We’re upgrading our Verizon DSL to the business version, and either Verizon has been much more efficient than they said they’d be, or the 9 to 15 day gap in service hasn’t started yet. I’m rooting for the former.

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Over the holidays we drove down to LA. We considered cancelling the trip after my father died, but we’d already talked to Sophia about it (and you cancel a 3-year-old’s visit to her friends at your own peril), and there wasn’t much of anything for us to do in Northern California before the funeral, so we decided to go ahead with the trip.

The wonderful: New Year’s at Tamar’s (I hope it does become a tradition!), seeing Tamar and Dan and Damian and Michele and Allison and Adam and Atticus and a whole host of other friends in the few short days we had, visiting old LA haunts (Sweet Lady Jane! Michel Richard!), and getting away from the general malaise of my father’s passing.

The not-so-great: realizing that the worldview of some of my friends down there is so alien, antithetical, and abhorrent to my beliefs that I probably won’t contact them again, remembering that even non-freeway driving in LA is horrible and every road is four to six lanes wide and packed with people trying to beat the next light, and finding a decent midtown hotel for a family. We stayed at the Doubletree in Westwood, which was functional, but I need to find a suites hotel for the next time.

I know there will be a next time, because as we left LA on Sunday morning Darin said, “I have to wait a whole year to get another raspberry tart at Michel Richard.” I said, “We could come back sooner than that.” Darin shook his head and said, “No, no, we really can’t.” So I’m willing to surmise that he doesn’t secretly wish we still lived down there, but he’s willing to do the drive down every so often, particularly if, as we’ve discussed, we get the DVD system installed in the car for the kids.

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Darin has needed some new clothes for a while. I couldn’t find enough clothes to pack for this trip. We had heard that LA might have a few clothes shops.

So what the hey: let’s do some clothes shopping while we’re down there.

We had planned to go clothes shopping on the 31st, but we didn’t make it, which is why I was doing laundry at Tamar’s on the 1st. On the 2nd we headed out to the Beverly Center, which is Shopping Mecca. Every upscale chain store you’ve ever heard of and then some.

I remembered that I had some clothes shopping to do as well, so I headed into Macy’s women’s department. All of the dresses I saw were slinky, had spaghetti straps, and enough glitter on them to make me itch. I went up to the clerk and said, “I need a black dress appropriate for a funeral.”

“Oh,” she said. “So you’ll need sleeves?”

Why, yes. Yes, I would.

She showed me the one dress she had that fit my requirements. I don’t even remember what the dress looked like, but I do know that the sizes available were: 0, 2, 4, and 6.

I returned to Darin and said, “We have to go to Glendale anyhow. I’m going to Nordstrom.”

At Nordstrom I walked into the women’s dress department and repeated my request. The clerk there looked at me with sympathy and said, “My mother-in-law just passed away. I’m sorry for your loss. Please, wait here in this dressing room and I’ll get you some outfits to try on. Would you like some espresso?”

Night, meet Day.

I’ve always heard that Nordstrom clerks are more helpful because they get commissions. But my friend Allison, who worked at Macy’s a million years ago, said that clerks in the dress department got commissions there. So what’s the reason for the disparity in behavior?

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In some ways LA felt intensely familiar—several times I had the deja vu-ish feeling that I’d just been driving down such-and-such a street. But in many ways it already feels like we lived there a million years ago. I couldn’t remember the order of streets in particular areas, an order I could have rattled off no problem six months ago.

LA. Just another tourist destination for us now.

Thanks for all the really supportive, great comments and emails and cards. It’s always surprising to me how really nice people can be at times when I need it. Surprising and gratifying.

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It’s still weird to think about: on the one hand, my father had been sick for a while, so it’s not especially surprising that during this cold and flu season he got sick and passed away. But on the other…the guy who used to pull my loose teeth and take me sledding in Elizabeth Park can’t be dead. He just can’t.

I thought the funeral would help me get a handle on really understanding he was dead, but it didn’t. When we showed up at the mortuary to see his body, I didn’t react much at all because to me the figure in the casket didn’t look like my father. The face was different. The color was wrong. Clearly the mortuary had made a mistake and put a wax dummy meant to represent my father into the casket, because that wasn’t my father.

After the viewing we drove to St. Dominic’s, my father’s church, for a mass, and then drove to the cemetery for the burial. (The graveyard’s in Colma, of course—graveyard to the Bay Area!) One of the prominent members ot he cemetery is Joe DiMaggio—my sister said, “That would make Dad happy.” My Dad was a lifelong baseball fan.

The workers lowered the casket into the ground and we threw roses on top of the casket. Well, all of us except Sophia; she didn’t want to give her rose up.

We’d explained to Sophia what had happened, and she seemed to understand what we were telling her, if not exactly the proper etiquette. She went up to my Mom and said, “Your husband died. You’re a little sad.” Sophia was much more interested in playing with her cousins than in being quiet and still. Actually, all four cousins were well-behaved (given they’re all 4 and under) during the day: the viewing, the mass at St. Dominic’s, the burial.

We went back to my sister’s house for a luncheon/wake, and then late in the afternoon we headed home. We were all exhausted.

A little over a year ago I went to the Journalcon in San Francisco—a special request! How could I say no? I flew up with baby Simon. We spent the night at the St. Francis hotel, off Union Square, and in the morning we wandered over to Journalcon. Right after my session I had to dash off, missing what everyone said was a great luncheon, because I was having brunch with my parents at Sears’ Fine Foods. My mom had seen Simon when he was a month or so old, but my dad hadn’t met him yet.

During the brunch my father seemed strangely distracted. He kept checking his watch. At the end of brunch he said he wanted to go home to watch the Giants in the playoffs. We’d spent about an hour together. I knew how much he enjoyed baseball, so I kissed him goodbye and then set off to catch BART to Oakland Airport.

A month later my sister called me to tell me our dad had collapsed and was in the hospital. He seemed weirdly disoriented, saying very strange things. And he was checking his watch all the time. “That didn’t just start,” I told them.

Then a little while after that she called to tell me he’d had a stroke.

I flew back up to San Francisco, Simon in my arms, and I went to visit Dad in the hospital. He seemed to have no idea who my sister and I were. It was heartbreaking to see him looking so different than he had just a month earlier.

A month after that, at Christmastime, Darin and I drove up for the holidays as usual. My sister and I went to visit my father at the hospital, and I was astounded at how much better he seemed. He definitely seemed to recognize the two of us. He wasn’t trying to communicate, but he listened as we talked to him.

He came home a month or two after that. Much earlier than we thought he would, but there was nothing further for him in the hospital. He attended physical therapy. He slowly started doing things, like going for walks. He couldn’t use his right hand very well, but he was working on it.

I brought the kids up to San Francisco about every two weeks to visit Grandmom and Grandpop. My parents definitely seemed to enjoy seeing them, and the kids enjoyed the wonder that is their grandparents’ strange and unusual house.

Last month—it all runs together at this point—my Dad tried to talk to me. We didn’t get very far in the conversation, because he couldn’t aspirate very well. He’d had a laryngectomy about 12 or 15 years ago and used a prosthesis to talk afterward. After the stroke he couldn’t use the prosthesis any more, because it requires manual dexterity he didn’t have and patience to relearn the process, which he also didn’t have.

But he was trying to talk to me. Which was a big difference.

At Christmas last week my parents arrived with bags and bags of gifts. The ones from my father were wrapped clumsily—which meant he’d done it. And the tags were written in a jerky handwriting—which meant he’d done it. It’s impossible to imagine getting excited over gift tags, until you’ve done it, I guess. I told him how happy I was to see him writing. I said I’d be back up to San Francisco with the kids after New Year’s.

Yesterday my sister called me and told me he was in the hospital again, this time with pneumonia. Evidently in the morning things were very bad and “the doctor was ready to call in the priest,” but in the afternoon he’d rallied. Still sick, but doing much better. He was pretty out of it, though. I wondered if I should go up to visit him even though he was out of it.

This morning at 4am my mom called to let me know he’d passed away. This morning has been spent working out mortuary arrangements.

I keep telling Darin there’s something wrong with me because I just feel numb. He talked to his Dad (who recently lost his own father) and Steve said, Don’t worry, that feeling won’t last.

I’ve never had a close relative die before. Considering before Darin my family was pretty much just my parents and my sister, I guess that’s not too surprising. Despite the troubbles my father has had over the year (throat cancer, the laryngectomy, the stroke) this has still come as a surprise. An unwelcome completely expected surprise, if that makes any sense.

Anyhow. In case anyone out there knew Thomas Joseph Patterson, of Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco, he passed away today.

I’ll probably not be posting for a little while until I sort things out.