I lost my dad just a day ago on January 19, 2018. His girlfriend texted me Wednesday letting me know he didn’t sound good and was afraid it was pneumonia. I called and was able to convince him to go to the hospital because he sounded so bad. I was at work when this happened and could not make it to him until 4:30 when I got off of work. Well he ended up having pneumonia that was very severe. They had to put him on a ventilator and took him to ICU. When I had finally made it to the hospital he was already very sedated because he was fighting the ventilator. He’s struggled with being an alcoholic for his whole life and had an blood to alcohol level of 80. He ended up getting sepsis from the pneumonia because he wasn’t seen soon enough. Later Thursday early morning around 3am he went into septic shock. That’s when it got really bad. He kept almost going into cardiac arrest but would pull through and become stable before that happened. His kidneys ended up failing so they put him on dialysis which they were hoping was going to help clear out his blood. It didn’t do what they expected it to do and Friday morning they had everyone come to the hospital. His labs had came back really bad and his liver was beginning to fail. At that point he was on life support and believed to be brain dead. It was now time for us to decide whether to keep him in life support or stop everything other than the sedation and pain medication. It was hard for us to decide but at that point he was gone it was the machines keeping his heart going. We decided to take him off of everything. He passed away at 1:52pm January 19th. I’ve never cried so much and felt so lost. I came home after an hour of just sitting in his room crying and being searching for everything I could find of him from cards he gave me to letters from rehab. I listen to his last voice mail over and over again just go hear him laugh and say he loved me. I miss him so much and am having a hard to accepting the fact that he is gone. I’ve cried myself to sleep and I cried when I woke up. I’ve cried most of today and probably will continue to for a while. He was only 59 yrs old. I sort of feel guilty because he had texted me Saturday but I didn’t text back. I keep thinking if I would have texted back I would have made him go to the hospital sooner and he would still be here. I don’t know how to not feel like this.
Brezzy, I am so very sorry for your loss and for all the pain you are feeling. This is such a very new loss, and I find for most grievers this type of suffering is very much to be expected in the early days. I think one of the hardest things a loss like this makes us face is the fact that we have no control. And we spend a lot of time after loss going back and thinking what we "should" have done...certain that if we had just done things differently there would be a different outcome. Of course there's no way to know this and for most people I know they're just doing the best they can with the information they have at the time. Meaning, if someone showed you the future and said, all you have to do is text back and everything will be okay...would you text back? Of course! No question. But we don't get that crystal ball so instead, we just assume because the outcome was so bad that if we simply changed one thing the outcome could be good. But again, there is just no way to ever know that. In time, because this may be hard to do now...but in time I hope you can forgive yourself the way your father would want you to. I hope you can find the peace he would want you to have. I hope you can base your future life on what he would have wanted for you and model everything from this day on following the path to happiness that he wanted for you. I wish you all the best and hope we can be a help to you. We're here to support you...please let us know if there is anything you need. Take care~
