gone

I have profound ways to say it. I have crude ways. I am sometimes poetic and sometimes ugly in my thinking about what has gone down since this Thursday past.

At 5 PM on the 20th, my family and I gathered around the hospital bed of Tom Brumberger and one by one, bid him our goodbyes. He was then disconnected from life support, machine by machine, and laid in my mother's arms, where he died within minutes. Tom was my stepfather...but that's not really it...that sounds so removed. He was family. He was my Dad. He introduced me as his daughter, and by God, I was. From the time he got in a fist fight over my Carvel cake when I turned seventeen until always, I will be his daughter by spirit and because we are family.