(Sniff. Cat still gone. Not going to write about it.)

I talked to my Dad a couple days before Thanksgiving. He had decided to stay put in Florida, rather than head back north to spend the holiday with his wife and her family. The reason? His health is too poor right now to travel. He’s feeling weak and short of breath, and his heart rate has dropped to a dangerously low level. And he’s ALONE. There’s nobody there with him in his mobile home; he says the whole park is deserted.

But he is not going in the hospital. He’s decided that he never wants to be admitted to a hospital ever again. He didn’t like being the ICU for nine days over the summer, and he just doesn’t want to do that again.

How am I supposed to interpret this? I figure it’s just his way of deciding how his last days on earth will be spent. I am wondering if I should hop on a plane and say goodbye or something, but that seems really morose and perhaps over dramatic too. Maybe he will be fine, and maybe not.

He and I talked on the phone for such a long time: two whole hours. It was a luxury that I don’t usually have, because I have children*.

I had this luxury of time and availability thanks to a fully charged cell phone, and the fact that I was sitting at a client’s home office (client was not home) busily resurrecting his computer, a task that required little brain power but lots of patience while I waited for various applications to reinstall. So there I was, reformatting a hard drive and chatting with Dad.

Dad told me he no longer believes in God, in heaven– in religion in general. He thinks it’s all made up in the mind of man (humankind, folks, not male folk). He see hypocrisy in all things religious, he is cynical about our country’s government, and is disillusioned and weary about life.

Now I know that religion is something that is a great comfort and source of strength and resolve among the faithful. It seems really odd to me that in the end stages of life, someone who’d been so steadily faithful would lose all faith in God.

Being non-religious myself, I’ve nevertheless continued to hedge my bets. I mean, there’s the argument that if there’s no god, and you believe in God anyway, you don’t miss out on anything, except perhaps eating bagels in a leisurely manner of a Sunday morning. But if there is a God, and you fail to file the proper faithful paperwork under some religion or another, geez, you could end up in hellfire or whatever. Which one seems the safer bet??

For myself, I’ve come to what I consider a decent compromise. Live life in a way that basically heeds the rules of most of the religions, avoid the biggies of moral turpitude, and try not to piss off God. If he’s as merciful as some folks say, I should be OK. This works for me, since, I figure that God or no God, I’d probably live this fairly decent life anyway.

But if I were sitting in a trailer, alone, with a low heart rate, pondering mortality and failing to get my butt to a hospital, I think I might just want to say a prayer or two. You know, just in case.

So much for faith. He must have some faith in his ability to keep living, though, since he still is dragging his feet getting together a new will. This is something that I’ve been nagging him about for about three years, ever since he married his current wife. He’d had a will hastily put together just before his cancer surgery, because there was a 50% chance he’d not make it out of the surgery alive. This will became invalid when he got married.

He claims that he and his wife have a verbal agreement about who gets what. I told him that’s worth absolutely bupkis in the eyes of the law, and if he wants to leave his home and all his assets, eventually, to his current wife’s children, then he need not worry about getting together a new will. But if he has any interest at all in passing his stuff on to me and my brother (and even my estranged half-sister whom I’ve never met) then he needs to get something put together, and soon.

Because one thing I know for certain is that you cannot write your will in the afterlife.

*(Those of you out there who spend large quantities of time caring for kids know exactly what I mean, but the rest of the world might be confused as to why being a mother might mean a lack of availability for long and serious telephone discussions. There is well-documented evidence that when a mother wants to have a phone conversation, she needs to conceal this fact from her children, because the placing of a telephone to the ear of a mother immediately triggers a need for her children to whine and beg for attention as if they never ever got a single moment of love and affection before. As a matter of fact, I had to stop working on this post for the same reason, and I came back to it after a long while.)