The phone call woke me up at 4 AM. The emergency room nurse in a Los Angeles told me that my father had experienced five heart attacks and five strokes in the past half hour and wasn't expected to make it. Before waking up my siblings I wondered how the hospital got my phone number. Only one of my siblings was in contact with my father because he was so abrasive.
Because my eldest sib lived in LA, her house would have to be the base of operations. My younger brother was in Germany and making the trip was out for a number of reasons. I was number six of eight, but because I was the eldest male (actually I had an older brother in a state hospital because he was looney tunes) and in an Italian family, eldest male sib calls the shots.
A half hour later, the hospital called me back, he was gone.
I worked in a hotel kitchen, which opened at six, when the executive chef came in. I called him and told him what happened and that I would need to go to LA (800 miles away) for the funeral and such. He told me that the sous chef would come in at 10 and he would call me.
When the sous chef called me he said that there was a lot that needed to be done that day, he would need me that day, but he'd let me make as many calls as I needed. I had already packed and made my airline reservation after talking to the sous chef.
When I arrived the next day, in LA at 6 AM, my eldest sib (B) told me that sib #4 had disappeared and she was supposed to be in charge of arrangements and I needed to make a judgement call. This was my first ever major adult decision and I said that we would give her until noon. If she didn't call us by then, we would take over and do what we had to do.
At noon I was with B, in her kitchen. She was reaching for her phone to call a funeral home when sib # 4 called. Sib # 4 (M) was taking care of arrangements and we would need to be at a certain funeral home the next morning at 9 for the funeral. We now had the rest of the day to do whatever we wanted, so me, and three of my sisters, went out to a Mexican restaurant and got very drunk.
My sisters are actually much older than me. This was a great experience as it was the first time that I got to do something adult with my adult sisters.
The next morning, early, all four of us were still suffering from the alcohol, when we went to the funeral home. M had chosen a rather small and cheap wooden box for dad. He was morbidly obese and was very much sticking out of the box. The box didn't even have hinges, the box top was leaned up in a corner and I realized that the funeral home staff would have to nail down, or screw down the lid.
The visitation at the funeral home was short and the next part of this play moved to a church that M had chosen. When we got to the church, a major problem came up. The church had sixteen steps in front. The two guys from the funeral home said that they weren't paid to carry in the box and they weren't going to. B had her husband there, but he'd had knee surgery just the week before. I begged and pleaded. The guys and I came up with a plan to have the box on a carriage and to basically walk it, step by step, up the stairs.
As we reached the top of the stairs, the priest was chewing out the deacon for not finishing an ADA ramp and to get it done "NOW!!" (during the service we heard the bang bang bang of hammers).
So, reaching the actual front doors of the church, another problem came up-there were two mystery women in the church. We will circle back to that.
The priest, who most likely, never met my father, said some nice words over him. M cried her eyes out, the rest of us fought to keep from giggling. My dad, as I said earlier, was very abrasive and all but M had gone no contact with him.
Once the service was over, I talked with one of the "mystery women," who happened to be my half sister A. I had met A four years before, when we had been fixed up, by accident, on a blind date. We'd never known of each other before the date. After discovering we were siblings, we went to see my father. My father had an affair, with a woman, just before I was conceived and A was the result. A was raised by her mother and a man she thought to be her father. When A's parents died in a car accident five years earlier, an aunt told A the truth and she came out to LA to be in the same city as her biological father.
When A spoke to me after the service she said that now, all three of her parents were dead and she was moving on. She was engaged to a man and intended to build a family with him and create new memories. After A walked away, my sisters walked over and asked me who I had been talking to. When I told them, they became angry-not with me, but with my father.
That left the other mystery woman. We were heading out to a Denny's and asked the mystery woman to accompany us. When we reached the Denny's, we took that big circular booth that they used to have and placed the mystery woman in the center, bracketed by me and B. We asked the mystery woman how she knew my father. She had been a street walker and my dad took her in until she got her shit together. After finishing her explanation, the mystery woman took out a prescription bottle and popped a pill. B was a nurse and had noticed the very powerful antibiotic and asked the mystery woman why she was taking that. "For syphilis " she said. Instinctively, we all jumped.
I spent the afternoon helping M empty out my dad's apartment. The next morning, M and I were the only ones that went to the national cemetery to see Dad's burial. I totally took advantage of Southwest Airlines (then) unlimited baggage policy, toting 17 suitcases home when I left the next day.