Barb Caffrey's Blog

Folks, this past week around Chez Caffrey has been a struggle. (I’m not going to lie.) Dad’s death has really thrown me for a loop (or maybe into curlicues; a simple loop doesn’t seem to be enough, somehow, to describe this.) While I am not the executor for my father’s estate, I am trying to look after some of his interests while my sibs are doing other needed and necessary things.

Mostly, I feel like I’m failing.

At any rate, my brother, sister and I discussed what we wanted in Dad’s obituary and my brother mostly adhered to what we’d said (plus what he’d thought, too). (Jim, my brother, is the main person to make decisions. Dad was old-fashioned that way.) Dad loved music, played music, loved sports and was a huge fan of the Brewers, Bucks, Packers, etc. He loved old movies, as I said in my last blog, and he enjoyed listening to show tunes, some light jazz from the early 1940s and late 1930s (think Benny Goodman and his Orchestra and you’re not far wrong) and was a huge fan of Doris Day. (She, BTW, was one of the first actresses to portray an independent woman on TV. She also was a nightclub singer before she got her big break and became somewhat of a wholesome icon.) He knew a lot about DD’s life and career, and honestly mourned her death in 2019.

The thing is, as I’ve discussed at my Facebook page already, the cause of death has come back and it kind of threw me for a loop. It’s going to be “uncontrolled hypertension” that was the underlying cause of Dad’s death.

Why did this throw me? Mostly because my father was still taking blood pressure meds. They apparently had become ineffective — this is something I didn’t know until the medical examiner told me — but Dad was unwilling to either take a higher dose or try a new med. He’d stay with what he knew instead, for whatever reasons of his own, and could not be moved on this issue according to what was written into my father’s chart.

In other words, Dad was what you might call “noncompliant” with doctors. Or at least he’d become that way in the last few years, if that makes any sense.

See, to my mind, had Dad taken no blood pressure meds at all, or refused to take any more, that would’ve made more sense than taking something he knew was ineffective. (I can’t ask him why he made this perplexing choice, either, for obvious reasons.)

Hypertension, when it’s not controlled, can eat into your quality of life. I’ve known this since my early twenties, for pity’s sake. (Partly because my late grandmother had some issues this way, and partly because I was diagnosed with borderline high blood pressure at age twenty-two, I had to get cognizant of this in a big hurry.) When you have high blood pressure that’s not controlled, it makes you feel weaker than you would otherwise feel. It also can make it more difficult to get your rest or to get enough exercise to do your heart any good, because if you feel frail or at least feel off-kilter, most people get more anxious. (I know I do, and I definitely know my father did.) If you’re anxious often, this eats into your available bodily energy supply, and it makes you worry more about things you otherwise wouldn’t worry about.

All I know is, we have eight days to go until Dad’s memorial service. They feel sometimes like they’re both too short and too long. How they can be both at the same time is beyond me, but life is strange…and it’s even stranger after you lose someone close to you.

How have you handled this sort of thing? Have you had any deaths in your family? Any advice for me or my sibs? I’d appreciate it if you want to pass any along, as right now it seems like I’m going down a broken road without a map, without a flashlight (as the skies continue to darken), and as if I’m both deaf and dumb.