An Awful Month and a Postponed Decision

 Last month was rough and I am just getting caught up to where I should be this weekend. I am now working as a full-time college professor, which is a surprising amount of work. Making matters tricky was that just after finalizing the contract a major event happened.

My father passed away on August 20^th. He had been taken to the hospital a few days earlier for pneumonia. He had recovered from it and had been moved up to the rehabilitation floor. I was assuming he would only be there a couple of weeks before my caretaking duties would start again. Instead, as I was packing up the stuff he wanted me to bring him for my morning visit I got a phone call from the hospital with the bad news.

It is really strange when something like this happens as part of my mind knew he was gone but another part insisted that this was some type of prank or a mistake. I knew I was not in a proper mental state so asked my neighbor to drive me to the hospital. I simply had to verify that this was real with my own eyes. Stupid, perhaps, but at least I got to say goodbye to him.

Next was the funeral. Dad wanted just a small gathering of his closest friends and family. Thankfully my sisters were there to help prepare this as I had so much preparation to do in a short time. I did write the eulogy which took multiple attempts. I was warned that when giving a eulogy that you should do several dry runs so you can get through it without breaking down. I am glad I followed this advice. Even then, there were a few moments where I could hear my voice breaking and had to pause for a few seconds. What is interesting is that it was at the strangest moments. How hard of a worker he was. How much he cared for my mother. Even writing this I am struggling.

If this wasn’t bad enough to deal with, on the day of the funeral the air conditioner wasn’t clicking on and we had a plumbing issue. The plumbing was easily resolved, thankfully. The air conditioner, was also easy but had a warm house all that day as we simply didn’t have the time to look into the problem. It turns out that there is a switch to the furnace outside the furnace room that magically turned itself off. My nieces and nephews swear they never played with the switch and it is high enough on the wall  (above head height) to prevent accidentally turning it off.

Even after the funeral, I have lots of work to do, but spread out over a few months until probate is finished. Slowly packing things up is not hard work, but often results in surprising memories. Which finally leads to the point of this posting. I still have no idea what I am going to be doing with the site and blog so will be delaying my decision until next month.