Thursday at ~12noon, my mom called to tell me:
“they have taken away all the fluids” from Grandaddy.
What?
They took away the fluids and you know the body just can’t survive very long without liquids.
I’m sorry. So….Grandaddy’s in the hospital?
Yes.
And you didn’t think it was important to call and tell me?
(big fight; and yes, I’m right in this case)
If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because he was in the hospital for weeks March 2011 before my mom bothered to mention it.

E and I looked at our calendar. He had waited 6 weeks for a doctor appointment so we planned to leave right after that. It’s a 5-hour drive, so leaving after work gets us in quite late., anyway. We couldn’t have been there “in time” without more timely information.

I called mom to tell her our plans and explained 3 times that we’d leave Austin by ~11am. She then said he could be “like this” for days and implied that we didn’t really need to go up there.
Again, What?
Still, the only change we made to our plans was to ask friends to check on the critters on Sunday night if we weren’t back, we got on the road just before 11am. I texted my mom our departure time, but I never know if she gets texts or not. My plan was to call her as we leave the DFW area (and traffic) to give her an arrival time.

A few minutes later, my grandmother called with an update. She was sure my mom had called to tell me: Grandaddy passed away at about 3:30 this morning.

So, we’re on the road to hell, aka Paris effin Texas. It’s fathers’ day weekend and the annual family reunion that was started when Grandaddy’s father passed away and he/siblings would gather with my great-grandmother, “Mom”. Poignant.

RIP Frank M. O’Brien
3 July 1923
15 June 2012
Retired USPS Letter Carrier
WW II glider pilot
Purple Heart (shot down over France)