On the night that my father died I was in a vacation cabin rental in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with my mother and stepfather, my husband, and eleven-year-old son, on an annual trip to celebrate my birthday and cut down our Christmas tree from a fresh cut tree farm. They had gone ahead of me earlier that day, as I had been at my father's house for the twenty-four hours prior, watching his glassy eyes, chapping lips, and thinning skin on his hands, and listening to the purr and clap of the oxygen machine near his hospital bed in his living room.
Though his wife couldn't admit it, he had been in the process of dying for over a year, beginning with an acute urinary tract infection, pneumonia, and gallstones that had hospitalized him for over a month almost exactly a year prior. He had advanced multiple sclerosis, which had already caused paralysis in his legs and made him dependent on others, namely his wife. A subsequent gallbladder removal had weakened him beyond any independence he had left, and he had spent the year bedridden, both at home and in the hospital/rehab and nursing care, intermittently pissed off and resistant towards life and his condition and conversely motivated towards increasing his strength, regaining his mobility, and living many more years. I knew he would not live many more years.
I was making and serving chili at the mountain house when my father's son, my twenty-four-year-old half-brother, called and said, "Hi Kendall, this is that call." A surge of panic passed through me, then immediately, a current of relief, then that sort of suspension of reality that occurs when we get life-changing news that we don't know what to do with. How had I not known? How had I not known the exact moment of his passing? I was his oldest child, and a gifted psychic medium, and when a close friend passed just two years prior, his spirit had traveled right through me like a gust of wind when he crossed over. Had my father and I not become close enough that his departure would be felt by me, even at a distance? Had he waited until my sister and I were gone to die? Had we done the wrong thing by not being there at the moment he transitioned? What was the significance of him dying just two days before my birthday and three days after my sister’s? Now what?
I hung up the phone and thought I shouldn't have left him this morning. Though he couldn't speak and was on morphine, when my sister and I told him we were leaving, his eyes seemed to widen and furrow with confusion, as if he was objecting, as if he knew that he was finally dying, but wanted us (all four - his wife and kids) to be there. I had pushed this observation down, as being in his home was always acutely uncomfortable for a dozen different reasons, namely the soulless, shallow, passive-aggressive energy of his wife and my own father's rigidity (not physically, but energetically, though it's interesting that the body followed). Their home had never been our home and his presence (their presence) had never been entirely emotionally safe. Equally influential on my decision was that he had been at death's door repeatedly in the year or so past and had pulled through each time, though I did not expect him to. This time, the hospice nurse said who knows. His wife would not allow the word "death" to be spoken aloud where he could hear and seemed to be putting her hope on who knows as well. The interminable sitting in that environment had made my whole being contract and tighten, so I wanted to take the risk that he would be there in a few days and we could return. My sister felt the same. And it was not the first time we'd left his house with the ominous feeling that it could be the last time seeing each other.
I had done quite a bit of studying regarding the compassionate dying process and being with people during their passing, and I wanted more than anything to fulfill some kind of unspoken, ministerial, eldest child commitment of being with him when he left the world, as I knew it would be helpful to him and is a sacred experience all the way around, but years of stored trauma in my body combined with uncertainty and the suffocating feeling of being in the indefatigable coldness of his wife's presence, allowed me to walk out of the door.
During a three-year estrangement that I initiated with my father years before, a severance that was essential to break the patterns of abuse from him, to heal and establish healthy autonomy and boundaries, and to recover from my own battle with love addiction (induced by him), I had a dream about his passing that would occur one day. I dreamed that we had reconciled and that he and I were good friends and that I was alone with him. Almost all of these things happened, but alas, I was serving chili.
When I hung up the phone, I went into the kitchen and reported the news to a bunch of forks suspended in mid-air and sat down and began eating. My mother and stepfathers' reactions were somewhat flat - expectant and experienced in parental loss. My mom might have experienced her own five seconds of shock; the father of her children, who had at one period of her life treated her very badly, was gone. My ever-supportive husband likely gave a gesture of comfort, but I can't remember. My attention went to my son, who sat at the end of the table floating in time like I was. It was he who cried first, breaking the top layer of grief in the room with the realization that his grandpa was gone. He wanted to go be alone to process it. Dinner was done.
I made my way downstairs where Leland, my son, was sitting on a day bed with paper and a pencil and tears flowing over a face dotted in red, splotchy grief marks. On the paper he had written my father's full name and the date. We added his birthdate, and I played a song my father had sent me during our year of reconciliation, Willie Nelson's Stardust. He said he'd first heard that song in his early twenties while lying back on his sailboat looking at the stars at night on the ocean and thought it was the most beautiful song he'd ever heard. As we cried together, I reminded Leland of something my dad had told him from his home hospital bed, while gifting him a paperweight that bore the same words, "Never never never quit - Winston Churchill" He'd also said that we'd know he was with us because we would feel him on our shoulder. Then, lying there like a damp ragdoll with the youngest Heath in my arms, I felt another kind of grace: a sun forming at the center of my heart, shining for my dad's freedom from suffering. God knows he suffered a lot and doled a lot of suffering around, too, over the years. I knew that I had a lot of writing to do, for my own catharsis and to help others; and without him there to be destroyed by the totality of my truth, I would finally be able to do it. But first and immediately, I had to be with the compounded loss of losing the physical, earthly presence of a complicated, often impossible, and deeply loved father.
ความคิดเห็น