Pardon Our Dust

My father had a disease called progressive supranuclear palsy, and he battled it for the better part of a decade before succumbing to it on June 25th. It started with spells of dizziness, and it slowly compromised his balance, his ability to see, to walk, to talk, even to eat and drink, until eventually he was left bedridden after catching a cold. He never got up again, and was dead two weeks later. He had been in in-home hospice care for just over a week.

There are many ways one could describe the process of watching a loved one slowly pass away. It was utterly gut-wrenching. It felt like I was being pulled apart in a hundred different directions. I desperately wanted it to stop, even though the only resolution left was the one I could not bear. My siblings joined my mother in keeping watch over him essentially 24/7, expecting that every shallow breath was going to be his last.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but our vigil was going to last nearly a week. We said everything we needed to say, everything we could possibly think of. We told stories. We talked about family. We broke out the old slide projector and looked at photos from family vacations we took in the early 90s. But Dad just kept going. He could not eat or drink any longer, so we knew it was only a matter of time, but he held out far longer than any of us expected.

A funny thing happens when you know an emotionally shattering event is about to happen. You do everything you can to prepare, but if it doesn’t happen when you think it will... well now what? Our tear-soaked vigils around his bed could only go on for so long before we needed to eat. I have an infant at home. She’s the fifth grandchild in my family, and my brother and sister had their own kids and families to keep tabs on. It felt like time had ground to a halt inside that house, but it had done nothing of the sort outside those walls. Eventually, I became kind of cavalier about the whole thing. Sure, Dad might pass away at literally any moment, but we need a few things from the grocery store and I need to go home and get new underwear. 

We started taking shifts at night, staying up for a few hours each to give him his medication and to make sure he wasn’t alone. One night became two, became three, before my sister woke me up at 3:30 am on June 25th to tell me that Dad was passing. His anguished, shallow breaths were punctuated by several deep sighs, and then he was gone.

This past Father’s Day was my first as a dad, and it was Dad’s last. I came to his bedside, and read him the card I got for him. He was largely unresponsive after I had finished, just continuing to wheeze softly and stare off into the distance. I got up to leave the room, and I heard, clearly, just clear as a bell:

Pete. I love you.

It will be shorter and less prestigious than other year end pieces, but I thought I’d compile a brief list of my favorite things I wrote this year. The list commences.

Actually good, I like to think: Observing LSU’s strange expedition to Syracuse

Silly football discussion: An investigation into Action Bronson’s claims of fixing the 2006 ACC Championship Game

Serious football discussion: A rare midseason check into the sturdiness of the North Carolina bandwagon (Findings: Pretty damn sturdy)

I also had my first major freelance piece published this year, a Big Ten preview this August in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It was print only, so you can’t see how troublingly wrong my predictions were.

In non-sports news, Ash and I lost our cats, Tiff and Tyler, this year. I spilled my guts after Ty died back in the spring, and I’ll probably just leave it at that. If you have pets, make sure you enjoy their company as much as possible. It really sucks when they’re gone.

Sad stuff aside, the past 12 months have been so fun and so fulfilling. In addition to another excellent year writing about college football at SB Nation, I also started writing for Every Day Should Be Saturday this year, which still makes my head spin a little bit sometimes. I started reading EDSBS in the pre-SB Nation days, and reading Spencer every day was what inspired me to start writing in the first place.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve never really known what I wanted to do with my life.

The first thing I thought I would dedicate my life to was, I shit you not, paleontology. Jurassic Park had just come out, and it was all very exciting for a young lad like myself. This faded pretty quickly, as I realized a paleontologist would have as much contact with actual dinosaurs as the rest of the general population.

At one point I thought I wanted to be an engineer, a notion that was quickly disabused due to subpar math skills. Then I wanted to be a teacher. Then I wanted to be some kind of high powered executive, as if that was something attainable for someone who isn’t an executive’s kid. Then I wanted to be a lawyer. Then, after going to law school and discovering I furiously hated the legal profession, I just kind of started floating. I’ve had several day jobs here and there since graduating, none of which have been either decent-paying or fulfilling. I am hardly alone in this situation.

The one thing I’ve ever really loved was writing. I’ve had the good fortune to be with SB Nation for over three years now, and it really is great. I love my editors, I love my coworkers despite not seeing them face to face in an office setting, and the 20-25-or-so hours I spend every week on the clock make me happier than anything else I’ve ever done for work.

When we all found out Grantland was getting shut down on Friday, it hit me harder than I expected. We all knew there was a chance this would happen when Simmons left, so it’s not like we were taken completely by surprise. I feel terrible for the huge stable of excellent writers that got let go, but my feeling on this went beyond simply feeling bad for Internet Friends and people whose work I admire.

Seeing one of the Internet’s best outlets for good sports and culture writing get shuttered is incredibly disheartening. Other sites will pop up and there will be places for good writers to find a home, but Grantland -- from the outside, at least -- felt like the kind of place you dream up over beers and never expect to actually materialize. That it existed, and now doesn’t, is really God damn sad.

If I could make a decent living writing about sports, I would do it in a second. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that has been personally fulfilling. As we learned again today, the job security is terrible. You’re never going to get rich doing it. But it’s the only thing I’ve ever liked doing, and at 30, I feel like it’s not too late for me to still grab this stupid thing and try to hold on for a while. 

Most writers would agree, I think, that outside the irate person that emails you at 3:00 am about how you disrespected Arkansas, you are your own biggest critic. I still sometimes wonder what the hell I’m doing writing next to so many funny and smart people, but I try to keep it to myself for fear anyone might suddenly agree with me in that assessment. I’ve had an interview in the past year for a full-time position, but it didn’t work out, and that’s fine. Its just that in the back of my head, I selfishly feel that my chances just went down with all the Grantland talent hitting the market. This, of course, is stupid, since there are so many different niches that people can fit into and it’s not a direct competition.

We woke up at roughly 6:30 am on Monday. There was a quick dart of movement across the bed, and I sat up to find Tyler laying on my legs panting. He had wet the bed next to my wife, and himself in the process. Neither of us knew what was wrong with him -- he was totally normal the day before -- but we knew this was bad.

Tyler was 18 years old. My wife had gotten him and his sister Tiffany as kittens when she was still a young girl. By the time I met them, they were already adult cats, but I fell in love with them immediately.

Tiff and Ty came to live with us probably four or five years ago. Ash’s parents had retired and wanted to travel, and that meant the cats needed to find a new home where they could get attention and proper care. We took them in without a second thought, and they lived with us in a couple apartments, some of which most certainly did not allow cats, before we moved into our home last year.

They started having more frequent health problems as they aged, just as any animal does. It was never anything real major, but they steadily ran and jumped less, their limps became more pronounced, their attempts to go to the bathroom actually inside the litterbox became less accurate. It’s part of having an aging pet. It’s just part of the deal.

Ty hated going to the vet. My lord, he absolutely hated it. He was such a sweet and affectionate cat, but put him in their carrier and take him inside the vet’s office, and he would hiss, growl, bite, and generally be a real bastard about things. When we put him in the carrier Monday, there was no fight. He didn’t hiss or growl. He just laid there in silence, unable to stand or walk without extreme difficulty. I think he knew the jig was up long before we did.

When the vet took him back for observation, we sat in the exam room in a daze. It hadn’t dawned on us yet that Ty wasn’t going to be coming home again. The news on him leveled us. His laundry list of conditions included: heart disease, kidney disease, fluid in his lungs, atrophied muscles, dehydration, and blood clots. The vet thought that a blood clot had migrated from somewhere down to his spine, which cause him to lose the function of one of his rear legs. Over the past year he lost over a third of his body weight.

We had discussed the cats’ mortality a few times over the years, but it was never really more than “Man, it’s going to really suck when they die.” I had never given much thought to being in the position where we would need to put them to sleep, but that’s where we were. The line we had always said was that we were trying to give them the best life possible, and that if they couldn’t live capably on their own -- eat, go to the litterbox, go up and down the stairs -- then we’d have to make a decision.

Maybe he’d get better? Maybe he’d regain the function in his leg? Maybe he just needed to be rehydrated and things would be fine. We spent a few minutes trying to fool ourselves, but the reality of the situation was unavoidable.

Tyler’s normal life was over, and there was no use putting him through misery and suffering just because we couldn’t do what’s best for him. It was time for him to go.

The vet gave us the option to be with him when they injected him through a catheter in his leg. It was supposed to be a very painless, very peaceful way to go. We couldn’t do it. We were complete wrecks at this point, our eyes and faces red from crying for the better part of two hours. I’m not sure if I regret not being there for the end. A part of me feels like I owed it to him, but I couldn’t handle my last memory of this cat I loved so much to be looking at his lifeless body.

I’m not sure how long we were in the exam room saying goodbye. We hugged and kissed him and told him we loved him so many times I lost count. It felt like it wasn’t enough, but there wasn’t anything else we could do. At about 10 am, we said goodbye to our buddy for the last time.

Leaving the vet and going home with an unoccupied cat carrier was the most hollow and empty feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life. I’ve lost family members that have meant a lot to me, but making the decision to say goodbye is a different feeling. I spent most of my life without him, but the past 48 hours without Ty have been so lonely. Just overwhelming sadness. He wasn’t a kitten robbed of a long life by some disease, but that isn’t any comfort. I know we did the right thing, but saying yes to end the life of something you love so much just crushed me.

I feel sad. I feel sad that we had to say goodbye before we were ready, despite the fact that we would never be ready. I feel sad that after a long lifetime of constant companionship, Tiff is all alone. I feel sad that before we even left the vet’s office, I thought about getting kittens. I feel sad because even though he was my cat too, he was my wife’s for far longer. I feel sad because this is my best way to tell people how much Ty meant to me, and it doesn’t really do him justice.

We’ve spent the past two days crying off and on and trying desperately to tell Tiff how much we love her. She doesn’t understand English particularly well, so I’ve given her a robust allotment of treats just to hammer the point home. I don’t know if there’s any truth to the “death from a broken heart” thing, seeing her all alone after nearly two decades is painful. We’ll try our best to give her the best home we can, just like we’ve been doing.

I’ve never had to say goodbye to a pet before. I’ll probably have to do it again pretty soon, but Ty was the first. He was the weirdest cat in the world, and had idiosyncrasies that would drive me nuts sometimes. But no matter how loudly I would yell at him to stop meowing for the love of God and just jump on the couch yourself, when he finally got there he would purr loudly and look at you with unconditional love. He couldn’t say he loved us, but we knew, and he knew.

At some point, we will get another set of kittens. They’ll be siblings just like Tiff and Ty were, and we’re going to love them just like we loved these cats. They will never replace them, though. Both of them just have so much personality, and unlike stereotypical house cats, they were unendingly affectionate. We’re going to do our best to keep Tiff happy and healthy, but eventually she will go just like Ty did. For all of the joy we get out of owning pets, the cruel goodbye is part of the deal.

There will never be another cat like Ty, and I’m going to miss him for a long, long time. A day will come, hopefully soon, where I can think about him without welling up. That day has yet to come, and maybe that’s okay.

Goodbye, buddy.

[While I was on vacation and getting sunburned this past week, I decided I needed to get back to writing here more regularly. So this is me attempting just that. - Ed.]

Mad Men’s final season starts tonight, and I hate the stupid show so much. I’m going to watch it, of course, and that’s because I’m a silly person and a bit of a hypocrite. And I guess that’s okay.

I’ve watched every episode of Mad Men thus far, and at first I was pretty into it. It’s pretty slick for a period piece and it does a good job of working historical events into the storyline to give it a level of authenticity that resonates with people. It pulls you in and keeps you interested, that is until you have that crystalline moment of realization that everyone on the show is a loathsome automaton trying to move in a convincingly life-like fashion.

Don Draper is awful. Everyone in the office is gruesomely unlikeable. His family is annoying at best. The only character that I feel even a modicum of positive feelings towards is Roger Sterling, and he’s still a son of a bitch.

Each season is more tedious than the one preceding it, and it’s gotten to the point where I’ve been openly rooting for these characters’ doom for several years now. Watching a television show isn’t work, but watching episodes of Mad Men feels like work.

But I’m going to watch tonight, and I’ll finish the show out. This largely comes from a sense that after all these years, to quit the show just a few episodes away from the end would be more dumb than starting it in the first place. Also, there figures to be a few good jokes to come out of this, and I don’t want to miss the fun. 

I can come up with lots of lame justifications for why I repeatedly put myself through a show I dislike so much, but they don’t make a difference. It’s just a television show, and I’m not enough of an adult to stop watching.