"Hi, kid!"
For years, that's how my Dad greeted me when I got home from work.
I've been thinking a lot about my Dad today. You see, it is his birthday. The third one without him here.
I had hoped to take some flowers out to the cemetery, but Snowmageddon 2025.3 put a stop to that. The country road that leads to the cemetery is not good whenever any sort of moisture is involved, and I don't want to risk getting stuck, so I'll have to imagine a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a visit with Dad.
When I moved back to my hometown to take a public relations job at a local university, the initial plan was for me to live with my folks until I could get my house in Emporia sold and find a place here. One thing led to another and the longer I lived with my senior parents, the more it became apparent that they needed a bit of help. So I continued to live with my folks, Dad for about twenty years and Mom for more than twenty-one years.
Familywise, those were some of the best years of my life. Sure, we had our differences. Dad was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who moved farther to the right the older he got. For a number of years, I, too, was a registered Republican, but I couldn't reconcile that with my gut instinct to truly have empathy for others and help those in need. Brownback's "experiment" was the last straw for me. I reside in the moderate part of the political spectrum.
Nonetheless, we had a lot of good times.
Once I started working at the senior center as the executive director, Dad was a regular fixture, whether it was bringing Mom to her sewing group, having coffee with his friends or hanging out with the guys in the pool room. He always popped into my office for a bit, usually to fill me in on the latest gossip he had heard.
We took vacations together, attended family reunions and funerals in Minnesota together, and attended a lot of football games. My folks started taking me to Salina High football games when I was four. A few years later, they started buying season tickets for Mustang football and kept those seats for decades. When I moved back home, a seat for me was added to the season tickets. I, of course, proudly joined Dad as a Mustang alum!
When Mom and Dad were no longer able to climb the stairs of the stadium, we made a point of watching college football games together on TV. Of course, as we had since I was a child, we watched the Chiefs on Sundays. I'm glad both my folks got to see the Chiefs do well before they died.
Dad's last Christmas with us, I got us all Chiefs' shirts. I think he knew then that he was dying, as he gave me an earful about wasting money on Christmas presents for him. That very night, he went back to the hospital and less than two weeks later, he was dead.
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| Dad, taken two days before he went back to the hospital for the final time. Photo © Leslie Eikleberry 2025 |
I'm still amazed at how much Dad's illness and surgery took out of him. He went from a vital senior to a hesitant, thin, unsteady old man in a matter of months.
In the fall of 2022, Dad was diagnosed with rectal cancer. The surgery and radiation went well and the doctors were confident that they had gotten all of the cancer. What none of us knew at the time, however, was that Dad had developed what essentially was a small ulcer at the top of his colon. I suspect it was, in part, from worrying about his cancer diagnosis. Through the hole caused by the ulcer, bad bacteria was able to leak into his chest cavity and he developed a bad infection that his 90-year-old body just couldn't handle.
Although I miss my Dad greatly, I am glad he is no longer suffering. That infection wreaked havoc on his body and his final few days on Earth were not pleasant.
Even though Dad has been gone for a while now, I still have moments when I think to myself, "I need to remember to tell Dad about that." Sometimes, when I walk in the front door, in my head I hear him say "Hi, kid!" I guess that is my way of holding on to memories.
Happy birthday, Dad! I love and miss you greatly.
