Hi all
At this point, it's all I can do to try and be strong for my Mom and siblings. With things being up in the air in regards to how much residual abilities my Dad will get back, it's kinda hard to come to terms with everything, because nothing is "finalized" yet. We're still waiting to see what type of situation we're going to have to deal with.
As of right now, he can't speak or move his left side. He has a hard time opening his eyes and we can't tell if he even recognizes us yet. They are still running tests to determine what areas have been affected and to what degree, but observing his abilities & disabilities are a better indicator I think. So it's a wait and see game right now.
My memories of my Dad are mostly happy ones....
My Dad taught me to be true to yourself, even if you lose friends over it. I've only had that happen a couple times, but felt better in the long run for not comprimising myself just to conform to someone else's expectations of me. He use to say "If you want to be a sell out, that's your business.... just don't sell yourself out." I really appreciated that advice.
I also remember him responding to some rumor or another than a particular person was trying to spread about him. They ended up getting proved wrong and looked like a fool, but even so. When confronted with the rumor, my Dad refused to get caught up in feeding the flames by getting mad or trying to insult the person's character or anything. He just said "As long as it's the truth, it can't hurt me." And he left it at that.
My Dad tended to work a shift where I wasn't able to see him much as a kid. He'd be there for dinner usually, but would have to leave soon after and wouldn't get home until early in the morning (like 4AM or something). So he wasn't up when I got up for school and couldn't hang out to help me with homework or stuff like that after dinner. Still, when we DID get to hang out, we had a blast.
He helped me make a pinewood derby car for Cub Scouts. He encouraged my interest in inventing things and would help me to make them. Granted, most of them were pretty lame, but still. A few were pretty cool. We made a full auto BB gun that was fun.
Something that's relevant to the saber community, he helped me convert an old Mag Lite into a lightsaber by having a slip on blade holder I designed made up at his work. It used a solid acrylic rod for the blade and didn't light up nearly as well as the current Luxeon sabers. Years later, when Luxeon came out with a drop in LED upgrade for the Mag Lite, I got one and put it in "the beast", as we called it. While technically, this may have been one of the first Luxeon sabers, nothing was ever really done with it and the solid acrylic blade ended up getting broke, so the saber just got stored away somewhere in the garage. The darn blade holder was so huge around on this thing that it looked like a dumbell on one end. Definitely not a sleek saber.
Anyway, my Dad is a cool guy that helped a lot of people. Not just me. He used to take me to soup kitchens to volunteer with him or to just go around and hand out sandwiches to the homeless with me. He used to go to auctions and buy a bunch of surpluss coats and we'd hand them out to people that needed them at shelters and such. This type of thinking inspired me to approach my Junior High school and ask about setting up a program where we took the left over food they didn't serve us in the cafeteria and arrange to have it donated to the soup kitchen we volunteered at. The school was able to right off a portion of the cost of the food expense and they got to help people out at the same time. I'm not sure, but I think the school still does this.
My Dad was many things to many people, and we will never really know how many folks he helped over the years, but I'm sure that in his life, he helped far more people than he hurt. I'm positive of that.
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Originally Posted by Corbin_Das
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