Tomorrow, my father dies.

Our relationship is one of those things <better unheard, better unsaid> and my life now is unrecognizable from that one.

Still, I sit vigil with those days.

It started on a Wednesday. I was carried to the hospital by my mother's friend. My father had gone into surgery that morning to clear a pick line - a tube he had implanted for use during dialysis. This is a fairly common outpatient procedure. He had a heart attack during the procedure. He was brain dead.

<They said I was in shock. Shock is underrated as a coping technique. I remember telling my mother about how excited my brother and I were about the rental car we had to get to attend my grandfather's funeral when I was twelve. It had electric windows and nooks and crannies to explore. My father was appalled at how thrilled we were.>

They put him in an intensive care unit. My aunt, my father's oldest sister, came to sit with us. He was taken off life support. We waited for him to die. It did not happen like I thought it would happen. I thought he would shuffle off this mortal coil in a timely fashion. Not so. He was no longer in residence. The body would sit up, eyes wide open. If he were there, he would have been said to look like he was pleading. My mother held his hand for eleven hours. I was ousted when my aunt arrived.

My then-fiance picked up the children from school and stayed with them at our house. I had to tell my children their beloved Papa had died. We went to stay at my mother's house, with my uncle and cousins. I drank tea and put the children to bed. I got five hours of sleep, then got up and went to the hospital to sit vigil with my mother.

I was too late. My mother and my aunt were on their way to my mother's house. He died without me.

He was angry at me the day before. He was not an affectionate person, not to me, anyway, and he had told me he would stay with me as long as he could. I asked him if he meant that and he was angry that I would doubt his word. Later, my mother liked to joke that he died as he lived - angry with me.

It was nasty weather that winter - ice and snow. We don't get bitter weather often in west central Georgia.

<Today, this weekend, we are predicted ice and snow. The first time this has happened since Daddy died.>

The National Guard was supposed to come out and do a salute at the graveside. They couldn't make it because of the weather. He was a Vietnam veteran.

There was a service here, where he lived, and another "down home" in Tunnel Springs, Alabama. Monroe County. He was buried next to his father, with a space in between for his mother, and another space on the other side for my mother. Both of those empty spaces are filled now, too.

I had to clean out my mother's house this time last year. In her closet, I found the clothes that he wore to surgery, still in the bag from the hospital.