It had always been difficult speaking with my father, and being around him for long periods at a time. My father's name was Liam Hanskead. He passed away when I was thirty, just five months after my mother had passed. My mother, Gretchen Keering Hanskead ended her own life by walking in front of a passenger bus. I blamed my father. Now my son can blame me.
Two months before he died we finally got answers from his doctors. He needed a transplant of the liver. He was evaluated but was put on a waiting list. He was a number. He was rated and qualified as 'not in urgent need.' Ratings come from financial ability and donor status and compatibility. The doctors misdiagnosed his need.
The more I think about it, the more I can remember him in the early stages of his ailments. We didn't know they were symptoms at the time, no one did. It turns out his liver began breaking down some ten years prior because of something called encephalopathy, which is an increase on portal hypertension, or at least that's what I got out of it. We didn't know what was wrong with him for the longest time. It seemed like everyday stress, having a job he didn't like, worries of a second mortgage and three kids finishing schooling, real life stresses. He was changing in front of us and we didn't even know why.
It turns out it was his liver and the fact that it was slowly, but surely, breaking down. His personality changed, he never seemed the same for more than a week at a time, even daily he would fluctuate. That's what drove my mother crazy the most. It wasn't the temporary aggressiveness and short temperance, and it wasn't that he seemed more and more confused about things. He would focus on certain things, certain ideas of memories of our family, some of which never happened at all. It's called 'rewriting' the past in a way that focuses the mind for the body, but just separates the person from reality. It wasn't the focusing on these false memories, and the constant attention and insistence on small and inconsequential matters either that set my mother into fits, it was personality changes, an almost pseudo dementia or trans fixation on exact personal traits. He would just change overnight it seemed, and sometimes he'd come back, but then he would go again, mentally, in a total opposite direction.
My brothers were mostly put off by his memory loss. They couldn't bare hearing stories over and over and over. They stopped laughing at the jokes that always came, the same jokes told infinite times so that they were more commonplace than entertaining. It was a slowly progressive disease, and it slowly tore us apart.
By the time the doctors had figured it out it was too late without the transplant. He was just a number though. A number on a waiting list. Medications wouldn't help, nothing could help, not even faith.
The last time I spoke with him he was insistent on planning a vacation together for the following summer. He told me that he wanted the whole family, including my mother who had passed, to go to Mexico for a ski vacation. He wanted to go to Mexico in the summer with my dead mother on a skiing vacation. I would say he was a bit confused in his last few weeks. Then he told me a joke. I had heard it a good two hundred or so times from him, but it always got a rise out of me. And then out of nowhere he told me he loved me and that he meant it. After that he went quiet for a minute, and it seemed to me that he was thinking about what he had just said. He blinked twice and then told me he wanted to plan a vacation all over again. He died three hours later with just me at his side. My other two brothers were still on their flights coming into see him.
You are suppose to bury your father, not your son. Not your healthy, smart, beautiful son.
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