Dark & Twisty

This is a very personal entry.  It's the obituary for my father who died at 2:30 am on April 22, 2009.

Lacy Vickery was my father.  He was born on October 1, 1951 in Alabama.  He lived the majority of his life there.  He was raised in rural Marion County which is near the Mississippi border.  He went to elementary school in a small town called Brillant before he moved to Parrish, where he lived the remainder of his life.

My father worked most of his life in the coal mines.  Most of that time was spent underground.  He helped build airshafts early on before actually mining the coal.  He finished out his career as a variety of former first a section forman then as an assistant mine former.  This was a good job for people around this area.  They made lots of money but the work was hard, and as most of the miners I know that worked with my father would tell you, no one worked harder than him.  My father only went through high school, but was well read.  He knew a little bit about everything.  He knew a lot about history, especially American.  He knew about electricity, and had fun with it when he could.  He was a fisherman who spent many days on the river catching bass and got really good at it.  He loved his family and did everything he could for them. 

All sons write things like this about their fathers, but this is true.  This is as true as what every son writes about his father after he is gone.  We do this because we cannot in life tell them how special they have been and what kind of heroes they were while living.  It makes us wusses.

My father battled colon cancer for 7 long years.  At times he seemed like he would beat it down and be as good as new, but at other times, he seemed on deaths door. This waffled back and forth many times until earlier this year.  At the beginning of 2009, it became evident that my father would not make it out of this year.  As the months rolled passed faster than I would like, he got worse and worse faster than any of us liked.  Finally he spent his last few weeks coming in and out of delirium, thinner than he had been since high school and unable to walk without assitance.  When I helped my father changed shirts, his chest sunk in and his muscle drooped.  My father never had drooping arm muscles.  He had hard biceps, viened and scarred from years of hard labor.  Cancer, the most evil of all villians, stripped him of everything.  Everything but his love for his family and his stubborn will to live as long as he could.  Even the villanous cancer took away that will at last.  My father struggled through his last day, laboring to breath and doped on morphine.  He final ceased his breathing at 2:30 am.  I had dozed and awoke to my mothers pitiful and agnozied sobs. 

I regret nothing.  I had a wonderful father who spent the last 7 years in and out of pain.  I spent as much quality time with him as I could and absorbed all I could from him.  The last good memory I have is sitting while he needed help up and down but was too himself and watching old Clint Eastwood westerns.  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  We couldn't decide why Clint, Lee Van Cleeve and Eli Wallach weren't all the ugly.

But now, he's gone and at 29, I'm fatherless and feeling a little bit like an orphan.  But I had a daddy once and he was a good one.  I thanked him in his last hours, and when the time came I gave him his dignity by dressing him in clothes like a man wears not the PJ's of man stripped of his manhood by horrible disease.