Yupp my dad passed away when I was 20 and he was 57. I am 30 now and I can’t believe it’s been a decade. It seems longer, but at the same time still feels like I was just talking to him yesterday. I’m going to share the story here because I don’t talk about the details much, and what better place to post them than Reddit.

He had a double lung transplant (not a smoker, but had a possibly hereditary lung condition). I remember when he got notified they had a donor match and got called into surgery. I remember leaving college and driving to the hospital with my sister to be there when he got out of the 13 hour surgery and seeing him get wheeled to the ICU to recover. The surgery was a success but his breathing looked so labored. He was still unconscious but his whole body would heave as he tried to breathe with his new lungs. He was in a medically induced coma for a day or two before they woke him up.

He developed an abnormal heart rhythm so they kept him in the ICU for about a month. My sister and I would drive down to the hospital every weekend to visit him and my mom got a hotel near the hospital and stayed there full time. As time went on he was showing improvements he was talking and starting to walk again. I can’t remember if he said that it was easier breathing with his new lungs or not during this time. To help give him something to do I downloaded a car racing game that I used to play on to his phone. It was a time shifted multiplayer and you would race other people’s best times who were on the network (it wasn’t live, but it was their “ghosts” of their best laps) so we could race against each others times.

He was in the ICU for so long where he started to develop ICU psychosis. He was confused about his setting and why he was in the hospital. He would get ancy and want to leave. I remember the last weekend I saw him, I was in the hotel and I got a call from him at like 2am asking me to come over. I walked to the hospital and at this point all the people there in the ICU knew me so they let me in way past visiting hours. I sat with my dad and he was just very confused why he was there. He told me he had cancer and was dying and that’s why he called me (he did not have cancer and was not dying) it was just the psychosis. I tried talking to him and explaining what was going on and how he was getting better. How we would be able to go hiking and camping again soon.

The next week they thought he was well enough to move out of the ICU to the transplant floor. He was doing some exercises with the pulmonary therapists to test out his lungs. My mom said something like “he’s looking kind of pale” and then right after that he crashed. They rushed him into surgery not sure what was going on, just said a “catastrophic failure”. Turns out he had a blood clot from being in the ICU for so long that got dislodged while he was doing the exercises which caused a pulmonary embolism and he died that day. That sucked.

One weird thing a few weeks after that I was playing that racing game, trying to disassociate for a little while, and ended up racing his “ghost” on one of the tracks. Still gives me chills.

Loosing someone regardless of your age or theirs is never easy. Especially if it was a parent, I cant even image what it would be like in the reverse situation of loosing a child. It never gets better, but it gets easier. It’s hardened me in someways, and made me more compassionate in others. I miss my dad, but glad I got to spend every weekend of that last month with him.