12 June 2026

It’s kind of amazing how fast life can change in half a month.

Or end.

No, not me. My father passed away a week ago.

We knew it was coming. The reason we knew it was coming is he told my brother and me through Dad’s best friend Carrie that he was quitting dialysis. He wanted to quit dialysis because while it was keeping him alive, it also had him sick, miserable, and in pain after every session -- and patients with advanced kidney failure like his get dialysis three times a week. He declared that he was an adult and of sound mind and did not have to continue suffering if he didn’t want to. He also instructed Carrie to only tell his kids, and instructed us through her to not tell the family because he knew they would try to talk him out of it.

Brother was near frantic and basically said to me, Hey, you know about this medical stuff. How long does he have? I didn’t know a lot of specifics about kidney disease, so I googled it and ignored the AI slop and visited the National Kidney Foundation site, which said anywhere between a week and a month depending on what else was going on.

He had a lot going on. He lasted about a week.

Carrie has been an angel. She has helped where she could, which isn’t as far as she’d like since they never married (and were never “um-friends” either), but she was the one who notified us as soon as she heard from the nursing home, and she helped us get the ball rolling on the obituary, and there were a few other things within her power to do. Dad didn’t have a will and didn’t have much personal property, so probate isn’t an issue (it’s Louisiana, a state which insists on doing things its own way). So she’s basically just making sure we get what was left of his personal stuff.

Dad also had veterans’ life insurance with us kids as beneficiaries and another policy with Carrie’s kids on it. All that pending me getting things lined up with his death certificate. Right now I’m in limbo because I may have misunderstood the process and so may be expecting a step that isn’t ready to happen yet. Hopefully I get that sorted out. I feel like a fucking vulture, not to put too fine a point on it, but I still have to get this shit done because even if I could probably get by without it, my brother lost his job this year and has really fallen on hard times. (We can never just have straightforward life stories. His employer was a legal pot farmer, basically, but got in trouble for a shady real estate deal, by which point my brother had already bailed for other completely understandable reasons. He could use some breathing room here.) I don’t exactly feel like the whole world is on my shoulders, but I am really hoping this works out for him.

The other feeling I’m having is some kind of negativity because Dad going all weird in his final years (I don’t think he had dementia exactly, but he wasn’t fully himself anymore, either) meant that just when my life got kicked apart in ‘21, I couldn’t get settled enough to put it back together and I kept losing and kept losing and kept fucking losing. It’s been difficult to not be bitter about it. I haven’t been trying very hard. If he had been almost anyone else, or even himself from thirty years ago, I would have pushed hard for reconciliation because I know he would have wanted it. But he got mean in his final decade. It is hard to explain if you weren’t right in the middle of it. I do not have the spoons to navigate a situation like that. I didn’t want to leave, not either time I left his house, but I don’t regret going because nobody needs that shit and I’m still not okay. So to hear what he’s more or less leaving me now (though, fun fact, life insurance to a named beneficiary is not considered “estate”) has kind of got me going, “okay, now we’re going to put to rights what he helped tear down.” It’s awful. I'm not proud of myself. But if he could see the situation from outside, I dunno. He might concede I have a point.

We were too fucking much alike, if you want to know the truth. Mixed blessing. I can see where I picked up some of his cool attributes like his problem-solving, and I have my random moments of generosity too, when I’ve got it to give. But there’s always the danger that I’ll turn into a mean old lady, and that’s the last thing I want to do. I don’t want to be a sucker or a pushover, but I’ll be damned if my kids ever hear the words I don’t like you coming out of my mouth and aimed at them. Even if they have just done something to piss me off.

But this was also the same man who, the second time I stayed with him, was good and drunk one evening and off in his own little world and mumbled something about being glad I was safe. (My second time staying with him post-2021 was as an alternative to living in my car in an Ohio winter. Again.) I’ll never know how much of the Mean Old Man was some bizarre kind of bluster. In the end he loved both us kids, even if we did drive him to absolute distraction sometimes.

I am kind of running out of steam here and really need to go to bed. I just didn’t want to let it go longer without remarking upon the situation. Some of you already knew, but I think most of you didn’t. So there you are.