After my dad’s funeral I was unbelievably tired.  I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night in weeks and it had been more than a year since I had a full night’s sleep. My dad’s illness consumed my conscious and unconscious life.

But through it all I truly believed my dad had years left even though the doctors kept saying he only had months… then weeks left. I believed that my father who had always been the strongest man I have ever known and who could do anything would beat the cancer coursing through his body.

It wasn’t until arrived in Texas the second week in October and he was already in hospice that I realized that the man who I thought would always be there for me wouldn’t make it to see another week. He looked so frail.

He was given pain medicine but the nurses had to sedate him because he kept moving when he was in pain and the doctors feared he would break one of his fragile bones. When he breathed it made this horrible sound; some call it a death rattle.

I spent days and nights at the hospice.  I wanted to be there for him. Then my mom came and said I had to go home and the doctor made me leave too. She said that my presence could be making him hang on instead of moving on. A few days later my father died.

After the funeral I start getting ready to fly back to NYC when my mother decides she needs to get out of the house for a while. We make a plan to drive across the U.S. Then Hurricane Sandy happened. The Super Storm had already battered the Caribbean and now it was making a beeline up the east coast.

We should have left earlier than we did but we were waiting to see what Sandy was going to do.

Our first day of travel we drove from Houston to Memphis, TN. You can’t visit Memphis without paying your respects to the King of Rock-n-Roll. I had a lot of fun learning about the Elvis but dad was never far from my thoughts and neither was Hurricane Sandy which was heading straight for my home in New York.

In my next post I will let you know if the plane made of gold rumor is really true, pictures of the room that Elvis decorated all by himself and some other facts that you may or may not have known.