The call came at 2:30 am Thursday night/Friday morning.  Within minutes my mother and I were speeding toward the hospital.  I don’t think either of us said a word during the short drive, each of us lost in our own private terror.

We arrived at the hospital and reached the floor of  my dad’s room.  We are put into a waiting room.  Told to wait.  Speechless, we sit, and we wait.  Each minute seemed like hours.  A nurse comes in to tell us the doctor will be in shortly to talk to us.  She cannot say any more.  We overhear that the doctor and nurses are “still working on him”.  Sound carries very well in places like that.

Finally the doctor arrived.  The news isn’t good.  Dad suffered a massive heart attack.  The nurses found him on the floor of his room, in between the bed and the wall.  He had been unconscious long enough, his heart not beating, that we knew there was brain damage.  Even if he survived, which the doctor told us was probably not possible, he would be basically a vegetable.

Fear and grief makes people react differently.  Some people cry, some don’t.  At that moment, I yelled.  Screamed. I was angry.  Afraid.  I was angry that we had been told to rush to the hospital, only to be put into a room and wait.  I was angry at the nurses, whose station was right outside my dad’s room, did not hear him fall, yell for help.  I ranted, I raved, I threw a box of tissues (the only thing I had on hand) at the doctor.  I was a pissed off, terrified teenager.  I remember my mother trying to calm me down. I am not proud of how I behaved.  I apologized later, feeling terribly foolish for having caused a scene.   I was afraid.  What would we do?  How would we survive? Life without my dad?  Even though we knew his disease would cut his life short, we were not prepared.  Is anyone ever really prepared to lose a loved one?

Dad was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).  It was hours before we were allowed to go in to see him.  By then, I remember phone calls being made at the pay phone.  Our neighbor, Linda and her husband Jim.  Aunts, uncles, cousins.  My grandmother.  Plans were being made to travel.  We knew it was the end, it was just a matter of time now.  I was so torn about going in to see him.  I wanted to, but I didn’t.  I didn’t want to see him that way.  I wanted to remember him the way I saw him last.  The night before when mom and I left to go home.  He was sitting up in bed, smiling.  As we left, I said “I love you, Daddy.”  I didn’t often say it anymore, being a teenager.  I don’t know what prompted me to say it that night.

In the end, I went in.  It was like being a dream.  That couldn’t be my dad lying there with a machine making him breathe.  Tubes everywhere.  That terrible ashen pallor to his skin.  I kept thinking I would wake up.  This wasn’t real.  It couldn’t be real.  How could he be so alive just hours before, so normal, and now this?

So much of that night is a blur. I’ve blocked out the memory of it, and the next day for so long,  details are fuzzy now.  I remember at some point our neighbors, wonderful friends, showing up.  Mom insisting that I go home with Linda and get some sleep.  My aunt and her son arrived some time early that morning.  It was light out now.  Another dreary winter day.  Colder than usual.  So cold.  Linda drove me home to shower and take a nap.  She would be back to get me in a few hours.  I showered.  I cried.  Tears mingling with water until it wasn’t clear which was which.  I dressed, crying.  I sat on my bed.  Crying.  The first time I had really cried.  Rocking back and forth.  Sobs that racked my body.  In that moment, I had never felt more alone in my life.

Now, what happened next you can dismiss as sleep deprivation, or a hallucination brought on by grief, my mind playing tricks.  As I was sobbing, I felt a hand on my shoulder.  I whirled around to see who the hell was in my house.  Had Linda come back?  There was no one there.  I can still remember the warmth of the touch.  A firm, but gentle hand.  I took a deep breath.  I stopped crying.  I felt at peace.  I slept.  I’ve never been a super religious person.  I believe in God, but I hadn’t given the Almighty much thought up to that point.  But I believe at that moment, God saw my heartache, felt my loneliness and reached out to me to let me know I was not alone.  That I could survive this.

That afternoon I went back to the hospital.  Not much had changed.  More relatives were there.  The doctor came in and spoke to Mom and me, telling us that soon we would have to think about making the decision on removing Dad from life support.  He had no brain activity.  Several times they had tried to see if he could breathe on his own.  He could not.   I felt like I had been kicked in the gut.  I did not want to make that decision.  How could I make that decision?  I know my mother would have deferred to me.  How I know that is a whole other post.

My mother wanted me to go home with Linda (our neighbor) and sleep that night.  She wanted to stay there, close to Dad.  I protested, but my aunt said she would stay with my mother, for me to go, get some rest.  She told me I would need it.  The coming days were going to be hard and my mother would need me to be strong.  So I left.  To this day, I regret that decision.  Not that it would have made any difference.  Dad did not know of our presence.  We were not allowed to stay with him.  Only fifteen minute visits once per hour.

But I was not there when he died.  I was not with my mother.  I was at my neighbors house lying on an air mattress watching television.   We had been home about an  hour when there was a knock at the door.  Linda opened it and I saw my mother.  I knew there was only one reason she would have left that hospital.  She looked at me and said “We lost him.  He’s gone.”  She had no tears.  I grabbed her, holding as tight as I could.  My daddy was gone. The man I loved and respected most in the world had left me.   What now?

Tomorrow, Part Three

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