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So terrible, I have to laugh.

Warning: This story is a little morbid, proceed at your own risk.


When my father died, I was living with him and my brother in a house in Southern California.

He had a heart attack. I was not there at the time, I had gone to a spend the weekend with my then boyfriend. When I got home, my brothers informed me that my father had died, in his bedroom.

My brother tried unsuccessfully to administer CPR, and when the ambulance arrived, Dad was removed from the home.

He was a diabetic, had his leg amputated just below the knee and had a prosthetic leg and apparently, paramedics don’t bother with fake limbs when taking a dead body from a bedroom.

His prosthetic was tossed aside.

So, where does a prosthetic leg fall, when tossed aside by a paramedic?

How to explain this.. It was laying in such a way that the foot was sticking out at about a 30 degree angle from the bed. That part that attached to my fathers living leg was under the bed. It was positioned in such a way that when you looked at it, it seemed as if the rest of my fathers body was hidden out of sight, still dead, but stuffed under the bed for all eternity.

I was not prepared for this, I did not know that I would see that the first time I walked into that room. I couldn't go in there for a long time, and when I finally did I was absolutely horrified. And then every time I tried after that, the leg was there.. along with dad's phantom dead body under the bed. The younger version of me wasn't able to just walk in there and fix the situation quite yet.

It took about a month, until I finally walked in there, grabbed the leg and donated it to a charity.

This went from being absolutely horrific back in 1989.. to being kinda funny here as I type this in 2019.

But, here in 2019 that image in my head is just as vivid as it was back in 1989. My father is permanently buried under his bed in my brain.


Both horrible and hilariously funny at the same time.

Life is such a complicated mess.
 
It took me many years to be even a little bit alright after my brother's premature death. I'm glad you're in a position now to feel some levity in your soul about your father's situation. How do we grieve? How do we heal? Idk, I think we're only alotted a few weeks to get 'back to normal', when in reality, its a process that is supposed to take years to overcome, if we were really close to the person we lost.
My brother was my closest friend, and the member of my family that I was closest to. 'Complicated mess' was how I felt for many years afterwards. That would have made a great Pink Floyd song title, btw, :lol:
 
It was awful when my brother died. I remember feeling like the world needed to just STOP for a minute to let me breathe and try to recover. The world just wouldn't do it. It just kept spinning along.
 
I believe your father left you a little gift to which he was unaware of at the time. You will remember him with a smile.
 
Warning: This story is a little morbid, proceed at your own risk.


When my father died, I was living with him and my brother in a house in Southern California.

He had a heart attack. I was not there at the time, I had gone to a spend the weekend with my then boyfriend. When I got home, my brothers informed me that my father had died, in his bedroom.

My brother tried unsuccessfully to administer CPR, and when the ambulance arrived, Dad was removed from the home.

He was a diabetic, had his leg amputated just below the knee and had a prosthetic leg and apparently, paramedics don’t bother with fake limbs when taking a dead body from a bedroom.

His prosthetic was tossed aside.

So, where does a prosthetic leg fall, when tossed aside by a paramedic?

How to explain this.. It was laying in such a way that the foot was sticking out at about a 30 degree angle from the bed. That part that attached to my fathers living leg was under the bed. It was positioned in such a way that when you looked at it, it seemed as if the rest of my fathers body was hidden out of sight, still dead, but stuffed under the bed for all eternity.

I was not prepared for this, I did not know that I would see that the first time I walked into that room. I couldn't go in there for a long time, and when I finally did I was absolutely horrified. And then every time I tried after that, the leg was there.. along with dad's phantom dead body under the bed. The younger version of me wasn't able to just walk in there and fix the situation quite yet.

It took about a month, until I finally walked in there, grabbed the leg and donated it to a charity.

This went from being absolutely horrific back in 1989.. to being kinda funny here as I type this in 2019.

But, here in 2019 that image in my head is just as vivid as it was back in 1989. My father is permanently buried under his bed in my brain.


Both horrible and hilariously funny at the same time.

Life is such a complicated mess.

Back when Karen and I lived in Dallas and we participated in her very first National Veterans Wheelchair Games, we made friends with a diabetic veteran named Cleveland Greene (now deceased) and ole Cleve also had two prosthetic legs, which you can see at the 4:11 mark in this video.



Clevelands legs.jpg

Well, when Cleveland passed away, we went to his apartment to pick up some personal items to rush to his family before everything was cleared out by the rest.
And sure enough, there they were, his two prosthetic legs, sticking up, with the shoes and socks already on, as if they were waiting patiently for their owner to jump into to start another day.
It was mighty strange to pick up his two legs, so I understand how you may have felt.
 
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