I feel the need to share things with you because I want you to know how much I love my dad. I want everyone in the world to know how fantastic of a man my beautiful father was.

I've been crazy for these last few days and the craziness gets worse. I cried even more frequently once Mike got here. I feel bad for Mike because he has to witness my mood swings. I start by wailing, I cry out loud just like my mother, then I scream really loud. Then I stop, I'm calm. I start talking to God and ask a ton of bizarre questions that I already know the answers to about my father's peculiarly rare and disgusting disease. I pace the house. I stare at pictures, watch videos of Dad when he was sick, the only videos I have of my father, which I then start feeling regret. Regret that we didn't record my father before he got sick, but we didn't know he was going to be diagnosed with this neurological progressive disease.

My dad's body is going to be turned into ashes and for some reason, that bothers me even more. As if my dad's body is still perfect and can come back to life. I know that my dad was real sick, I saw it.  I took care of his sick body from the moment he couldn't do things for himself. I have recordings of my dad's voice still saved on my cellphone that I played for the first time today and just balled. Things really got bad at the start of 2007 when Dad started to lose his voice. I started to learn how to interpret dad's jibberish, and it sucked when not just me said, "What?" but everybody. It used to make me feel so sad for my dad, because it must have been so frustrating for him to have to repeat himself. But he always tried, and if he couldn't be understood, he would just blow it off and motion a "nevermind" gesture.

Uh. I'm just irritated. I am angry that my perfect father had to live out the rest of his life with such an imperfect illness that no doctor really knew how to treat. The only things the doctors knew was that the disease was going to get worse and be the death of him. The good thing, though, is that this brought my dad and I even closer to one another and it made me look at my father with even more admiration.

He was a hero because he never gave up. He always ate 100% and also took anything healthy I would give him, even if it tasted bad. My father wanted to live, and wasn't afraid to die at the end. I remember asking him the first time I dared ask the question, "Are you afraid to die?" And he said, "Yeah." Then, months later, as the disease hurt him even more, paralyzing him from the top of his head down, I asked him again, "Are you afraid to die?" and he said, "No."

I know things about my father that even my own mother didn't know.  She knows things about Dad that I don't know, either. We both shared in seeing my father breathe his last breath, and that's the other thing that drives me insane. I was so devestatingly shocked that it happened. But, it's probably better that it did take us by surprise so we didn't have to mourn even more. Earlier that same day he died, both my mom and me cried over my father, he saw and heard us. I layed my head on dad's chest and grabbed his hand, felt his skin, touched his face, kissed his forehead, massaged his legs... I'm so hurt. My heart bleeds.

When noone was home last night for a bit, I called out, "Dad?" and repeatedly said it and my calls to him got louder and louder, while sniffling at the same time, tears falling, legs kicking, as I laid on the bed, grasping the pillow. I started to think, "I better calm down. The neighbors are going to hear. I would sometimes yell at the tv when the Florida Gators or one of my favorite football teams would score a touchdown, and he'd say, "Shhh... The neighbors will hear you..." But, what my father didn't realize, I learned that yelling at the tv style from him. We cheer as if the tv people can hear us.

When I start getting upset, angry, frustrated, irritated, I always answer my own questions, and then start to feel better again. This is the very first time I have ever had to go through something this painful, this atrocious, this unbelievable. The relationship I had with Dad was a unique one in that my father's age was too young, and my life during his illness and what we all went through during it all, I believe, no one will believe. My brother went through the nastiest divorce and child custody battle, I almost got thrown in jail because of his ex- (and I have no record with the police, whereas she has several pages of charges against her), my mother was there only half the time, if not absent more, but I accepted her absence and sacrificed my life for her to deal with her own issues, not knowing what "power of attorney" meant, getting married to Mike and him still wanting to marry me, knowing what he was marrying into, trying to manage paintball things like a team and becoming the Editor at Paintball Sports Mag, while still caring for my father for almost 3 years at a full-time level.

GOD. I don't know what I'm going to do without Dad. I told Mike, "I wish Heaven had an 800 number so I could call my dad." Yeesh, stupid, right... I'm so tired, my eyes are still burning, and I have no make-up on, so that can't be the reason why they're burning. Maybe rubbing them, pushing my eyes in, and crying alot is causing it to burn, you think?

I still have to write the eulogy and obituary and I am so afraid I will leave out something. So, I have to write a book, and that way, I will have plenty of pages to write an extended eulogy, right?

My father lived for us, I finally came to realize, and all he wanted was to be loved by his wife, children, and other important family members like his favorite brother, my godfather, my Uncle DAN. He was the "cool" uncle to my cousins, too, in that he wasn't as conservative as my uncle, but was conservative around his brother's presence. I could cuss around Dad, both my brother and I could, with Mom in the kitchen saying, "Why do you have to talk like that?" It was just a matter of using an expressive word that isn't used in public so frequently, thus the reason why the use of curse words were so freely used in the privacy of our own home.

I just think about my dad's awesome demeanor, how everyone he met loved him, how even the nurses and CNAs and doctors all thought my dad was the most adorable and nicest person. He made people laugh and he loved to laugh when people treated him like he was just a healthy person like the rest of us, and not a sick man dealing with a nasty disease.

OK, I have to go. I'm getting irritated again and it's 430AM. I could write forever about my dad and tell a million stories... that's how much my father affected me. I live to be like him, man, I even looked up the possibility of joining the Army just so I could follow in my father's footsteps... ugh. I even thought maybe, I will see what it takes to work for American Airlines as a ticket agent. Wow.

Finally, I found my dad's necklace... the one my friend Christine, a person I met through paintball, that she sent me as a gift a couple years ago. It's a glass pendant with like a laser-engraved color picture beamed into the glass. It looks like a Christmas ornament, a rounded shape, and I thought I had lost it. But, it was in the couch and the only reason I saw it was because I punched the couch with both fists as I squirmed, frantically talking to Mike about the curiosities of life and death. The couch's seat fell off a little, revealing the necklace... of course, I wailed outloud again, for the ninth-millionith time today...

Help. Is this normal? I feel like I'm a basket case full of grief, regrets, remorse... Yet, then, I will feel a sense of hope, faith, belief, and slight happiness that my dad can breath again and see a vision with my eyes opened of my father in Heaven in his teenaged body with a full head of hair.