Wonderful! 425: Faucet Donkey Cat

**Rachel McElroy** (0:17)
Hi, this is Rachel McElroy.

**Griffin McElroy** (0:18)
Hi, this is Griffin McElroy.

**Rachel McElroy** (0:20)
And this is Wonderful!

**Griffin McElroy** (0:21)
Welcome to Wonderful! This is a podcast where we talk about things we like, that's good, that we're into. And I will say that those things have been in short supply. Those things have been in short supply for a little while, for a little bit now. We're back and we're doing a bit of a flyer.
We're taking an easy sort of nervous step back into the waters of podcasting.

**Rachel McElroy** (0:48)
I was gonna say, it's literally the way that I get into a pool, which is like inch by inch.

**Griffin McElroy** (0:52)
Now, if I had my druthers, you know me, I'm a big cannonball boy. I like to make a big splash, get it all over with, one and done, and do like a four hour long podcast after not podcasting for a week or two.

**Rachel McElroy** (1:07)
Podcasting is how the McElroys really figure out kind of where they're at and where they wanna be.

**Griffin McElroy** (1:13)
A lot of people get on us for that. They say, why do you turn your life's most challenging and most tragic sort of occurrences into content? And I say, that's how we heal.

**Rachel McElroy** (1:25)
Yeah, we don't know any other way.

**Griffin McElroy** (1:26)
I don't know any other way. It's lucrative, but it's how we heal.

**Rachel McElroy** (1:31)
And it's not my choice.

**Griffin McElroy** (1:33)
It's just the cards that life and God dealt us.

**Rachel McElroy** (1:38)
Yeah, those of you that are on social media may have seen Griffin's post. My dad passed away, I mean, as of recording a week ago, he had been dealing with cancer.
He had had cancer over a decade ago and it had gone away. And then it came back about, I mean, almost a year ago.

**Griffin McElroy** (2:03)
Yeah.

**Rachel McElroy** (2:05)
And he'd been doing lots of treatments and been having a lot of success. And then like anything, eventually they had to see if it was gonna stick. And so he took a break from treatment and then everything came back and had spread. And the kind of the recommendation of all the, you know, doctors that he'd been working with was that he'd just not pursue further treatment based on the spread. And then everything happened really fast after that. He'd been in the hospital for two weeks and we had made the decision to pursue hospice.
He went home on Wednesday from the hospital and then he passed the following Monday. So it was just, I mean, you know, I had never been through anything like this before, so I didn't know what to expect, but it was outside even my realm.

**Griffin McElroy** (3:03)
Yeah, no, I mean, it is different for, the timeline is different for everyone.

**Rachel McElroy** (3:09)
Yeah.

**Griffin McElroy** (3:11)
You know, your grandmother was sort of in assisted living, sort of the hospice care for years.
And obviously, that was a different situation. But my mom kind of had a similar kind of timeline where she was in remission for a while, and then it came back and it just came back super, super, super fast and super duper aggressive.

**Rachel McElroy** (3:34)
So, you know, we're doing okay. You know, like I said, he had been sick for a long time. So in some ways, it was always kind of a consideration. But we had to make a lot of decisions really fast and Griffin was really helpful in doing that.
And then, yeah, towards the end, you know, my dad wasn't as lucid. He wasn't himself as much.
So those last few days were really kind of confusing and difficult, but luckily we had kind of made some decisions in advance. And so we were able to kind of, I mean, you know, go forward as peacefully as possible, I guess. And feel like we were doing kind of everything we could. But yeah, you know, I've talked about him on the show. He's always been kind of like a big presence and kind of a lot of things that I have brought week to week.

**Griffin McElroy** (4:41)
He listened to every episode, as does your mother.

**Rachel McElroy** (4:43)
Yeah.
Maybe not there recently with everything going on. But...

**Griffin McElroy** (4:53)
It's so horrible. And I feel like in this exact situation, it would be appropriate to kind of memorialize or honor. And I don't know that either of us are really equipped to do that.

**Rachel McElroy** (5:09)
Yeah, I mean, it was a week ago, so I'm not ready to really do that. I will just say, like, he has been a presence on the show. He will continue to be.