The End Of Satan Claus

I'm spilling over in my mind with words to describe all that has happened in the last 24 hours.  It could be the reason I'm still up at after 1am on what was supposed to be my only day off this week.  I'm exhausted, but I need to get this out there.  Let this be your warning, this is totally a Debbie Downer post.  If you're already in a down or volatile mood, you may want to skip it.

Last night I was wrapping up my night at work when I looked down and saw I had a missed call and a voicemail on my phone.  Funny, it hadn't been there 10 minutes ago when I checked to see what time it was.  I knew immediately it was bad news.  Chip and the kids were home asleep and based on a text I received earlier in the day I already knew what had happened.  He was gone.....

I've spoken about my biological father on several occasions, most notably, here.  When I called my half-sister back at 2:15 yesterday morning, I got the news.  He had just died.  Not 12 hours earlier I had gotten a text from one of my other sisters, Melissa, letting me know that he was in the hospital with what looked like pneumonia.  They weren't going to try and treat it because he was already in such poor shape.  They were going to do their best to make him comfortable until he let go.  Apparently he chose to let go well before anyone expected him to. 

The man that I refer to as Satan Claus, who has caused so much heartache to my mother, sisters and myself is finally gone.  One of my late night regulars was still in the bar when I made the phone call.  I had told him what was going on earlier and we had talked.  He was the only caregiver for his parents, putting a promising career as an attorney aside, for the last 10 years.  His mother passed a couple of years ago, his father a couple of months ago.  He cried with me when I hung up the phone.  I got it together enough to finish up closing the bar and headed home to cry myself to sleep on the couch because of a man who was possibly the worst parent a child could have.

Let's be real honest, I sleep on the couch on the regular these days.  Chip has a grueling job in which when he comes home, he's exhausted.  A couple of beers later, he's passed out snoring like a freight train.  I am a night owl anymore and it would take ear plugs to get me to sleep with all that racket.  It's just easier for me to plop down on the couch and watch tv till the wee hours of the morning than deal with all that....

His alarm went off this morning and he immediately came out to see if I had made it home from work.  I had only fallen asleep an hour before so I was groggy and didn't know quite what was going on.  He told me to go to bed, but I didn't for whatever reason.  He came back out awhile later and woke me up enough to tell me goodbye.  I told him what had happened and he was as much in disbelief as I was.  He apologized for having to leave me for work, but hey, someone needs to make the money in the household right now....

I went to bed and laid there until it was time to get the kids up for school.  Once they were out the door for the day I crashed out hard.  I woke up to 7 missed phone calls, 20 Facebook notifications and 9 text messages shortly after 1pm.  My sister had called three times because apparently she needed to know when we could get flights to Florida for the weekend.  Umm what?  Florida?  Why not 3 1/2 hours away in Pennsylvania where the man was born and raised?  While I was talking to her I kept getting more and more angry.  Why do I have to do this for a man that I hate?  I mean that's me missing at least three shifts at work.  That's like $500.  I can't afford to do that right now with all that's going on!  I got off the phone with her feeling my blood pressure more than slightly raised and cried some more because I was so angry.

The next call I made was to Chip.  There were several calls and texts from him worrying about me, so I called him back and told him about the whole Florida thing.  He agreed it sucked, but after talking to him and thinking about it some more, there are very few people left in Pennsylvania that would even care that he passed.  He's been in Florida for something like 30 years.  Of course they would hold his services there.  It doesn't change the fact that I have no idea how we're going to get there, but it calmed me down slightly.

I had things to do before I had to go pickup E, so I got my ass out of bed and headed up to work to make arrangements for my shifts for the week and get some lunch.  Once that was all cleared up, I headed out to the east side to get the kid and tried not to cry the whole way home as the one text I was waiting on finally came through.  From my mom.  It read "Sorry to hear that Tom passed."  Part of me said no she wasn't.  she wasn't sorry at all.  In some sick sort of way, she was probably happy.  If I was her, I would have been.

Once I got home I told the big kids that the man they knew as "Tom" had passed away.  They were relatively unaffected because they really didn't know the man.  I laid down for a little bit before we had to head off to baseball.

It was a cold wet night at baseball in which E, as usual, tested every bit of the little bit of patience I had left.  By the 4th inning he was covered in mud and we were sitting in the car trying to get warm.  Ugh.  Not quite the sort of low key evening I needed.  Oh well, we got through it, got home and everyone got settled in for the night.  Fast forward to right now when it's now after 2am and E is sleeping beside me peacefully on the couch.  He knows his momma needs to cuddle tonight I suppose.

So how do I feel about the passing of Satan Claus?  I'm not sure.  Guilty maybe.  Happy maybe.  Sad for a man I never really knew?  Maybe.  I don't know.  Guilty perhaps because of all the mean things I've said to him and how I've shut him out of my life.  Did he deserve it?  In my warped mind, yes.  Nobody ever stood up to that man like I did.  I hope it made some impact on his life.  Happy?  Maybe a little bit.  He's gone.  He can no longer hurt anyone with his words or his fists like he did for so many years.  Sad, well yeah, he's my father and no matter how shitty of one he was, he still was. 


The longer I think about it, the more conflicted I am about the whole situation.  He should have died when he had that brain tumor all those years ago but didn't and nobody could figure out why.  He was certainly not the same person afterward, afflicted with all sorts of ailments left and right all this time.  I'm not a religious person, but there's part of me that thinks God (or whoever) did this to him.  They let him live through that horrible time only to be a miserable vegetable for all these years since.  Karma at its best perhaps, I'm not sure.  It sounds good in my head right now.

I guess I should try to get some sleep.  Work tomorrow and we all know that dealing with stupid drunk people isn't going to be the best thing for my state of mind right now, but there's money that needs to be made.  I need to be in Florida with three kids by Friday afternoon and that's not just gonna *poof* happen.  Airfare is like 3 thousand dollars for the four of us, so it looks like we're driving.  Who knows how I'll take care of everyone once we get there...... 


Take care people.  Hug your kids, parents, grandparents, friends....  You never know when you'll lose one of them....  Life is short.....  At 63 he's gone....