Stranger Than Fiction

Four years ago today my father died.

I remember the day well. It was a Friday. C was just recovering and doing great, though still moody from the drug withdrawal and he tired easily. M was needy for Mommy time and attention. It was a teacher workday, so no school. I had just started back to my regular schedule at work that week. We went into the city to see a museum for an hour or so, meet up with Daddy, then out to dinner (Italian) with in-laws for their son’s first birthday. We also stopped by the PICU so the dear staff could see how well C was improving. Just a month earlier, he couldn’t walk because he was so weak. It was just over a week until our first fundraising walk for the hospital.

We arrived home around bedtime and carried the boys into their beds. The phone rang. It was my brother.

My brother never calls. Never. In the nanosecond I first heard his voice, I knew.

I remember feeling overwhelmingly sad. It was at that moment that the door closed forever on the last bits of childhood. The first man to love me unconditionally was gone.

When my brother was telling me what I already knew in my heart, I thought about the events of the previous two months. Just two months earlier, on my father’s 78^th birthday, I called, I sent something, and a realized – rather with a shock – that he could go at any time. Any time. I remember the jolt of the feeling, and wondering why this realization was coming now.

In the weeks after that realization, C became so sick. My sister went to try to tell Dad what was happening, but with all his complications and meds, we don’t quite know what he understood and what he didn’t. When he died, I had just resumed writing my weekly letters to him. I don’t know if he ever received the last one I sent.

I have so many emotions around my father’s prolonged illness and death and the memorial service, and still a lot of anger. The hours and days that followed were such a mess.

You see, my father’s wife knew he was dying. She knew he was near the end, and did not call his children. We would have come in a heartbeat. My brother and sister were hours away by car, and I would have flown out as quickly as I could, within a day. She wasn’t even with him. She had stopped by briefly early in the day – and I emphasize briefly – to the home nursing center she had placed him in and left again. The nurse there tended to him as best she could, but she had others to tend to as well. He died alone.

We made it out a few days later. I can’t write much about what happened. It’s still hard, and, in some ways, not appropriate to get into here. The Internet is wonderfully anonymous and not at all anonymous all at once and I just don’t want to commit fully to stepping down that potentially ugly path. Without details, I can tell you there was the wife – not my mother, a semi-literate, probably intoxicated aunt, a cousin who claimed to know my father better than I did, a child none of us had ever seen being called a grandchild (related to the wife), a bagpiper playing (beautifully, as much as it can be a cliché) “Amazing Grace,” a kind pastor, a couple of confused police officers, family friends and former colleagues watching the scene with dismay, and my brother, sister, and me with our heads held high, mourning our father with as much dignity as we could muster (a lot), thinking about what he would have wanted - even as a good deal of shit was thrown our way and we were specifically not invited to the reception after the memorial service (at the aunt’s house).

It was exhausting, on so many levels. And not what my father wanted, for any one.

I stepped on a plane in the late afternoon after my father’s memorial service to fly far away from that old life of mine and back to what is now my home – but only after taking out my week of pain on an unsuspecting gate agent. You see, the governor had instructed that state flags were to be at half-mast to honor my father and a fallen police officer. The state flags at the airport weren’t, so I let him know they needed to be. Now.

We stepped off the plane in the wee hours and made our way to our own home and our beds. Four hours later, we rose to shrill alarms and a nor’easter outside. It was time to go out for our first fundraising walk for the hospital.

It seemed like the sky was wailing with me that day. Roaring and crying all the hurt and fear and sadness I felt inside, from C’s illness, from my father’s illness and death. I don’t really remember walking the walk that day, that first year, but we did. Because sometimes you just have to keep going. In spite of everything.