Part 2 (Thursday): The Longest Days

It’s 11:40 at night on a Thursday, and I just emailed one of my (favorite) employees to request that she steal a bunch of chord-holders from work and mail them to my parent’s house:

Natasha,

If we have any left, will you grab me about 20 of those chord holders I ordered for the event and mail them to me? Just stick them in a big envelope from the shelves by my cube and put it in outgoing mail. I’m setting up a work station at my parent’s until my dad passes away and this chord situation is stressin’ my ass out.

This is a lesson in not being afraid to ask for what you need to be successful as a business person. Thank you in advance.

AP

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I don’t know what the longest day of my life has ever been.

I haven’t ever invaded Normandy beach, so there’s nothing that stands out in my mind. I’ve been to Normandy beach twice. Both days were pretty nice and involved me listening to historical facts from Europeans tour hosts and lunching on crab legs while contemplating what it would be like to run into Nazi machine gun fire. The first time I invaded Normandy beach as a tourist, I was reading The Longest Day. It was a phenomenal book and gave me all of the necessary facts.

The second time I invaded Normandy beach as a tourist, I brought my father. My husband and I took our wedding guests on a guided tour of the beaches as part of the wedding deal. Seems a little joyless, but historical tours bring me delight like almost nothing else. I regaled any of my wedding guests who I could trap into a conversation for more than 4 minutes with an encyclopedia of wild and unexpected D-day details (d-etails. No?). Our tour guide was a boring-ass internet professor-type, and so I frantically supplemented his bland lesson with a visual painting of what ships were where, troop movements, and other critical information like the fact that Band of Brothers was actually filmed in England, and this one Nazi (whose name I forget) had a dog with him while he watched 200 ships appear on the horizon. You used to be able to just chill with your dog by your side during major war events.

Part of being in a major war event is that you don’t know that it actually is a major war event, so dogs aren’t expressly off limits during these important historical moments.

Today started with my dad leaking intestinal fluids all over the bed and ended with me working until midnight.

Notes:

• I learned to change a pick-line
• Mom cried all day
• Dad wasn’t lucid because he was on Morphine
• My pregnant sister visited and her naked baby ran across the street into the neighbors yard
• I rage cried at the gym

A super pretty hospice night-nurse named Morgan came over to deal with the incredible amount of biley-liquid from my dad’s bed. He basically has a gigantic hole in his stomach with a medical-looking straw in it, because once your body starts shutting down, you just fill up with fluid like a water balloon. The medical-looking straw was leaking, which is not ideal.

No one commented about what a babe Morgan was, and I was proud of my mom for not accidentally sexually harassing her.

What *was* difficult, however, is that my mom took “something to relax” and she wasn’t paying attention to other human feedback. Basically, it was like managing a drunk sorority sister (who you love!) as she is dominating the conversation / trying to close the A/C vent on the ceiling by hitting it with a decorative glass dolphin / forcing my dad to eat ice he didn’t want as he got more and more stressed out, etc. Morgan was very patient. Granted, mom had spent 40% of the day crying and this was around 9 pm. I was patient too.

The days are getting longer. His body is weak, he can’t shuffle around today, and he didn’t really get out of bed. He is losing trains of thought easily. He winces most of the time, even if he is on Morphine. He can’t think, he can’t focus his eyes, he doesn’t know how to use the remote, and he needs to be reassured that things are where he thinks they should be. He is thirsty all of the time. He breathes with his mouth open. He stares at the ceiling blankly. He only wanted two watermelon pieces this morning. I gave them to him by hand. This morning he was concerned about doing it himself. By night, he just understood it was easier to eat the ice chips out of my hands instead of using his own. He can’t.

He asked questions about when Kristen’s baby is coming. I told him not to worry. We will all take care of each other. All of the love we have for him we will have for her. We will all take care of Kristen just like we are taking care of him.

He was relieved by that. He slept all day, but when I adjusted his pillows turned out his light at 10:30 he asked if it was 11:00 yet. I told him it was very close. He feels like it’s important to stay up until his normal time.

I said “You did great. You almost made it.”

The night is coming.