(no subject)
Here's another installment of what happened the day my dad died. For a refresher, here is the last entry about it: http://laurielou862.livejournal.com/73069.html?view=356973#t356973
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As I made my way into the mourning room where my mom was I felt a change come over me. It was as if I had become the mother, and I felt my face soften and a little bit of tension leave my body; I had slipped into care mode. The room was crowded with chairs. I was almost completely distracted for a moment, realizing that no matter what happened in my life now, my physical disability and wheelchair would not leave me, and would have to be dealt with come hell or high water. My uncle and the pastor who was there scrambled around to help me get in the room. I finally got to my mom and put my arms around her. I felt my face contort, and my eyes rolled up to the ceiling, wanting to roll all the way back into my head, I felt my brain wanting to black out; then it passed, and the pastor was there. My mom and I let each other go, and I said something intense and amusing that I can’t remember now, but I do remember my mom saying proudly to the pastor, “My daughter can say things that make me laugh and cry at the same time.”
The three of us sat in a circle, and my mom asked me if I wanted to say a prayer for my dad. I could come up with nothing, and the absence of words in my mouth shocked me. I said that I didn’t know what to say, and then the pastor said a generic prayer with us. After the prayer was done, my mom began to tell me her experience.
She was in the shower when he called her, telling her he was going to the hospital with chest pains, but not to worry or rush. So she rushed worriedly to the phone and tried to call him, with no answer. She threw some clothes on and got in her car and on the road, right behind a slow-moving camper. She couldn’t get around it. He called her again, from the hospital phone. That phone call was the one where she said she “heard the fear in his voice”. I tried to imagine it, but honestly I have never heard real fear in my dad’s voice. The closest thing I could come to picturing it was imagining what his voice might have sounded like as he sat near my ICU room and cursed God for me becoming paralyzed. What it might have sounded like when my mother was giving birth to my brother and I. I suddenly remembered a story my dad had told at the dinner table.
I was about eleven years old. He was talking about a guy he had hired to work for him; construction workers are some of the people around here that are addicted to meth, and apparently this guy was on it and he decided that he wanted to fight someone. My dad got in between the two men and tried to break it up, then the guy who was high turned on my dad. I remember him saying that he thought that the guy was going to kick his ass, and at first I thought he was joking - my dad was always cracking jokes. But then I realized he was serious, and the next thing I felt was confusion, because I could not imagine my dad being beaten by anyone - I mean, he was huge! He could pick me up like I was nothing, and he had big muscles! My dad, at risk of getting hurt by someone? I didn’t believe it at first. After I processed that for a few days, I began to look at my dad in comparison to other men. I discovered that he was short for a man, about 5’8”, the same height as my mom. I saw the lines on his face. And I finally accepted the fact of my dad’s limitations - my dad was not superman, not invincible. I remember feeling fear for him, for the first time. I didn’t want anyone to hurt my dad.
In the mourning room, my mom was saying that she had ran into the emergency room and tried to get to his bedside, but the room he was in was packed with fifteen or so doctors and nurses, working frantically. They told my mom that my dad would not know she was there because he was not conscious. She saw a nurse straddling his chest, desperately trying to compress his heart into a regular beat. My mom’s knees buckled, and two nurses on either side of her held her up. After about fifteen minutes the cardiologist came to my mother and asked her if she would give them permission to stop. She said nothing, just staggered over to the mourning room and collapsed into tears. The doctors and nurses had tried for a full forty minutes to cajole my dad’s heart into a regular beat, but instead it insisted on moving wildly, dancing to the unknown and alien rhythm of death. If they had gotten some sort of regular beating out of it then they could have attempted emergency bypass surgery. But it seemed his heart was not interested in being cut into anymore.
“The nurses have asked if you guys wanted to see the body,” my uncle Jim said, coming back into the mourning room. “But I don’t know if you want to do that, because they had to do things to him, and he’s not going to look like the person you remember. I don’t know if you want that to be your last picture of him.”
My mom and I agreed; just hearing the phrase “they had to do things to him” made my world teeter a bit. So we sat. My mom told me her experience about three more times; in the coming weeks I would hear it a few more times, and at those times I would feel mildly shocked by her candor with me, by the way she would hide nothing; no emotion was blunted.
After either a few hours or a few minutes my uncle left the room, came back in and said, “If you guys want to go in there, I’ve pulled the sheet up over his face - that way you can be near him if you want.” My mom and I agreed that that would be alright, perhaps it wouldn’t be as traumatizing that way. My uncle led us out of the room and to the curtain that the hospital bed was behind. The curtain was pulled back so we could enter.
Suddenly my wheels stopped. My hands froze, there was a ball in the middle of my chest that was being tugged at from behind, trying to prevent me from going in there. There was a dead body in there. I had never seen one before. I absolutely froze. Frozen in time. Frozen in my life that had not seen his body; if I took one more step, I would then be on the other side of that not-seeing-his-body. And the only way that ball in my chest would let me go was if I made the decision to move forward. I was crushed under the fact that I had to decide to go in - the decision could not be made for me. My uncle and mom stopped, because they realized I had fallen behind. My uncle asked me what was the matter. All I could do was put my hand to my mouth and shake my head. He came back to where I was and asked me if I was going to be alright, doing this. I knew only two things at that moment: that I could not move forward, and that I absolutely had to.
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As I made my way into the mourning room where my mom was I felt a change come over me. It was as if I had become the mother, and I felt my face soften and a little bit of tension leave my body; I had slipped into care mode. The room was crowded with chairs. I was almost completely distracted for a moment, realizing that no matter what happened in my life now, my physical disability and wheelchair would not leave me, and would have to be dealt with come hell or high water. My uncle and the pastor who was there scrambled around to help me get in the room. I finally got to my mom and put my arms around her. I felt my face contort, and my eyes rolled up to the ceiling, wanting to roll all the way back into my head, I felt my brain wanting to black out; then it passed, and the pastor was there. My mom and I let each other go, and I said something intense and amusing that I can’t remember now, but I do remember my mom saying proudly to the pastor, “My daughter can say things that make me laugh and cry at the same time.”
The three of us sat in a circle, and my mom asked me if I wanted to say a prayer for my dad. I could come up with nothing, and the absence of words in my mouth shocked me. I said that I didn’t know what to say, and then the pastor said a generic prayer with us. After the prayer was done, my mom began to tell me her experience.
She was in the shower when he called her, telling her he was going to the hospital with chest pains, but not to worry or rush. So she rushed worriedly to the phone and tried to call him, with no answer. She threw some clothes on and got in her car and on the road, right behind a slow-moving camper. She couldn’t get around it. He called her again, from the hospital phone. That phone call was the one where she said she “heard the fear in his voice”. I tried to imagine it, but honestly I have never heard real fear in my dad’s voice. The closest thing I could come to picturing it was imagining what his voice might have sounded like as he sat near my ICU room and cursed God for me becoming paralyzed. What it might have sounded like when my mother was giving birth to my brother and I. I suddenly remembered a story my dad had told at the dinner table.
I was about eleven years old. He was talking about a guy he had hired to work for him; construction workers are some of the people around here that are addicted to meth, and apparently this guy was on it and he decided that he wanted to fight someone. My dad got in between the two men and tried to break it up, then the guy who was high turned on my dad. I remember him saying that he thought that the guy was going to kick his ass, and at first I thought he was joking - my dad was always cracking jokes. But then I realized he was serious, and the next thing I felt was confusion, because I could not imagine my dad being beaten by anyone - I mean, he was huge! He could pick me up like I was nothing, and he had big muscles! My dad, at risk of getting hurt by someone? I didn’t believe it at first. After I processed that for a few days, I began to look at my dad in comparison to other men. I discovered that he was short for a man, about 5’8”, the same height as my mom. I saw the lines on his face. And I finally accepted the fact of my dad’s limitations - my dad was not superman, not invincible. I remember feeling fear for him, for the first time. I didn’t want anyone to hurt my dad.
In the mourning room, my mom was saying that she had ran into the emergency room and tried to get to his bedside, but the room he was in was packed with fifteen or so doctors and nurses, working frantically. They told my mom that my dad would not know she was there because he was not conscious. She saw a nurse straddling his chest, desperately trying to compress his heart into a regular beat. My mom’s knees buckled, and two nurses on either side of her held her up. After about fifteen minutes the cardiologist came to my mother and asked her if she would give them permission to stop. She said nothing, just staggered over to the mourning room and collapsed into tears. The doctors and nurses had tried for a full forty minutes to cajole my dad’s heart into a regular beat, but instead it insisted on moving wildly, dancing to the unknown and alien rhythm of death. If they had gotten some sort of regular beating out of it then they could have attempted emergency bypass surgery. But it seemed his heart was not interested in being cut into anymore.
“The nurses have asked if you guys wanted to see the body,” my uncle Jim said, coming back into the mourning room. “But I don’t know if you want to do that, because they had to do things to him, and he’s not going to look like the person you remember. I don’t know if you want that to be your last picture of him.”
My mom and I agreed; just hearing the phrase “they had to do things to him” made my world teeter a bit. So we sat. My mom told me her experience about three more times; in the coming weeks I would hear it a few more times, and at those times I would feel mildly shocked by her candor with me, by the way she would hide nothing; no emotion was blunted.
After either a few hours or a few minutes my uncle left the room, came back in and said, “If you guys want to go in there, I’ve pulled the sheet up over his face - that way you can be near him if you want.” My mom and I agreed that that would be alright, perhaps it wouldn’t be as traumatizing that way. My uncle led us out of the room and to the curtain that the hospital bed was behind. The curtain was pulled back so we could enter.
Suddenly my wheels stopped. My hands froze, there was a ball in the middle of my chest that was being tugged at from behind, trying to prevent me from going in there. There was a dead body in there. I had never seen one before. I absolutely froze. Frozen in time. Frozen in my life that had not seen his body; if I took one more step, I would then be on the other side of that not-seeing-his-body. And the only way that ball in my chest would let me go was if I made the decision to move forward. I was crushed under the fact that I had to decide to go in - the decision could not be made for me. My uncle and mom stopped, because they realized I had fallen behind. My uncle asked me what was the matter. All I could do was put my hand to my mouth and shake my head. He came back to where I was and asked me if I was going to be alright, doing this. I knew only two things at that moment: that I could not move forward, and that I absolutely had to.