“He looks like Grandmother Wilson,” I said, remembering my paternal grandmother, who died in the early 1980s.
“Yes,” said my mother. “He does.” She took a shallow breath and then, “Why did this happen?” Mother stared at Daddy and I patted him on the shoulder, which seemed to make me feel like I was doing something helpful.
“Would you like to go ahead and take his jewelry with you?” asked the nurse.
His wedding ring and class ring (University of Mississippi, Sigma Nu, 1948) came off fairly easily, but the watch was harder. His hands had always been big—something I inherited from him, along with his sensitive skin and his tendency toward impatience—and it seemed his hands and wrists had doubled in size since he’d been in the hospital. Watching the nurse struggle became too painful. “Greedy daughters take jewelry off dead father. Film at eleven.” In reality, we were simply clawing for any piece of Daddy that we might keep, anything that might outlast death.
“I’ll get that off for you later,” said the nurse.
Mother cradled his wedding band in her palm, and I slipped the class ring on the thumb of my right hand. It was too big, even for my pudgy fingers, but I wasn’t about to let go.
“Sometimes I like to pray with the family,” said the nurse. “Is that all right with you?”
Who knows how each of us prayed silently as the nurse spoke, her voice soft and clear and sure as she asked for the emotional healing of my family. Her short hair and wire-rimmed glasses gave off a certain air of efficiency, but it was not just about the job for this woman. It was about us, too, the ones left behind. The ones she could still help.
As for me, I thanked God for giving me such a fabulous father. And then I bawled like a baby.
Reservation Confirmation for Martha and Earl's Honeymoon in 1948
“The obituary pages tell us of the news that we are dying away while the birth announcements in finer print, off at the side of the page, inform us of our replacements…”—Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell
As my father drew his last breath, he did not rise up to confess the name of an unknown love child or reach out to my mother to proclaim his love one more time. He simply died.
“Is this it?” asked Mother. At 78, she looked like a child who had lost sight of her parents in a crowded shopping mall.
“I think so,” I told her, crying, searching the nurse’s face for a signpost of my own. She nodded.
“Yes,” I said to my mother. “I think this is it.” She climbed onto the hospital bed and lay down beside Daddy, cradling his head in her arms and whispering into his right ear. She was wedged between the side rails and her soulmate. My two sisters and I huddled around the other side of the bed, taking turns telling Daddy good-bye. Later we discovered that Ann and Mother were begging him to stay, while Ginny and I were telling him he could go, his work with us was done, he had done it well. We did not know if Daddy could hear us, and in light of the conflicting messages, maybe it’s best if he didn’t. It’s a good thing Daddy always knew his own mind.
It became obvious rather quickly that my father was indeed dying. Numbers dropped on machines, glowing lines lost their arcs and veered toward flat. I know you’re not supposed to be able to hear hearts break, but I swear I heard something, loud and clear. After twenty-four hours of his head swaying back and forth, his face obscured by an oxygen mask, the first love of my live was gone.
The nurse moved to turn off the machines that accompanied my father from this life to the next. Despite her best efforts, she could not get one of them to stop beeping.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong.” More beeping.
My friend Mary said when her sister died of skin cancer—she was only 35—there was a death rattle, sort of a guttural sound. All I heard, besides the beeping, was absence. Ann, Ginny, and I helped Mother down from the hospital bed. We gathered ourselves one into the other and moved around the room as a single unit, a glob of grief, not knowing where to go or when to stop. Occasionally one of us reached for a tissue or glanced out the window at the skyline of the city that had served as our family’s backdrop for more than half a century. But mostly we drifted around Daddy’s bed, first one side, then the other.
When Mother sank to the floor in a heap, phrases that didn’t begin to do the scene justice came to mind: thought I might die; took my breath away; hit me like a ton of bricks; I was beside myself. I kept looking for the just-right cliché, but I did not find it. As a daughter, I was speechless. As a writer, I was at a loss for words.
When a doctor entered the room, my mother looked at him square in the face and wailed, “Why did this happen?”
“Blood vessels get weak over time,” he said. “There was nothing we could do.”
“She thinks she might have done something to save him,” I said, softly. “She thinks it’s her fault.”
I was pleading to a stranger for some remnant of reassurance. Anything. The last family member to arrive at the hospital, I wasn’t introduced to the doctors, wasn’t allowed to view X-rays my sisters saw, pictures that convinced them our father could not be saved.
“We’ve already told her it wasn’t her fault,” said Dr. Meany Pants, curtly, before leaving the room. “Your mother knows better.”
Note to self: After suitable mourning period, confront people who piss me off during the process.
The curtain that separated us from the rest of the world, the world of the living, made a slight shushing sound as it came together behind the doctor.
“Wow, the color sure goes out of you fast,” I said to the nurse, as my father faded to white from his head down.
“Yes, it does,” she replied.
Did I just use the word “wow”? Surely something more meaningful was in order.
“How long can we stay?”
“As long as you like.”
“We might be here a while, then,” I said, but I did not know how long would be long enough. I did not know anything.
I asked the nurse to remove Daddy’s oxygen mask and take out his mouthpiece. The minute she did, I was almost sorry, because then I could really see my precious father’s face. I was reminded this was not some sort of terrible mix-up, like when surgeons remove a kidney instead of a lung or amputate the wrong leg (you read about that all the time). Daddy is dead. Repeat after me.
I made my way toward him—it did not occur to me to say, “the body,” for even without breath, he was still my daddy—and smoothed his bushy eyebrows. In doing so I accidentally raised one of his eyelids and saw into the nothingness of his eyes, eyes that used to light up when he saw any one of his girls come into a room. Always a believer in another world beyond this one, I saw for myself, in that very instant, that something separate from our skin and bones, something apart from our organs and tissue, makes us who we are. Call it spirit, call it soul, call it whatever you wish. Whatever it is, it no longer resided inside my father. Just like that.
Here’s the scene: I’m sitting next to my mother, who is 88 and lives in a “retirement community.” We’re watching a television show about Bernie Madoff, the disgraced/disgraceful financier who is now serving prison time for bilking investors out of millions of dollars. One of his fellow inmates says he thinks that life in the prison must be similar to living in an “old age home.” It’s one of the nicer joints, apparently, with holiday cookouts, flat screen tvs, and beautiful landscaping. Still, though, there are structured mealtimes, mandated check ins, and limited societal interactions that one associates with being locked up. This comparison is not lost on my precious mother, who winks at me and squeezes my hand.
I’ve got aging on the brain these days. It’s all I can think about, mine and my mother’s. I’ll soon be 49, and she’s 88. I’m obsessed with her well-being and her happiness. I don’t have children, so maybe this is sort of what being a parent feels like. I spend most of my waking hours, and I dare say a few of my sleeping ones, wondering what I can do to make sure she is happy, and safe, and cared for. She is in good shape, you know, “for someone her age.” She lives in a nice retirement community, has access to good medical care, and my two sisters live close by. I’m about 400 miles away and visit every six weeks or so. But it’s not enough, for me at least.
I find that I am ultra-sensitive to anything involving Mother. If you are too slow to respond to a need of hers at the doctor’s office. you’re likely to get my glare, which I’ve been told can be quite unsettling. If you express frustration in the time it takes Mother to decide what she’d like for lunch in a restaurant, I will be less likely to over tip. I love this woman with all my being, and I will do what I can to make sure she lives out the remainder of her days knowing she is adored.
When I visit her at the Happy Trails Retirement Utopia–not its real name–I see lots of things I’d rather not: elderly people eating alone in the cafe, hungry for nourishment that cannot be supplied by chicken salad; frail women climbing on to shuttle buses for the weekly grocery store run; and rows upon rows of walkers lined up outside the dining room because you’re not allowed to take them in with you. On my most recent visit, I had an encounter with a man who needed help on a computer. That’s all he needed, and yet he had to turn to me, a stranger, to get it. I wrote about it for Her Nashville, and you can read it here if you like.
I’m wondering why parents would chastise their children in public, for all those in line to renew our license plates to hear. As soon as the words were out of the father’s mouth, I saw the girl’s face crumple. He was unhappy with her performance in a softball game, and he let her know it in no uncertain terms. I wanted to hug the girl, tell her I bet she did the best she could and that her sandals were cute. Instead, I started thinking about how we speak to one another–in public and at home. How words do hurt. And really, how many of us have had to worry about sticks and stones? Read more of my latest post for Her Spirit here…
“He looks like Grandmother Wilson,” I said, remembering my paternal grandmother, who died in the early 1980s. 
Amy Lyles Wilson, M.A., M.T.S. | Writer, Story Coach, Spiritual Director 