"MY MEMOIRS" PAGE 15: MY FATHER'S DEATH

A Knack For Calling People At Certain Times

I'd always had this knack for calling people and having them tell me, "It's funny, I was just talking about you (or thinking about you) just the other day (or even 'just yesterday')". Add to that that I tend to call just when something is important is happening, too - both good and bad.

On this particular day, I was at home - having just finished some online errands. Taking a break from that for awhile, I brought youtube up, and watched an episode of "Sanford and Son" (I'd been on a kick watching older childhood TV sitcom shows lately). It was the episode when Fred and his son, Lamont go camping, and re-bonding as a result. This made me miss my own Dad and I wondered how he was doing. It had been 2 or 3 weeks since I'd spoken to him on the phone last. So, I called him.

I got his wife's voice instead. She told me that he had just suddenly gone unconcious rihjt then. Soon the paramedics came to try to revive him. She couldn't give me details at the time, but she was right next to him, was talking loudly. If people could hear when they go unconscious, then I hoped he'd heard when I had called when he was passing out. I was told I'd be notified of any updates once he reached the hospital.

JUST AS I HAD FEARED

The next morning came. I had contacted my sister, her daughter, my cousins, and close life-long best friends the day before to let everyone know what had just happened to my father. I then got the phone call I had had a sinking feeling I would get. Sure enough, it turned out my father had died in his sleep. Actually, he had never woken up from the day before. I knew this was coming. After all his years of severe health problems and suffering, we all knew this coming eventually. Yet, still, even thoughnobody was surprised, you're still not completely prepared for the reality of it when it does finally happen. All I could think was that at least he went peacefully in his sleep, like my mother did. I still balled my eyes out after I hung up the phone, and when I had to break the news to everyone. Now I had to hurry and get an emergency flight out to Chicago.

SANDY BURIED MY FATHER IN A CASKET WITH MY NAME ON IT INSTEAD OF HIS OWN!

My niece and I were the only ones who stayed to watch my father being lowered into his gave at the cemetery. Sandy did not even stay. I figured it may have been because she was upset that my father's wish had been to be buried next to my mother instead of her. It hadn't gone unnoticed that, at the wake, Sandy had completely left out any photos of even any mention of my mother. Though she had a couple of photos of my sister and I with them, the funeral home was mainly filled with photos of just HER and my Dad or HER relatives with my Dad. All of my original family members and friends of our original family noticed that. Sandy would REALLY suddenly show her true colors to us a little later on.

Anyway, my niece and I stayed to witness my father finally being reunited with my mother again - where he wanted to be and where he BELONGED! As the casket was being lowered into the ground, my niece pointed something out to me. Instead of my father's name, the casket had MY name on it instead! Granted we had the same technical first and last names, but our middle names were COMPLETELY different! Having recently survived a close brush with my own death battling cancer and grueling chemotherapy, the image of a casket with MY full name on it being lowered into the ground in a grave so soon afterward, was VERY disturbing and unsettlig to me! It still gives me occasional nightmares and haunts me to this day when I think about it. It also greatly angered me that my father was denied the proper respect of being buried with his OWN name on his casket.

She had done the same on the funeral home cards at his wake., too! So, doing it AGAIN on hiscasket...this was no coincidental mistake.

After inquiring, I later found out from the funeral home that Sandy had been the one to fill out all the paper work and chose the name that would be on the funeral cards and the casket. It wasn't the funeral home's fault. It was Sandy's fault and entirely Sandy's doing. She claoimed she was just in distress and forgo his full name. But I did not buy that at all. Nor did my original family members and our friends. This woman filled out tons of medical paperwork and other documents that required her putting in my father's full name each time for TWENTY YEARS! There was no way she'd "forget" his name after 20 years of all that. No, we didn't buy it for a SECOND. And, always coming across as she would rather my sister and I not be in my father's life after she married him - showing plenty of signs all along - starting from right after my mother's death and onward - of wanting us out of the way that I had ignored and always mistakenly givem her the benefot of the doubt for, Sandy would get worse and more selfish and cruel to us from there shortly after my father's funeral.

I suddenly realized that she had indeed knowingly kept my father isolated from us, two hours away from home except for maybe a day or two every couple of weeks right after meeting him just two months or less after my mother had just died and we were all still grieving, including my father. My sister was still a minor and in high school during that time. But my father was never home. Sandy kept him at her house hours away all the time- fully aware that we were grieving, needed my father's support, that my sister was still a minor and in school, and obviously not caring in the least that she had my father to completely neglect his parenting when we needed him most. This was parental abuse and neglect. It was obvious that SAndy was manipulating him - using hisgrief over my mother to keep him isolated and under her strong, manipulative influence. Because of her, he gave up on his parental duties completely, and left us to the wolves and our own devices, and to grieve for our mother completely on our own without his support. Later that same year, heannounced he was getting married to her. After my father's death, it became crystal clear that she had married him only to expand her own wealth. We were not wealthy at all, but myffather did have property - the house we grew up in and the large farm in Wisconsin my grandparents had left him. And who was the one who got all the money from selling those properties? She did. And we got nothing.And after his death, once again, sje kept every single thing, and sold most of my father's belongings within just two days after his death even before his wake. We droopped in on her unexpectedly jus before the wake, and saw that her house was completely empty of my father's and our original family's belongings, and we overheard her on the phone talking to someone about her having sold it all.

Sandy also refused to let us or any of his original family members have anything of my father's - saying it was all hers and that she would keep it all for herself. She eeven refused to give back things that had NO monetary value to her whatsoever - or sentimental value. Things she knew had a lot of sentimental value to us. This included little kid school art projects I had made in grade school for my mother. They wren't even my father's. I had made them specifically for my mother, and many of them SAID "To My Mother..." or "For you, Mom..." on them. No one would ever buy those things from her. But she refused to give even those things back to me when I made them, and I had made them for my mother - not for my father, and certainly not for HER (Sandy) who we wouldn't even meet till several years later in our lives.

More on that later.

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