A Dad for the People

Three weeks ago today, Dad’s body was lowered into the ground at Lake View Memorial Park in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

His parents, Jean and George Buehner, though they had chosen to be cremated, have memorials there as well; my maternal great-grandparents, Helen and Kenneth Ruddock, are in the facility’s mausoleum. There is some solace that Dad’s body rests, at last, beside those with whom he once sat at a table carving a turkey, or saying a prayer.

His spot is under a crabapple tree similar to the one at Omro Road: as such, many birds frequent the area, which is very fitting for someone who always paid attention to them; to everything. 

“Fitting” as all of this is, I literally cannot believe he is gone. 

“He’s in his casket,” the funeral home director had stated when my brother Ted and I went to go see him one last time before they sealed it. Of course he was: they had done their job getting him in there.

Up until that point, we had done our jobs taking care of him when he was sick, taking care of him when he was extremely sick, and taking care of him when he was dying.

We’d done everything the way that they had said to do it. The zoom meetings, the in-person meetings, doctor after doctor after doctor. Despite all of my brother’s and my diligence, cancer, in its all-encompassing, singular grotesque fastidiousness, had also done its job.  

It was the end of July 2023, 19 months into his illness, that the first major changes could be seen in Dad. Glioblastoma predicts 12-18 months, so in this way we were all lucky to have still had “HIM him” for as long as we had.

Despite the terrible thing that was happening to him, he was our very own competent, funny, responsible, graceful teacher until the very end.

Dad’s childhood friend Bill K. was at Dad’s the first time he fell. They had decided to take two of Dad’s old bicycles for a ride, and Dad had run his into a garbage can, fallen, and broken three ribs. I sat with him at Urgent Care while it was determined by a second X-ray his ribs were not puncturing any of his organs.

While we’d been waiting for the X-ray results, he’d gotten cold. They’d given us a warm blanket and we walked around in the Healing Garden for a little bit; then we went and sat in a chair, wherein he immediately fell asleep next to me; then we walked around the lobby, where he ran into a fraternity brother and said “How goes it?!”

I can’t even think of the color scheme of Aurora without going back to this time with him. 

Then, they sent him home. I needed to go pick up Imogen and Ansel, so I heated him up a meal and left him in the company of Bill.

After I left, he became increasingly agitated and fell two more times in his house. Ted was there by this point and tried to pick him up off the floor but couldn’t, and called for an ambulance. Dad was carried out of his house in a sheet by the paramedics. Ted called me right after he called the ambulance. I made it across town in eight minutes.

After almost forty years, that morning he woke up and went for a bike ride with his childhood best friend was the very last time he would ever wake up at home.

Because of the optic nerves’ crossing, the tumor located on the left side of his brain had first created a small blind spot in his right eye. Eventually the entire right side of his body would be in so much pain it would hurt to put ice on his ankle; at this point, it explained why the man who had navigated the Canadian Rockies on a ten speed had bicycled straight into a garbage bin.

As I’d said, I’d made it to his house just after the paramedics had transferred him from the sheet into the ambulance, so I was able to ride to the hospital with him.

They had just wheeled him back into the OR after a CT scan checking if he had any internal bleeding from his fall (he had not), and that’s when he had a minutes-long seizure from which he would never fully recover. 

They upped his meds (by a lot) and he stayed the whole weekend in the ICU, where the attending physician told us he now needed 24/7 care. Ted and I looked everywhere in town and just outside of town and finally decided on Aspire Senior Living in Oshkosh.

Dad went to Aspire by CabULance and came walking down from his room in a Packer hoodie later that day looking more like he was there visiting someone than he did a patient. 

Now that we are on the other side, we can see that his time at Aspire was about saying goodbye. During the six weeks he stayed there at the end of his life, he enjoyed full celebrity status: friends, family, neighbors, former colleagues and students came from all over the country, joining the Aspire staff and AseraCare Hospice team in caring for and checking in on Dad. He had so many cards we literally didn’t have time to open them all while he was there. 

This was a very tender, special time for those of us who loved him most. We got the slide projector going and he was able to recognize some people. His balance got worse and he fell.

Hospice got him a walker, which frustrated him. He had trouble moving from his bed to his chair and they got him a wheelchair, which didn’t really work either. Ted got him a chair that elevated. It became hard for him to communicate.

One Wednesday evening, I showed him a picture I’d taken of the sunrise over Lake Winnebago on my way to work. In maybe our last “normal” exchange, he’d said “Nothing better.” After that following Sunday, he wouldn’t get up again at all.

That Friday I went to see him after school, and one of his best friends, Bill B., who’d lost his own wife to cancer, sat in Dad’s room with us. Bill B. and I mostly looked at each other. Dad had his hat pulled down over his eyes because the light was bothering him at this point too.

The next night, Saturday, he had another fall and I went back over to find him sitting in the cafeteria with the on-call hospice nurse and (Aspire staff) Tanner, one of dad’s favorite guys. Tanner went and made Dad a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and Dad ate every bite.

Leon’s Frozen Custard was mentioned, and Dad had expressed his enthusiasm for it. I’d left as he was being wheeled back to his room. “Off like a herd of turtles,” the on-call nurse had said, and Dad had laughed. He always loved that expression!

When I went over the next morning, they told me he had spent the entire night in his wheelchair. I remember being really confused because things had seemed so positive when I’d left not even twelve hours earlier. I guess he’d hardly slept at all during that time, which was why he wasn’t getting out of bed.

The “two small black coffees” in my hand moved in that moment from our order to a thing of our past.

Thankfully, he rallied that Sunday, watched the Packer game with Ted and ate pizza leftover from Leo’s fourth birthday party. Later that evening, he ate a turtle sundae from Leon’s, which I fed to him.

That night, he got in bed and shut down. He never really communicated with anyone again. The latest we’d heard, we were hoping to see the holidays. Now hospice was saying we had just one week left with our dad.

Out-of-state family and friends called and asked us to hold the phone up so they could say goodbye. He did his heavy breathing thing for four days. On Thursday night Ted and I sat with him for hours telling stories about all the cool things he’d done as our dad. There were so many, because he’d spent his lifetime making sure there would be.

Ted went home about 11:00 p.m. I sat in Dad’s chair and looked at pictures for about ten minutes. Then I was unbelievably tired. I went and said goodnight to Dad and told him I was going to be sleeping there in his room, on the mattress on the floor. Then I turned his lamp off and laid down, listening to him breathe.

The next thing I knew the overhead lights were on. “He’s gone.” I knew immediately what had happened, before the staff member had told me. I sat up on the mattress on the floor, still wearing the Carhartt hoodie that I’d given him as a Christmas present. For some reason, the first thing I’d said was “Are you serious?” as though they’d have joked about that. He was gone.

I don’t feel like there was anything left unsaid between me and my dad. We had so much time together and I loved him so much I made a point of making sure I’d told him everything multiple times.

That night after the air show in his garage, he had told me he liked sitting there with me, that it was nice. He wasn’t afraid to say things like that, and I’ll never forget that moment. When I’d left, he’d hugged me and said “We’re good.”

We were good.

I feel so bad for him that he had to leave his beautiful life before he was ready, and that someone who cherished his memories so much didn’t know what was happening to him at the end. I certainly think he could have seen his four grandchildren grow up instead of getting taken out by inoperable tumors. I do feel so grateful for all of the time I did get with him, all the time, but especially at the end.

I told him that I was going to be okay without him (someone had recommended I do this).

“You stay with your dad,” Aspire staff Sweetness had said on that last night; she’d also recommended I sing him a song. I sang him “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean.” I am VERY glad I did this, as he used to sing it to me. I think I got it just right, because I learned from the best. 

I miss him like a giant hole in my heart.