Discovery and Recovery

I mulled over that post about my dad a lot this last week.  It was all true.  But it wasn't complete.  Certainly there is the darkness that is the loss of him, but at the same time--even as it was happening--there are and were discoveries of hope, of light, and of love.  Without those the story is only half told. 

Death of a loved one is life at it's most dramatic.  For me, facing mortality had an incredibly clarifying effect.  In those moments when I had to look death in the eye and reliquish our beloved father, every peripheral, unimportant element of my life slipped away.  Things that I thought were important, things that I thought I wanted, suddenly weren't.  What I did for a living, the size of my home, the style of my car, who knows my name and who doesn't  just...didn't...matter.  What was left after the blazing heat of grief was the crystalized understanding that few things follow us into the life hereafter.  Love, faith, and the time spent with both are about all we get to take with us.

I was rehearsing the lead for a play in San Diego when I got the call that my dad was in a coma.  It was because of those rehearsals that I missed our last family gathering and my dad's 70th birthday.  I regret that.  I don't think it's coincidental that I haven't done much auditioning since.  I still love the theater, but it is not the pivot around which my life revolves.  I'd rather be with my kids.  I'd rather have the freedom to make the reunions and birthday parties.  I don't want that gypsy lifestyle.  I want roots and deep friendships.  They require time, and Daddy's passing taught me that time is a limited commodity, there's never as much of it as we would like to think, and I need to be thoughtful about how I spend it.

When I got the second call 24 hours later reporting that Dad's condition had not improved as they had hoped, that things looked darkly inevitable, my husband was 90 miles away.  Or rather, I was away from him, but I needed him.  Immediately.  Thomas told me long ago that I'm a girl that needs a wide berth.  That I don't like being held too tightly, and I suppose that's true, but when things fell apart for me, when I was confused, heartbroken, and lost, I needed him to cling to.  What a felicitous discovery to find that the one person I chose to spend my life with is truly the one person whom I need.  And because I needed him, he flew to my side and held me together. That is a moment that cemented and sanctified our marriage.  My rock.

The plane ride home was miserable.  There were still a lot of unknowns at the time, but words like "brain-damage" and "vegetative state" were being thrown around.  I felt undone in a way that I had never experienced before.  Someone from the family, I didn't know whom exactly, was going to pick me up from the airport, and I worried that I would fall apart when I saw them.  That when I saw their identical broken heart,  my own, which I was barely holding together, would tumble out in gasping shards.  I came down the escalator to find two of my older brothers waiting for me.  As I met their eyes, in that very moment I had dreaded, I was surprisingly lifted up.  I felt stronger, more understood, more myself with them at my side.  This blessing of family that I had always appreciated held new significance.  It was now a necessity.  It was my safe harbor, and it would see me home.

At some point in the days spent in the hospital, it became clear that my father was not going to return to us.  The he that he had been was already gone.  Then we had the awful decision to make regarding life support.  Mom and the seven of us, her children, sought out a quiet room, and we knelt in prayer, each of us taking a turn to pour out our hearts aloud to God, to seek His will.  It was a significant moment for me--for all of us--and when we were done, we knew what we had to do.  However, His peace had settled on our hearts and we were unified in spirit.  Never before had faith meant so much to me.  Perhaps it is only in the darkness that we can clearly perceive its brilliancy.  Without its guiding light, I do not know how I would have found my way through the grief and come out on the other side intact.  But I did.  Not only did I come out intact, I think I came out better than when I went in.

Death is the great unknown, but I agree with the author who said it is like a ship passing beyond the horizon simply out of our sight.  Somewhere I'm out on that wide ocean myself, captaining my own little skiff.  My father's life charted my course in childhood, but it was his death that pointed me in the right direction in adulthood.  In the loss, I more fully discovered who I want to be and where I want to go.  Discovering the light in the darkness is not just the rest of the story, it is the only thing that gives the story any meaning at all.