One time when I didn't listen to my intuition still haunts me. My dad had undergone triple bypass surgery in 2002 and never regained consciousness afterwards. For a long and unbelievably painful month, my mother, brother and I waited for him to "wake up" while all his systems were shutting down one by one. After consulting with a battery of doctors, we finally had to face the undeniable fact that it was time to let him go. We did it in the most humane way possible, by stopping his daily dialysis and letting the toxins build up in his system so that he would "float away" painlessly to his death.
During this excruciating month, I was occasionally making trips back home to Georgia for various reasons. I had gone home to attend my daughter's honors assembly at school when I received a call from my brother that my dad was near death and would probably go within the next 24 hours. If I wanted to see him one last time, I needed to head back to Florida. I left immediately and drove those 300+ miles like a madwoman. I remember there was construction on the interstate and it was shut down to one lane with bumper-to-bumper traffic. I got over on the dirt shoulder and passed all the traffic for miles. Lots of people honked; some angry drivers gave me the finger. I didn't care. I kept going. It all seemed so surreal.
My dad was still alive when I finally got to the Orlando hospital and I sat with him for a couple of hours. Occasionally I talked, assuring him that it was OK for him to let go, that my mother had lots of people to look after her. I told him that I'd miss him but knew he would always be my guardian angel. Other times I sat in silence, just holding his hand and rubbing his thumb. A nurse came into the room periodically, checking on me and asking if I was OK. "Not really," I answered honestly. He nodded and told me he was sorry. An Hispanic cleaning lady came into the room and looked at me with big, brown sympathetic eyes. "Your daddy?" she asked in a heavy accent. I suddenly felt like a little girl again, and could only trust myself to nod my head. She came over and gave me a big hug. Such a sweet lady.
I decided to go out into the hallway and call my mother, to let her know I was back in Orlando and I was planning on staying with my dad while he passed away. Her voice was full of heavy worry and stress as she requested that I please leave the hospital and come to her house instead. "You don't know how long you'll be there by yourself. That hospital is in a bad part of town. I don't like that you'll be leaving there on your own, maybe in the middle of the night." I really wanted to stay with all my heart. I could have explained that I felt compelled to stay with dad. I could have promised that I'd get a security guard to walk me out when the time came. I might have asked to speak to my brother, and gotten him to help convince my mom that it was better for me to stay put. But how could I add more stress to a woman who was already at her breaking point? A woman who had already lost most of her eyesight, and was now not only losing her husband of 53 years, but her alternate pair of eyes?
Tears gathered in a big lump in my throat, where some of them still hide. I left without going back into my dad's room again. I'd already been saying goodbye for two hours and I just couldn't bear to say it for the final time. I didn't permit myself to look back. Against my gut instincts, I left him to die alone--a man so afraid of dying that he refused to make any burial plans with my mom, or to talk about death in any capacity. We got the call that he passed away about four hours later, a minute before midnight.
Recently my mom told me that her one big regret was that she let my dad die alone. I'm glad she couldn't see my face as I listened to her. I kept my voice steady as I comforted her by saying that we had all done our very best at a time when we were heartbroken and grieving. Now if I can only believe my own words and forgive myself.
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