The first phase of our remodel was just to replace the flooring in the part of the house that we aren’t fully remodeling so that we could live there comfortably while the rest of the big project is done. They began on Thursday.
When I picked out the flooring a couple of weeks ago, I asked if there were thresholds to match the floors. Our last floors were an unusual reddish colored wood and the thresholds did not match as well as I would have liked. This time the salesman called them “transitions” and assured me they would be a perfect match.
Last Thursday they began the floors and got the living and dining room complete. They came back on Friday and papered off the doorway between the kitchen, their next work area, and the already finished rooms. I was separated into the dining room area so I could work on some new curtains and get to my office in the front of the house.
The kitchen had tile floors, so before the new floor could be laid, they had to tear out the old one. It was going to create an amazing amount of dust. Luckily that hadn’t been necessary in the other rooms. The noise that they commenced to making was incredible. It sounded like the whole house was being demolished!
Late into the afternoon, one of the installers walked around the house to get me so that I could see something they had discovered. I had no preconceived notion of what I was about to see, but I was not prepared when I opened the back door.
In my den were most of my kitchen appliances lined up next to my den furniture. Once the shock wore off I turned to the left to see the kitchen a total wreck. The work on Thursday had been so calm and easy that this situation was shocking.
It wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, I just wasn’t prepared.
On Tuesday I left the hospital with all of the information I needed and had 24 hours to make a decision. After talking to Tim, I felt that I had made the right decisions and was ready to go back on Wednesday with what I thought was a well thought out plan. I even had pictures to illustrate my thought process and to show the doctors who my father had been and why we had to proceed the way I had decided.
There was a picture of him as a thin, sickly high school senior with bad skin. There was a picture of him graduating from college with honors and an Army officer’s commission. There was a picture of him in his Army uniform, now the strong, elite ranger he had turned himself into. There were pictures of him with an elephant, an alligator and a parrot as he became the youngest zoo director in the country, there was a picture of him in a park on a blanket having a picnic with my beautiful mom and me, just a tiny baby.
What I found on Wednesday morning when I entered the room was shocking. It was not at all the same situation I had left on Tuesday evening.
It wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, I just wasn’t prepared.
In the few hours that I had been gone, my father had gotten much worse. He had been asleep the whole time the day before, but as the nurses and doctors gathered in the room with me, they all remarked that he had declined considerably in the last few hours.
All of the decisions I had so carefully made flew out the window as they were no longer options. God had made the decisions for me and although I wasn’t happy with the answer, it was what I had prayed for all night.
Then the comfort care nurse began talking to me and there was that word again. Transition. She spoke of how are bodies are wonderfully made. She spoke of how the body begins to shut down, not needing food, not feeling hunger. Dehydrating itself as it prepares for transition. Never spoken was the word death, not platitudes of “passing away”, only talk of a transition.
She made the whole process seem like something wonderful, beautiful and planned. She made transitioning sound peaceful and promised that their job was to make it just that- as pain free and peaceful as possible.
I signed a bunch of papers and the nurses left. I told my dad goodbye, just in case. I had done so with my mom and had been glad that I did. In the same breath I told him that the nurses had told me I could break any rule they had as far as number of visitors. I had already rallied my little family to come visit the next day. I told my dad we would be back to see him the next morning.
When the phone rang at 3 am I knew what the man was going to say before he said it. The transition, not a stepping over a threshold but just a smooth path to the next room, was complete.
It’s not that I can’t handle it, you’re just never prepared.
