9月11日

I was sitting in the Boca Raton Community Hospital Outpatient Scheduling office. I was about to call my first patient to schedule her upcoming pap smear. I had not expected to be there.

My plan on March 8, 2001 was to graduate from Loyola New Orleans and move to Florida to live with my then-girlfriend. I wanted to take a year off to play on the beach and sail. After that the plan was to move to China to learn Mandarin, then to Georgetown for a degree in Computational Linguistics. I had a plan, goddamnit and like all Conulaidhian plans, it was complex and ambitious. But that plan was overtaken by events on the ground.

On Friday March 9, 2001 I went out with a bunch of college friends for a night of drinking and eating. We all had the expectation of an easy ride to the end of the semester and I went to bed happily drunk. It was the last time I slept easy.

At 8:00 AM, on Saturday March 10, I woke up to my girlfriend’s friend knocking on my Fern St. apartment door. “Call your mom”. Then she turned and left. Ok…. I stumbled back into the apartment and picked up the phone. 817.927….. My mom picked up the phone. “John, dad’s gone.” “What?” And then she told me what happened.

My father had been complaining of lower back pain since Christmas 2000. His doctor had responded by prescribing increasingly more powerful pain killers. By the beginning of March, my dad had turned into an opiate addled zombie. In one of the few shows of agency in her entire life, my mother put him into the car on Sunday and drove him to Harris Methodist Southwest. They checked him in and he spent that first week of March in the hospital. He was mildly pissed that he missed the Irish Festival.