7 Days Earlier…

After 4 days on the ventilator it was pretty clear that Old Boy wasn’t going to rally and make much of a recovery. And since he couldn’t speak on his behalf, the decision whether or not to shut off the life support fell squarely on Lola.

And Lola being Lola, she gave the only answer she could:

“Call those damn daughters of his and tell them to get their asses here. Let them decide what to do — he’s their father and I don’t want to be blamed later for pulling the plug…”

And so I made the calls to Gong-Li (formerly known as Ruth, but who changed her name after the death of her hard drinking Korean mother) and Soon-Yun, the hard as nails accountant from Portland. Both asked that Lola not make any decision until they could assess their father’s condition.

Lola was fine with that.

“Let those little bitches sign the papers — his blood can be on their hands,” she replied, flipping through The National Enquirer. “Says here that Paul Newman is down to 90 pounds…”

Thursday morning Soon-Yun and her husband Andrew flew in, all crocodile tears and “oh, daddy”s even though she hadn’t seen or called the old fart in over 4 years. That night, Gong-Li and Clark drove in and put on a similar performance. Immediately following the floor show, the doctors came in and gave their prognosis which led to more theatrics and a unanimous decision to remove Old Boy from the ventilator.

Friday morning, the doctors offered their condolences and promptly turned off Old Boy’s blood pressure meds.

“He should go very quickly,” they said before excusing themselves.

When one of the doctors came back 45 minutes later, he seemed a bit baffled to find all of us sitting around the still breathing patient.

“Hmmmmmmm,” he said, looking at the various monitors, “I thought that would do it. I think what we’ll do is turn off the ventilator. That’s all that’s keeping him breathing, so once that is off he’ll go very quickly.”

An hour later, the same doctor returned with a look of pure bewilderment.

“Huh. I really would’ve thought he’d be gone by now…tell, you what — why don’t you folks step into the hallway while we remove his breathing tube? Once that’s out, it should be a matter of minutes…”

That was at 11:15am.

Old Boy held his own sans meds or machines for another seven hours and 5 minutes before shuffling off this mortal coil.

Shortly thereafter is when the real drama kicked in.