Goodbye

Dave,

Thanks tremendously. I can’t tell you how much your kindness means to me. Thank you.

I love that picture, too. He’s nearly smirking; I think he’s glad to be 82 or 83 (this was taken just a year or two before he fell permanently ill), having survived* the wars he was in. No doubt he had other reasons to smile, too. He was tough as nails, and soft as a kitten.

*although it was Agent Orange that got him, in the end. It took 35 years of leukemia to finally bring him down.

~jer

We tried calling you guys but you must have been on vacation; we couldn’t get through for days. I’m sorry, i guess nobody followed up after that.

It was sad – so sad. It still kills me every day. Every day i think about him and his sweet, gentle ways. He was such a good man. Not without his faults, but nobody is. I miss him more than anything. Him and my Grandmother, that is.

I know he loved your whole family like crazy! He was just wild about those silly little sweetie-girls.

Things were not real good for him or any of us that last couple of years. Everything just… went to hell, i guess. One day he’s up and painting the fence or whatever his Big Project was at the time, and the next day he was down for good. I guess in a way, it’s too bad that he couldn’t have gone then, although i am selfishly glad that he didn’t.

To be honest, i had a really hard time dealing with his [literally!] overnight invalidism. It just killed me to pieces, especially when it was obvious (apparently, only to me) that his mind was taking a huge hit as well. He became pretty fairly demented, to be honest. And paranoid, in a weird way. He thought he was living in a hotel, or a restaurant, in a duplicate house in an identical town in Kansas, also called New Carlisle. It tore me to pieces, Mary. I stopped coming over to see him, especially after there was also major drama with caretakers we had hired to look after him. There was good and bad times with that, but the small bad outweighed the big good, for me anyway. People got weird and crappy with one another and the whole vibe over there was just like some terrible weird tenseness all of the time.

It killed me, and it continues to every day. He shouldn’t have not been able to get better at some point. Instead, his last two and a half years were all a big nightmare. He was literally helpless from the first day he went into GMH to the day he died. He never got even slightly better. He lost the ability to swallow and had to be fed through a tube for two years.

GMH.

GMH? Let me tell you about GMH…

Greene Memorial Hospital flipped everything upside down. That place is so evil i can smell their putrid stench from the middle of Dayton. They really screwed him bad, and they know it. But that’s a long and terrible tale, and it’s too late at night to be digging up those old bones. Let’s just say that that system has not one person with a sense of Hippocratic duty or even the most elementary of ethics. It’s isolated, corporate culture, and that can easily breed a kind of moral sickness that pervades everything from the top to the bottom and all places in between. A sick corporate culture where the employees have lost touch with even common sense can almost never hope to cure itself, and that place above most deserves to burn to the ground, if only so a newness can wash over and cleanse the psychic space where the infection once threatened to choke the goodness out of otherwise ordinary people forever.

Can you tell i’m bitter about his “treatment” there? Agent Orange was the bullet that gave him leukemia, but GMH really emptied the chamber on him. On our sweet, dear Ralph!

Anyway, he had pretty much lost most of his ability to communicate during this time, especially in those last couple of months. That twisted the knife deeper into my wounded heart, knowing he couldn’t say what he wanted to, and especially knowing that whatever he had to say wouldn’t have made much sense a lot of the time.

That last day was the worst. Fights broke out – yelling and screaming, right over his dying body. At the end, i left the house, promising to be back in the morning. I got the call the next day.

He had already died a couple of weeks before that, in the hospital (i forget which, but they were terrific). They had to give him the paddles, and then do the chest thing – which i now know usually ends up breaking ribs, which it did. So he had to lay around with broken ribs and never once did he complain. Never once. He did howl when they had to turn him over for cleaning and whatnot. That was terrible.

I guess what i’m trying to explain is that the whole ordeal was just pure, unfiltered hell, and that i am sick to death of death. Now i know what Roger Daltry really meant when he said that bit about hoping he died before he got old.

I’m sorry this got so dark, but those were definitely bleak and dismal times. Hope i didn’t upset you. That’s how it all went down, though.

This is getting super long (sorry!) and I better run, but it’s really great to hear from you, circumstances notwithstanding. I’m so sorry we never did get hold of you guys but we did try for days. Ralph loved the bejesus out of your family, especially those sweet little sillyheads. I hope you and Jim and Haley and Hannah and little Hilary are doing great! Don’t be a stranger! Tell Jim and the kids i said ‘hi!” and give ’em hugs from me, and be good to yourselves!

~jer