Florida Memories and Grief: The Power of Healing, Writing, and Photography

Anyone who's dealt with the loss of a loved one knows there's a process to getting through the grief. For me, this includes reflecting on memories, looking at photos, and writing to heal (in addition to the other stages). The traditional stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, according to grief.com's website. We'll visit grief in more detail, the concept of it, perhaps down the road. 

For now, this post is more about my personal experience with just one aspect of it. Perhaps I'm in the acceptance phase, or close to it. Otherwise, I am not sure I'd be able to look back at this time in my life and share with you in word form. 

And I want to recount a particular experience with you because while we are all from different walks of life, backgrounds, societies, and cultures, at least we all have one thing in common: we all go through life losing someone that we love and we all need to come to peace with it at some point or another. Otherwise, our lives will not be worth living.  

Dolphins Swimming in Sarasota Bay:

It's been almost a year since my brother and I drove to Florida to pack up our father's house. From Thanksgiving of 2016 until recently, I have not wanted to reflect back on the last year and a half that I spent back and forth in Florida and all the time I have I spent in dealing with things. 

I do though, all the time, and all the memories that keep surfacing are about my father, his death, his house, his possessions, and the handling of his estate. It's getting easier, to think about things, but it has been a mental, emotional journey I wouldn't wish on anyone.

I live with my father's death every day: it happening, being a part of it. The emotional scars are long from healed, but I forget that beyond the death and the packing up of his home, and before the estate proceedings fully got started, there was a side trip that my brother and I took. It's a trip I would never have taken otherwise.

Truth be told, my father wanted me to come visit, especially during the second year he lived there, but due to my work schedule, it was always difficult to get away. During semester breaks, I had to work odd jobs to make sure I could pay my bills. Anyone who's an adjunct or knows an adjunct, knows it is not a lucrative career. 

We do it because we love it, but the price to pay is that work is not guaranteed and you go two months without pay between semesters (not counting the summer if you are lucky to snag a class or two, and even then, based on enrollment, those classes may not stick), and too eek out a living, many adjuncts have to travel to several different campuses and between two and three colleges just to get enough classes to make the bills.

So maybe it's time to look back at this side trip to see just how far I've come, to remember that I am surviving the grieving process and still going through it, and that no matter how utterly hard it was to be in Florida to watch my father die, and no matter all the bad stuff that came before that and after that, that at least up until today as I write this, I'm still here. I'm still surviving.

I'd forgotten all about it, this trip, because the grief of everything else was still too raw, too present.

And in wanting to share these photos now, I have to sit and think carefully, how much of the story do I have to share, want to share? I don't have to share anything really, right? I could just put a blog post up with some pics and leave it at that, or add them all to my social media page. No one would be the wiser. But I would. As a writer, I would know. As a daughter, I would know. As a person, I would know. I would know that there is more to the story. There always is.

Every photo has a story of how it came to be that you were in the time and place that you were to be able to even take it. Maybe it's just me, but I'm one of those who, when I look at pictures, think about the person who took it and I wonder, who is this person? Why were they even there in the first place?

And while that's this great power that we writers have, to pick and chose what we want to share, if we are going to share the real, then we have to bring the real. And real has both good and bad elements. But you have to be honest too, with the real. You can't just leave stuff out to make it sound fabulous. If I wanted to share fiction, heck that can be anything I want it to be...fiction you can manipulate and contort. Real you can't.

But here, for brevity sake, you won't get all the nooks and crannies of the real. You'll have to read the memoir for that, which I'm working on. You will get the "who is this person" and "why were they even there in the first place" aspects as to why I choose to share these photos now. And I'll go back just far enough in the real so that you, the reader, understand a little bit more, just how important these photos are, and why it took so long to share them. Even with myself.

On Thanksgiving Day of 2016, I sat on my couch with my sixteen year old Jack Russell Terrier, watching "Game of Thrones." With no essays to grade, I planned to stay home the entire weekend and enjoy the mini break before the last few weeks of the term kicked in. 

Knee deep in teaching six classes in college English that semester, students were gearing up to complete final argument essays and turn in their semester long blogging projects. I geared up to grade about 100 assignments in the week I'd have between the semester ending and grades being due.

My father had been living in Florida for about two years at that point. In a recent Facebook message, he'd indicated to me he had thoughts of moving back home and had begun sorting things for a yard sale.

That Thanksgiving morning, he called. He was in the hospital. A blood clot had lodged in his colon and erupted. He had to have emergency surgery to remove a portion of his small intestines the night before. This wasn't my father's first stint with blood clots. A spider bite (he thought) had gotten so infected the previous summer that it caused a clot to form in his leg, which landed him in the hospital for a few days then. We spoke for a while, arguing that it was not necessary for me to come down.

I got off the phone with him and called my brother, relaying exactly what I knew. While Dad stressed not to come, I told my brother I thought one of us should. Like now. Could he? Classes for me resumed Monday, and I had no way of getting a hold of my deans and getting classes covered over a holiday weekend. 

I could reach them and my students by email sure, but what are the chances they would get it before Monday? Could I just drop my classes like that? I wasn't sure. And it didn't help that my father was so combative about someone coming down, and I think he wasn't as forthcoming with me as he could have been about his condition. Perhaps this was so I wouldn't worry?

If my brother could get down there, feel things out, I could make better plans when I was back on my campuses at the beginning of the week. My brother agreed and got a plane ticket to fly out Friday. I called my father back to let him know. 

He was angry, yet relieved that at least on of us could come. I told him I needed to speak to my deans Monday and try to arrange something for the dog. She was fairly sick by that time and I knew I couldn't travel with her so I needed to make sure the vet kennel could take her for an unknown amount of time if need be. He understood.

Over the weekend and into the next week, my father seemed to be improving. My brother kept me updated the best he could, but then things started to go south. My father had to have a second emergency operation. Fluid collected in his chest, causing pressure on his lungs. I spoke briefly to my father as he went under anesthesia.

It was the last time I would speak to him. He told me he loved me. I told him I loved him. He dropped the phone. I could hear the nurse in the background talking to him. I kept calling his name, hoping he'd pick the phone back up. The line eventually went dead.

The fluid was blood and the small intestines were still infected. There was so much, they missed all of it the first time around.

By Wednesday of that week, I was making plans to cancel the rest of my classes and to communicate with my students via email through the end of the term, where all assignments would be sent to me. I borrowed a laptop from one of the schools. I borrowed money for an aunt, one of my father's sisters, to rent a car. 

I spoke to the vet and we agreed that having the dog with me would be best. If something happened to her, it was best she was not stuck in the kennel at the vet, although they could treat her, of course, but given her condition and how long we'd been together, would I want her to go alone and in a strange place?

I left town that Friday. It's a long trip anyhow, down to Port Charlotte, Florida, from the Dayton, Ohio area. I have heard people do it in one sitting, but I had to pull over often for the dog, to check on her and what not. I pulled off for the night north of Atlanta, and that took about ten hours to reach as it was. The dog was restless, shaking constantly, wouldn't eat. Kept me up all night.

I called my brother in the middle of the night and had a breakdown. I was fearful something would happen to the dog and there I was in BFE Georgia headed to see my father who I knew in the back of my head was going to die but I wouldn't admit it, and I was worried that I was going to have to put the dog down before I could even get there. It wasn't so much the dog that nagged at me, it was something else. I just didn't know what. Actually, I did; I just didn't see it clearly then.

My father had taken a hard hit the latter part of the week, but they didn't tell me. I was on the road and they didn't want to scare or panic me. Friday, his organs began to shut down. The kidney dialysis wasn't working as well. His white cell count was low. It turns out he'd been in a medically induced coma for a few days. They were giving him every medication they had in hopes he'd regain some sort of strength and begin to recover, but his body just wasn't recovering. He was septic.

It was that Friday night, as I lay in the strange hotel room with my terminal dog... where there was a moment of panic that struck me like a ton of bricks. It was that moment my father moved his foot for one of the last times. That was when he started to decline. 

My aunt said she told him to hang on, that a surprise was coming, so he just had to hang on a bit longer. It was that moment of panic that I had that led me to call my brother. Something was wrong beyond what was happening with the dog. It was my father letting me know he was going to go soon. They said he was still moving his feet to sounds and such that Friday, but hadn't at all that Saturday.

It was late when I made it to my father's house that Saturday night (it was another ten hour drive). I unloaded the car and the dog and my brother and I left to go to the hospital. I grabbed my father's hand and said, "Daddy, it's me." He moved his foot one last time. My brother nudged me to make sure I saw it. We left, returning to his house.

Sunday and Monday were spent between the house and the hospital. I knew what was coming. I began making calls. I began looking for papers.

On Monday, they wanted to put a port in his heart because the dialysis quit working. We said no. We arranged to meet with his doctor, who kept telling us dad could come out of it, he could recover. I asked, at what cost, man? At what cost? What kind of life could he even have at this point? 

The nurses were honest and real, and as much as it sucked to hear, they told us the truth. No sugar coating. I told his doctor it was days beyond how long Dad would have wanted to even be on machines. With no living will or power of attorney though, we could only argue so much.

In between all that, I sat in the ICU room and read essays out loud as I graded, played Johnny Cash and George Jones on my iPhone, and sang to him as I watched my father's foot like a hawk to see if it would move again. It didn't.

I am certain that damn doctor would have kept my father "alive" for a year on machines if he could have. I told him that keeping my father alive as a vegetable was not an option. He was down here alone, we were all out of state, and he just wouldn't want it. He would not want it. The doctor said, one more day? Give it one more day. I said you have one more day, fine.

By Tuesday morning, when we went in, the nurses told us the infection had spread to his brain and he had developed pneumonia. His cell counts were extremely low, and there were no more medications to give him other than ones for pain. I ordered them to stop all treatment and to call hospice.

At about five that afternoon, they removed all the tubes. Everything. His chest heaved up and down with such force. The nurse explained that it was reflexive breathing, his body was doing it automatically, so he was already gone. Had been for a while, but now the body was just going through the motions.

For six hours, his body exhausted itself. For six hours, I watched his chest move up and down and watched the numbers on the heart monitor machine get lower and lower. Eventually his heart gave out and his body took its last breath a little before 11 that evening, Tuesday, December 6, 2016.

I held my father's hand and told him to go be in peace, that I hope he found peace. He had been so tired from years of tragedy and heartbreak. He was sick for days before he even went to the ER Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. He was a stubborn old turd who didn't want to die in a hospital, but there was no other choice.

I never watched anyone die before. I have dreams about it. Will for a while, I suspect. Some of the pain and tragedy he went through later in his life, I went through as well, but it's not a journey we took together. I wish we had, but people... we all grieve and cope differently. We push people away. We don't know how to cope. We... get lost in it all. It takes its toll, that's for sure, grief and heartache.

I stayed with him for a while, and at some point, returned to his house. The dogs knew nothing of the events. My dog, in fact, seemed to have a second wind. She and my father's dog thrived together and she really seemed to like the Florida sun and warm weather.

-If you are still reading, thank you. This is the first time I've gone public with all of this, sans a short creative non-fiction piece I wrote in honor of Father's Day last year that a local literary zine published. I usually submit poetry to Mock Turtle, and this piece began as a poem. However, it was too long. So I turned into a creative non-fiction piece and on a whim, submitted it. In fact, I submitted it on the last day of their issue deadline, from a Starbucks Cafe in Port Charlotte.

I wrote it that week in May that my brother and I were at my father's house, packing it up for the last time. Aside from any journalism I've had published in the past, and aside from the city of Dayton profile I wrote for U.S. News back in early 2016, it was my first official non-fiction publication in a literary zine. The city of Dayton profile was written for a "Best Places to Live" piece... it was a bit higher on the list in March of 2016 than it is now, but Dayton is still on the list! I also took all the photos. The only parts I didn't write were the education section and the graphs (an editor contributed those). -

My aunt returned home and my brother and I stayed in Florida a few days longer. My father's body couldn't be released and flown to Ohio for days and I didn't want to leave until I knew he was safe and in the air. More calls were made, more things were arranged, and so on. 

I graded final essays and blog projects while we waited for his body to be released in between numerous phone calls to close relatives and the funeral home up here. We eventually left Florida with the dogs and I submitted final grades the last night before they were due from a hotel room in Atlanta.

I gave my father's eulogy and received his flag from the Naval ceremony. After my step mother died in 2009, my father arranged his own service, so there wasn't much I had to do. The only thing I couldn't follow through on was getting a group to present the 21 gun salute. He was very proud of his time in the service and when I tried to call around to the local clubs I knew he had spent his life as members of, I got the run around. In the end, I couldn't deliver on that. It broke my heart.

On Christmas Day, I flew back to Florida, alone. My brother stayed behind to babysit the dogs. We didn't want to travel back down there with them and didn't want to put them in a kennel. The probate would take forever to get started and I would have to be appointed by the Florida courts before I could do anything official, but the next semester was going to begin soon, and I thought if I could get down there and just sort stuff while I could, it would be easier the next time we came down.

I figured that would be March during spring break. So I went and spent the week down there alone, going through all of my father's things, trying to decide what to keep, how to get it to Ohio, what to donate, what to try to sell and how.... clothes, food, the car. It was all very overwhelming. So I just began sorting and cleaning and figured I'd figure out the rest when we came back down hopefully during spring break.

I planned to arrive back home on New Year's Day, which would leave a week to prep for classes. However, the Thursday before that, my dog had a terrible seizure that left her blind and almost unable to walk. My brother took her to the ER vet and the next day to my vet. That night, I changed my flight ticket to fly out Saturday, New Year's Eve. 

I didn't get through everything in the house, but it would just have to wait. The car would have to sit because I couldn't take it, couldn't drive it or move it. Couldn't do anything with his bills, the utilities. Everything just had to wait. I arranged for my father's neighbors, a couple who had grown close to him, to watch things, and while I couldn't say for sure when, I assured them I'd be back soon.

I got back in late on New Year's Eve. Friends who lived near the airport picked me up and took me home. My dog and I didn't sleep that night. The next day was New Year's Day. I refused to have her put down at the ER clinic. I wanted her to go to her vet, where we'd gone for years, where they knew us, if she could hold out that long. So that Sunday, we just relaxed on the couch.

That Monday, she'd gotten sick all over herself. I'd spent the previous day convincing myself that I could keep her going, that she'd be okay. But Monday, when she lost it all on herself, I knew that was the end. We took her to the vet and in a matter of minutes, she took her last breath. I held one hand over her heart and felt her last heart beat. I cried like a baby. I didn't think I had any tears left from the previous month, oh, but I did.

Come March and spring break, I still wasn't appointed the personal representative, so there was no point in going back to Florida. I still couldn't do anything. The following week, however, the paperwork came through. Figures, right? But still, everything had to sit. I couldn't leave my classes. I had seven this time around, between three campuses and two schools. My brother and I made plans to go down in May after the term ended.

I wish I could say it gave me time to decide what to do, and let me assure you, I explored every possible scenario and option I could, but there were no simple, easy solutions. We stayed at the house for about a week, doing what we needed to do. It wasn't easy. At the end of it, I asked my brother how he'd feel about making a stop on the way home, a visit to a place my father tried hard to get me to go see many times in the last year or so, but I could never do because of work and life.

And hence the photos and the meaning of them.

Punta Gorda (which we saw with my father's neighbors while in Port Charlotte) is really nice, as is Siesta Key Beach. I stopped there actually, that week between Christmas and New Year, just to see it, thinking I'd never see it again. I asked my brother how he felt about stopping up there for a few days, to just rest. Dad always raved about it and I think he would have been mad at us if we left Florida not having spent time at the beach.

We got separate hotel rooms, did our own thing for a few days. I tried to use the time to reflect back on things, but it was still all too fresh, so I tried to make the most of my time sight seeing. I have no desire to return to Florida to be honest with you, but one day I might, and if I do, it will probably be to Siesta Key.

The importance of looking back on these photos, a year later, is really to remind me of my life as a whole; all I've seen and done because of my father. All I've seen and done on my own. Also, it's a chance to reflect back on what I need to do differently with me and my life. I am a work in progress. While I would say I have good character, morals, and integrity, often that is all tested and sometimes I fail miserably. I try to do the right thing, but it's never at the right time.

And I feel, at times, I've lost sight of what is still to come, and while it's difficult to try to look to a future and what it holds, at least I've got photos from a trip to Florida, that had it not been for my father passing away, it's a trip I likely would have never taken.

I gave my mother's eulogy in 2000 (suicide). I gave my step mother's in 2009 (breast cancer). I gave my father's in 2016 (septic from blood clots and surgery complications). These are not achievements I brag about. Rather, they are stepping stone reminders that are with me every day to remind me that I am still here. 

Still breathing. Still fighting. Still growing. Still surviving. But there's so many things that I look back on and wish I would have done differently because outcomes may have been different. But I've learned that death is an inevitable part of life and sometimes what happens leading up to it is out of our control. It's perhaps what we do afterward that might set the pace for what is left to come.

Hard decisions to make and tough situations are far from over in my life. Maybe all this writing and reflecting is to serve as harrowing reminders for me to: make the call, make the visit, take the photos, write the words. Losing someone we love is hard. Grieving is hard. Life is hard. 

The grieving process takes years for the average person. And it's different for everyone. There's no set time table. While there are books and websites out there that can help, ultimately, when you grieve, you have to be on your own journey. You have to work the process, for however long it will take. 

And so now that I have everything out of me that I can spare at this moment, let me show you my trip to Florida. My father was with me the entire time. I found Port Charlotte to be flat and boring at times, but I understand why my father moved there. It's pretty central to all the hot spots, Sarasota, Fort Myers, and Siesta Key, and the cost of living is more affordable, as long as you are willing to drive, and even then, that's not too bad. Punta Gorda, right next door to Port Charlotte, was really nice.

Brown Anoles:

Fishermen's Village, Punta Gorda:

Ponce De Leon Park, Punta Gorda:

The Hotel was very peaceful, calming. We enjoyed to pool and bar every day and night we were there.

Best Western, Sarasota, FL:

The sun wasn't out the day I went to the beach, and it was windy as heck. There were warnings about going in the water. Lots of people were there, but not too many were swimming. I braved the waves up to my ankles and the force about knocked me over several times. I got salt water in my mouth. It didn't taste good! And despite the lack of sun, I still got a sunburn!

The Waves of the Gulf, Siesta Key Beach

Unconditional Surrender Along John Ringling Parkway, Sarasota, FL:

An Uber driver picked me up at my hotel and drove me to St. Armands. I walked from downtown to the beach, and from the beach up to the aquarium. Thank God it wasn't too hot, but it was a long walk nonetheless.

St. Armands, FL:

Lido Key Beach, FL:

Mote Marine Aquarium:

Awwww, how cute!

Save the Manatees!

Sea Horses are real! 

The Great Gulf Monster! 

Cute lil sea otters

Great tortoise!  

Sharks!

Stingray

Sittin' on the dock of the bay... Visitors I had while eating a Red Grouper sandwich and drinking a beer at the Old Salty Dog, near the Mote Marine Aquarium, looking out over Sarasota Bay (word at the Salty Dog was that a manatee was swimming out in the bay, but I didn't see it: