I've been in a bit of a shock. And to be honest, I'm shocked I was shocked.
Mother gave me a little bag full of "stuff" that she said mostly came from Daddy's wallet, and thought I might enjoy looking through it.
And I did, at first. There was a lot of paperwork that was just run of the mill. There were wallet sized photos of us, one of mother in her twenties, that kind of thing.
There was a photo of him on an i. d. card from Lockheed, but it gave his status as retired, so it was done at the time he retired. The back of the card says they hope he enjoys his retirement, blah, blah, blah. The photo made me smile, because he had gotten fat! I remember he had to work on losing that, and he did. The photo says it was taken in 1985. I don't think I'd ever seen it before.
The photo I think favors him the most was taken seven or eight months before he died. He is sitting at the table and he looks up at the camera and smiles. He was fifty-eight, but he looked to be in his forties with the black hair and smooth, coppery colored skin.
He had to retire because of the massive heart attack he had, but he stayed pretty busy. He tended to his toddler grandson a lot, and my grandmother, his mother-in-law, lived with them, so they kept each other company. And he visited his mother until she passed away in October of '87. Of course, Mother never drove, so he took her back and forth to work too.
In April of '88 he went into the hospital to have his esophagus stretched. While he was still sedated an aide let his bed down and he aspirated into his lungs. They put him on a vent and he was in ICU for three weeks. No one expected him to pull out of it. But he did. He came home, but he was very weak.
I remember it all in vivid detail. I remember he went into the hospital with black hair and touches of silver and came out three weeks later with silver hair and not much black. I remember my husband visiting him while he was still in ICU. He had not seen Daddy in three days. He told me later when they let him in ICU he couldn't find my daddy. He went back and asked the nurse and she took him back to a bed he had been to, but my daddy had aged so much he didn't recognize him. I remember this.
But the other day I saw a photo of those results. He had his driver's license renewed on May tenth because his birthday was on the fourteenth. This photo looks like that of a man in his middle eighties. He died twenty-five days after the photo was taken.
Here's the thing: This photo stunned me. I couldn't think. I couldn't stop staring at it. My heart broke all over again.
Because I truly don't remember him looking like that.
The mind is powerful, and I guess I had erased this image, replacing it with the way he looked up until April. He looked that way for less than three months. So I "forgot" it.
And to be honest? I'm still stunned.
I never want to see that photo again.
