Life carries on - and so on

I have learned something this year. There's one thing harder than death of a loved one: waiting for their death.

Life between February and August was difficult because you did know that he was going to die, despite what he said, but you didn't know when and how long the palliative care period would be. As, despite all our confrontations, no one wanted that he had to suffer.
Last days of August were the hardest as we knew he had it bad after they sent him back to hospital instead of keeping him at local health centre waiting to be released back home. And the worst in whole thing was that I knew that one of those days I had to tell Tiny some really bad news. There's nothing more heartbreaking than having to tell your child that someone they love dearly has died.

But life carries on. My father's estate inventory is done and his possessions shared, on a paper at least. Bureaucracy takes time. (And I do foresee some butt hurt from our brother, poor thing gets his share as sole cash.)

And surprisingly....
It seems that my bad credit has cleared - or clearing. At least SII has given me student loan guaranty as a holiday season surprise and they do require clean credit history (clean-ish, they may discard your bad credit if you have only few soon-to-be-cleared markings). As much as I hate having to take a loan to support us it frees me to have outside income.

Life is kind of odd. But odd is not bad, as long as it would remain calm from now on.

28 days later

He passed away after a short period in hospital in late August, less than two months before his 70th birthday. You could say he was your average Joe when it came to this cancer: average patient diagnosed with pancreatic cancer is 70 year old male and they live 6 months on average.

He didn't get much more than that. And even it has come obvious that he knew he was going to die rather sooner than later his subconcious mind denied it. I am quite sure that I am not lying when I say that severity of his illness was not clear to any of us, not even his partner.
I got to read his death certificate: he had several metastasis all around his body and this he knew over a month before he passed. Knowing this confirmed my earlier suspicions about his condition based on his behaviour. (Yeah, it's hard to be always right. Or something. *grin*) Human beings are odd things, but still, I know and you know why he did it.

Tiny took it better than I had expected, regardless he does miss his grandpa a lot. But the process seems to help him. One day he told me that it was nice to see grandpa's white box, in other words going to his memorial service. There's still urn burial (my father's ash will be buried in his parents' grave (which is a positive thing as said cemetery is reasonably close)), I hope it goes as well as memorial service did...

The relativity of time has struck me, it seems like forever, but it has been only four weeks.

Well, four weeks and a aday.

Things that happened before it seem like aeons ago and things that happened after it... well, have just kind of passed.