step-down into the room itself was a lot deeper than it normally is. Perhaps that was part of the remodeling too. I wasn’t quite sure.

I heard Kandy defend Junior as Aunt Nancy walked out of the kitchen, straight outside. Naturally, Kandy followed, as did I. I had no idea where this was going. I couldn’t understand what Junior had anything to do with why we were there, but it sounded like a sound argument. It made sense at the time.

Around the house they went as Aunt Nancy tried to walk away, yelling back and flailing her arms as she yelled, never once stopping or turning around to look at her accuser. Rounding the corner, she entered through the back door into the living room, and back into her house she went. We followed, but she was nowhere to be found.

Back into the kitchen. Cameron was playing in the hallway leading to the bathroom, laying on the floor, holding a couple of small toys that he had found belonging to some of the kids. Kandy told him very matter-of-factly, “Get your stuff. We are leaving.” Without a word, he got up off of the floor, put on a jacket and grabbed a book sack full of his stuff, slung it over his shoulder and waited for us to walk out.

Nancy had walked back into the room, shouting at us to get out, that she never wanted to see us again. For whatever the reason, I decided it was time for a different approach. I walked over to her and wrapped my arms around her. “Aunt Nancy,” I said in a strained voice. “You know what it’s like to lose your parents and feel like you have no one left.” I had actually started to cry and I could feel her stiffen in my arms.

“You’ll never get rid of me, Seth,” she said. Only it wasn’t her voice. It was Dad’s. It startled me. Scared the shit out of me, really. I pulled away quickly and looked up into his blue eyes, just as distant as they were on the day he died. Milky in their essence, appearing blind, but staring at me with a penetrating glare. He was a bigger man, like the way he was in pictures of him and I together when I was a child. Very robust and round, more hair--though still white, not gray like back then. The only thing that stayed the same from the way he looked when he died was his eyes.

“Dad?!” My throat caught in that small syllable, barely able to choke it out. My first instinct was to hug him, just run up to him and jump into his massive arms like a child, and cling to him and never let go. He repeated those ominous words again. “You will never get rid of me, Seth.” It was almost a whisper this time, but there was no mistaking what he said. I heard it inside my head just as clearly with my ears.

Right before my eyes in a matter of seconds, his face and body begun to swell slowly, filling with edema. I backed away even further and stood side-by-side with Kandy and Cameron. They were both watching with horror. Glad to know I wasn’t the only one scared of what was happening. The rims under his eyes slowly became yellow, like a pale bruise. Larger and larger the color spread until it made large, full circles surrounding the entire eye socket of the skull underneath. His cheeks begun to lose their color as well, turning a deep, dark purple. Then hit me: he was beginning to decompose.

His eyes rolled into the back of his head, eyelids completely opened, exposing just the white of his eyes (though not much of a difference from his milky irises). And then he collapsed, face-first onto the kitchen floor, cracking his head on the table as he tumbled. Kandy and I both ran forward and tried to hoist him up. Cameron ran toward the front door leading outside, not actually exiting, but standing there, crying silently, scared out of his mind. All the efforts in the world to pick our father up off of the floor proved futile. He was dead weight and we couldn’t even so much as move his arm.

My mouth was dry, my stomach completely in knots and I felt like I was going to vomit.

We got ourselves back into a standing position and started walking, completely unnerved, to meet Cameron at the front door. Rustling in the background made us turn back around. Dad was standing again. (Because dreams are odd little scenarios that the brain throws together trying to make sense of random information while you sleep so you don’t go brain dead, I had the unexplainable knowledge already that he had had a heart attack and was about to have another.) His face was contorted in what at first looked like signs of outrage, then we recognized it to be agonizing pain, as if he could no longer breathe, and it killed him to stand on the very bones he was trapped in.

With a heavy foot, he started to walk toward us. My best way to describe this is like a zombie or a horrific mummy from one of the old horror movies of the 50’s. It was very overdramatic, yet emphasized how difficult it was for him to even move. A few unsteady steps later and he was at the refrigerator, just a few feet away from us. This time, when his eyes started to roll back in his head, I ran forward to catch him. Instinctively, I wrapped my arms around his middle and braced myself. I was not going to let him fall this time. I was going to keep him standing. Big mistake. He fell forward again, and took me down with him.

My mind raced, prepared for the worst--to be stuck underneath the immeasurable weight of my father. There was no way Kandy would be able to get him off of me, and unless he woke up from this heart attack again, I would be stuck like this. Who even knows if I would have survived. Instead, he managed to catch himself on the way down some kind of way, rather than crush me. He slid his back against the cabinet nearest the fridge and fell into a sitting position there on the floor, propped diagonally against the pantry, my legs trapped under his.

“Call 9-1-1!” Kandy yelled, panic-stricken. “We have to save him this time!”

I completely agreed. I maneuvered my legs free from the bonds and ran to a black chordless phone hanging high on the wall of the kitchen, near the ceiling. I quickly grabbed a chair from the kitchen table and stood on it, still having to stand on my tip-toes to reach the damn phone. My hands were shaking, but my fumbling fingers managed to turn it on and dial 9-1-1.

Some police department answered.

“Please send someone! My dad is having a heart attack!” I said, almost all one word.

“Where are you located,” came the voice on the other end of the phone. I gave them my aunt’s address, which I knew at the time. They assured me that someone would be there shortly to assist, and to keep talking to him and not leave him alone.

When I hung up, Kandy was sitting next to him on the floor. I threw the phone onto the kitchen table and rushed to the floor to meet them. I grabbed his left hand with my right one and held it. The way he felt was indescribable. The edema all over his body made him soft in a squishy, plushy kind of way, yet his skin on top of that fluid was completely hard, as if Rigor Mortis had already set in. The palm of his hand was calloused and his skin was beginning to flake off. The feel of the dead skin against my fingertips sent chills down my spine. I couldn’t help but sob. There was no stopping it. My breath caught in my throat as I cried hard for the loss of my dad, again, and again. Watching die twice that day at my aunt’s house, and the time before that when we had buried him the first time in reality. It was hard to breathe, making me light headed. My heart felt as if it was broken in two.

“Daddy! Please don’t leave us!” I exclaimed as best as I could, which wasn’t the most audible sounding declaration. “We need you! You can’t die! You CAN’T! We expected it of Mom, she’s weak and has no will, but you’re not like that!” I squeezed his hand and held it tightly in mind. There was no use. He couldn’t hear me. He was gone.

And that’s when I woke up.

I can’t take this bullshit anymore. What was up with him saying that I’ll never get rid of him? Was that prophetic, that I’ll always be plagued with watching him die over and over again like some dreadful Groundhog’s Day? Or that I’ll never completely get over his death? I don’t get it. I don’t want to forget him, I just want the nightmares to stop.		  
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