Nineteen years ago this very moment I stood next to a stainless steel labratory table holding my dead father’s hand in mine.<\/p>\n
He had finished his shift at Ford, locked his toolbox, and run up the three flights of stairs between his shop and the locker room on the mezzanine. Just like he’d done every other evening of his life for twenty seven years. Only this time he had a grabber about halfway up. He made it to the top and collapsed. They were unable to revive him<\/p>\n
He hadn’t had a genetically bad ticker, he had a bad ticker because of the hell he’d been through in his life. He had scarlet fever when he was young that messed up his heart valves and left him with only partial heart function to begin with. It was a wonder he’d made it as long as he had. <\/p>\n
I stood there with the table supporting me, holding his hand in mine, for a very long time. The wrinkles in his face were gone. The hospital sheet covered him to his chest, so I could see the scars on his shoulders and arms where he’d had surgeries and other problems in his life. <\/p>\n
An orderly came in and asked me if they could harvest his eyes now. He’d signed his donor card for the eye bank, his eyes went to fix cataracts on a couple other people. I squeezed his hand and left. <\/p>\n
I’ve never been able to talk about this in nineteen years. It’s killing me to do so now.<\/p>\n
We had dad’s favorite meal, which we always do on the anniversary, pork chops with mashed potatos and milk gravy, sauerkraut to mix in witht he taters and gravy. Mom cracked open a mason jar of corn we canned in 1978, one of the last years dad had the big garden. Dad would have put the corn into the jar, we ate it in his memory. <\/p>\n
I don’t know if this will ever not hurt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nineteen years ago this very moment I stood next to a stainless steel labratory table holding my dead father’s hand in mine. He had finished his shift at Ford, locked his toolbox, and run up the three flights of stairs between his shop and the locker room on the mezzanine. Just like he’d done every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}