Back in October of 2016, we had some warning about my dad, three days or so of his health changing again, but clearly the end was somewhere near. I had always imagined I would fall to the ground or throw something breakable, but I was denied an immediate reaction because I had to keep my sister focused on driving safely over the phone when the day came. Her phone had died overnight and she woke up and plugged it in. Almost immediately she saw the messages asking her to come to see our dad right away, but it was too late. He was alive when she left the house, gone by the time she got there.
What followed was three days of me being lost in a dizzy fog, not eating and crying in fits, and watching the final two movies in the Harry Potter series. The sadness of saying goodbye to those characters somehow mixed in with the displacement of having lost my dad. I eventually went back to work to encounter mixed reactions. Most offered condolences. One offered a cheap shot at a part of my job that he covered. Another expressed concern but started digging and asking questions in an attempt to get me to break down. The girl I was into at the time had ghosted me for two weeks (she often disappeared on my birthday) contacted me and wanted to go get coffee; as we sat outside, she was perpetually glued to her phone and not concerned about me. In the silence, I sorted through my feelings and started to break down in public, and she, not looking up from her phone, put one hand on my back. It felt gross, so I stuffed that shit back inside and finished our coffee session. All this happened the weekend some friends took me out drinking for my birthday and had conspired to get me heavily drunk (which was a problem that year because I had dealt with four other deaths), and I ended up being violently ill for half the weekend. When I returned to work, I received some space and emotional support, but nobody helped me with the workload during an unusually busy time, and I ended up working 36 straight days, at least 25 of which were 12 hour days.
That was the experience with dad, and my mom was in the bed next to his at their assisted living home, but thanks to Alzheimer’s, she didn’t know anything had happened. He died on October 15th, at 10:15am. That’s right: 10:15 on 10/15
My mother was a slow fade and once again we got some warning, but this time we had time with her, if only a few hours. It was early on Sunday, November 3rd, and I was on the phone with my two sisters in the room with her. She was unresponsive but we all talked to her, telling her we loved her. My oldest sister wasn’t saying anything that made sense, and I kept asking for descriptions of how she looked, what she was doing. A significant moment came when my middle sister was able to say what she never thought she would have the strength to say: she said “You’ve done enough. It’s okay to go. We’ll be fine. You can go be with dad.” We didn’t know what she was holding on for, but it finally felt necessary to give her permission to go.
It wasn’t until my older sister had to leave to get a sweater and her meds that my mom had changed. Slow, quiet breathing became 2-3 sips of air at a time, which became more shallow, and then it stopped. I will never forget hearing my sister come close to the phone, which was sitting on my mom’s chest, and she said “hold on, I think she’s gone. I think this is it.” She talked to the nurse in the room, who listened with a stethoscope for a heartbeat, and she said it was very faint. A moment later it stopped. A quiet moment at the end of a long life.
I was sitting at the edge of my couch and realized I was holding my breath. My sister said she had to hang up so she could call our other sister. As soon as we hung up, I can’t even describe to you how hard I cried. I just surrendered to it, convulsing, catching my breath, grabbing a couch pillow and letting out a noise that I never allowed myself to make when dad died. It felt like I was pushing the emotion out of me but it was bottomless, a break in a dam. I was at once an adult dealing with grief and a child overwhelmed with abandonment. As soon as I could stand and balance I washed my face in the bathroom and got the call back from my sister. We talked for another few hours and then had to move on.
I was dizzy and unbalanced as I staggered over to Burger King, because I hadn’t eaten that day, and the only thing that kept me intact and functioning was my favorite podcast, Never Not Funny. I will never forget that dizzy , floating feeling. I’ll never forget sitting quietly in my apartment, spending the rest of the week going through old family photos. A little over a month later, we put her ashes with my dad, and the two were reunited.
I protected myself this time from people who would try to take advantage or would cause me harm. Three and a half months later, the pandemic shut everything down.
I still talk to them and remember random details, the sound of my mom’s breathing when she would take a mid-day nap, my dad’s rough hands, my mom’s handwriting, my dad’s snoring, which scared his roommates in Atlanta when he worked for Delta airlines.
I look at family photos now and see a long history represented in moments with huge gaps in memory between them. It erases any sense of envy for anyone else’s life and raises the bar for things that upset me. All of this also really puts my life in perspective - what’s in my past and what’s in my future - but more so it defines who I was when I was a kid, who I was as a young adult, who I was when my parents were alive, and who I am now.
I know they’re still with me. I haven’t dreamed about them since then and wish every morning that I had, but I don’t feel alone. The worst thing ever was feeling completely isolated in the company of others, and I haven’t put myself in that situation again. I feel stronger for it, and acknowledge this perspective as a gift from my parents.
I hope they are together, enjoying a second honeymoon and occasionally tuning into the story of our lives. I want to give them a good story, and a good ending before I see them again.
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