Merilee's Story

 Here is my sister Merilee's story.  I am the oldest and she comes next out of four May girls.

I cried.  It was nothing new.  If I had to count, I’d probably done it nearly a thousand times in the last three years.  But this time, it felt different; I knew that tides had changed and it was now “the beginning of the end.”
It had already been about three years since Dad was diagnosed with a soft tissue sarcoma cancer.  He had undergone radiation, 2 surgeries, and chemotherapy.  I shouldn’t have been surprised by the call from my mother saying they’d found more tumors.  But I was; I was surprised and devastated, and I told her my premonition.
She denied it of course, as did my Dad.  It wasn’t the beginning of the end as I claimed, it was just some tumors they found in his lungs.   Just like the other tumors they’d found over the last few years.  We’d have plenty of time left to enjoy our father.
Perhaps they thought I was just being dramatic, as I suppose I was sometimes during my teenage years.  But as I sat in my one bedroom apartment, alone, I felt the emptiness close in around me.  I was nineteen, I lived alone and feared that everyone I loved would eventually leave me.  I wrote of emptiness, loneliness and despair in my journal, because I had no one I could talk to about my heartache except myself.  My sister and childhood friend had moved to Utah and married by this time; it was difficult to explain the agony of watching our Dad die when she was so far away.  My boyfriend had left on a mission and shouldn’t be bothered with trivial things like death.  My roommate had moved out, probably because I was depressed and consumed by the fear of losing my father.  No doubt I was an effective mood dampener.  Who wants to deal with death when life and love await?  I hadn’t yet developed a relationship with my two younger sisters to confide and call upon them for comfort and strength.  In fact, my parents frequently asked me to spend time with them, help them take their mind off the stress at home.  And I felt it would be a burden to talk to my mother or father; they had enough to deal with without having to deal with me.  It was my job to make everyone happy, not depressed with my problems – even if they were very much the same as everyone else’s.   I didn’t believe I would ever feel more alone than I did then.
On March 25th, 1993, they operated on Dad to remove the tumors in his lungs.  It was then everyone learned what I already knew; it was the beginning of the end.  And while it would usually feel good to be right; it felt awful and I was without the skills or life experience to truly grasp the pain of death.  I didn’t fear what lied ahead for my dad on the other side, I didn’t even fear that I may never see him again.  I simply ached inside, knowing I would never be ready to let go.
When they operated, they found tumors along the lining of his heart that they were unable to remove at that time.  They would wait, and do it later.  He spent nearly a month in the hospital following that surgery; and I visited at least once every day.  What else could I have possibly done?  I was consumed by the fear of his death, of not being there for him, not being ready, and not understanding how I would survive.
He called me crying one day from the hospital, afraid and unable to reach my mom.  The middle class certainly didn’t have cell phones back then and she wasn’t at home.  I dropped everything I was doing to rush to the hospital.  I would have done anything to stop the pain, but I was helpless. 
They never got do perform the surgery to remove the remaining tumors.  Dad died six months later, almost a month after his 47th birthday.  For all the effort I had put into being there for him when he was in the hospital for a month, I missed him the day that he died.  I missed him by mere moments.  My mother had called shortly before my shift began and called every hour thereafter with an update.  He was progressively getting worse.  Every time I insisted that I would leave work right then and be there, I was assured he would be there when I left.  Five minutes before the office closed, Mom called.  He had just died.
It wasn’t supposed to happen so fast, although the reality was he’d been sick for nearly four years.  He only went for a doctor’s appointment.  He was supposed to be home when I got off work.  But he was dead.  He was gone; and I knew instantly that it would be too long before I would ever see him again.  I crumbled into pieces that thereafter took me years to put back together.  Years before I would ever even learn to talk to my own family about the pain that I felt when he left.