Might as well confess…

Guess it’s time for me to pull back the curtain.

If the header didn’t tip you off, this is a blog that’s more about fiction than anything.  Video games, and movies, and TV shows, and the ideas behind them -- that’s what I’d prefer to talk about by a huge margin.  And that’s what I’ve been talking about.  So it’s not as if I’d suddenly start gabbing on and on about my life just because I felt like it -- except for this one time.  I hope you’ll forgive the deviation.

It’s worth noting that for the past month and a half (and maybe more) my dad wasn’t in the best of health.  He got dehydrated during a business trip, which likely opened up all sorts of problems -- chief among them, pneumonia.  It might not have been so bad if not for some of his vices catching up to him; he’d been smoking since before I was born, and he was no stranger to alcohol.  So it reached a point where at the end of July, he had to go to the hospital and spend a good three weeks there to try and recuperate.  You know, take care of the fluid in his lungs and such.

He got to come out of the hospital eventually, which was good, but not without a couple of caveats.  He needed to be hooked up to oxygen -- either a tank, or a machine to produce it -- to help the convalescing process.  On top of that, he had to rely on wheelchairs and walkers so that he wouldn’t have to overexert himself and make a bad situation worse.  But the biggest issue, I’d wager, was that the doctors found a mass on his liver.  And I hope I don’t have to tell you guys reading this what that means.

From what I could gather, it wasn’t necessarily a death sentence.  He got a slew of medicines to take, consultation from doctors, and aides to come visit him as needed.  And while there were days where he didn’t fare so well, others had him in a fairly good state.  He could still walk, and he could still talk.  He even had a cousin come over to visit him for about a week so he could lend a hand and so they could laugh it up.  He had me worried, and I knew there was a lot of work to be done, but pretty much everyone figured that he was on the road to recovery, or at least stability.

But then the road ended.  And my dad passed away.

As of writing, I don’t know all of the details.  I didn’t even know all the details about his condition beforehand.  If I had to guess, I’d say he had a bad reaction to some new medication -- because it was his heart that suddenly decided to call it quits.  (The irony is that I had talked to him that day, mere hours beforehand -- and he sounded better than he had the day before.)  Even if the doctors and EMTs and all the rest managed to revive him -- and they pretty much couldn’t, despite their best efforts -- it had been too long since he went into that state.  Basically, he would’ve been a vegetable.  That’s the one thing my dad wouldn’t have wanted. 

So I guess that’s about it.  My dad’s gone.  He was getting up there in terms of age, so it’s not as if his life was cut short -- in theory, at least.  In practice, I guess I have a hard time believing that he’s gone because it’s not how the story was supposed to end.  I thought -- and I hoped -- that he would get to see me become a true writing hero, a tour de force in the world of fiction.  And while I don’t doubt that he’s proud of what I’ve done so far, even if he’s nodding at me posthumously, I wanted him to be even prouder.  I wanted to see his smiling face as I showed him the fruits of my labors -- and that his faith wasn’t misplaced.

And I can’t now.  I can’t do a lot of things that I hoped to do.  As much as it hurts, and as much as I hate to admit it, I know the truth.  His story is over.

But mine isn’t.

My dad believed in me.  That’s been a given since I learned how to tie my shoes (and not bank on Velcro to see me through).  He always thought I could be more, and do more, and become more.  Back when I started this blog and showed it off to him, he was impressed.  He patted me on the shoulder and told me “Keep the faith.”  And I did.  And I will.  He believed in me.  He still does.  And now I need to do the same -- to honor him, to become the hero I want to be, and to show the world the power of faith.

I’m not even going to pretend like I’m at 100%, because I’m not.  So as much as I hate to, I need to step away from the blog for a while.  There are things that need to be done beyond it -- and even if there weren’t, I think some space would help me out a little.  I don’t know when things will pick up again, and I don’t know when I’ll be my irreverent, “overly sanctimonious” self again.  But someday, maybe soon, I’ll be back.

Someday, I'll have to come back.  There's still a long road ahead.