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fivestage-blog · 8 years

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Grasping at Straws

For me, I knew the instant my mom rushed into the house with tears streaming down her face. For my sister, it took several minutes and an official announcement from my mother to get the message across.

(But I guess you can’t expect much from a second grader, right?)

I didn’t cry when I heard the news, not at least immediately. I had read a lot of Maximum Ride books, and would Maximum Ride cry in this situation? Hell no. But then my mom handed me a folded up sheet of printer paper, and when I had retreated to my room and read the single, posthumous letter from my father addressed only to me, that philosophy went out the window.

My mom wanted us to go to the hospital immediately so we could see my dad one last time before the funeral, but I didn’t want to go.

Again, the influence of literature was prevalent in my decision-making: I had read a book in which the protagonist’s grandfather had died, but the protagonist’s mother forbade her from seeing the grandfather’s body, because she “didn’t want to remember Grandpa like that.” I assumed this principle would apply in this situation, but my mom disagreed, insisting that if I didn’t go, I would regret it for the rest of my life. So we went.

We pulled into the parking lot, sniffling and silently cursing the beautiful, sunny day. I remember a happy mother and her son walked past us, and - I admit it - I saw red.

How dare they be happy when my dad had just died?

Immediately, this surge of anger was combatted with logic: how could they know my dad died? Does anyone immediately know when anybody dies? To everybody else in the world who doesn’t know anything, it’s just another clear, sunny day. Everyday somebody dies, but I am happy regardless.

Walking into the hospital, going up to my dad’s room; it was all a blur. I couldn’t see anything; my vision was blurred, out of focus, but acutely focused on the sharp reds and blues of nurse uniforms and hospital equipment that surrounded us. We were ushered through pale hallways - or maybe my mom just knew the way, I can’t remember. Nurses murmured to us about “therapy groups” and “grieving,” but I just nodded, held my head high, and struggled to reconcile myself with the fact that my dad was dead.

And then we got to his room. He looked very yellow and pale, I remember. Was it chemotherapy? Was it the infamous pallor of death? I don’t know.

His eyes weren’t completely closed. I could see a little bit of his eyeball underneath his eyelids; they were glassy. They didn’t even look like real eyes, to be honest.

Later, my mom would say that he had died in pain. I imagined him thrashing around on his hospital bed, doctors and nurses fluttering all around, trying to save his life, with my mother on the sidelines, tears threatening to roll down her cheeks, watching her husband die right in front of her eyes.

But right then he looked peaceful. He had that characteristic “I’m thinking about something stressful but I’m not going to say anything out loud” look on his face, but overall he was peaceful. But that probably was because he wasn’t breathing.

My mom begged us to touch our father’s hand one last time. I refused. He would be cold, I rationalized. My mother cried. His chest’s not cold, my mother said. I still refused. It was still a fucking cadaver.

My mom and sister reached out to my father and touched his arms and chest. I was surprised, somehow, when they met solid flesh. For some reason I had imagined dead bodies to collapse when you touched them, that maybe the soul inside had floated up and literally left the body an empty husk, or maybe something biological happened and left it empty. But it was solid. It was real. It was almost like he was alive.

I couldn’t watch. I looked at the equipment surrounding him, I looked at the window that opened out into the sunshine outside, anything but my father in his thin hospital gown. I noted that there was a linen basket near the door. Was that for when he accidentally defecated on his bedsheets? I saw switches and wires running along his bedframe. Were those connected to his lungs right before they failed him?

Sometime during our time with the body, my mom got a call from my elementary school. They wanted to know why I wasn’t there today. They had been calling for quite some time. My mom picked it up and composed herself long enough to say “Stephanie cannot come today. Her daddy just died.” And then she snapped it shut.

When we left, she whispered “I love you” to my father’s corpse and kissed him for the last time. It was a like a soap opera.

There was more after that: the doctor who came in and excitedly recognized me from a science competition I had participated in years prior before realizing the situation we were meeting in; the juice boxes my sister and I were given but we now felt too old for; the questions that came up during school on why I was gone for so long and how I had to tell them over and over again: “My dad died. My dad died. My dad died.”

But that's not important.

What was nice, though, was that my 4th grade teacher, Mr. Harper, gave me two silver locket necklaces: one for me and one for my sister, so we could always keep our father close to our hearts. And one of my best friends, Roya, got the whole class together to sign a big card for me, telling me how much they missed me and their condolences for my dad’s death. And two of my best friends, Lauren and Kelsci, came over to my house with a big casserole and we hung out for a while, too.

I kept Mr. Harper’s necklace and Roya’s card in a happy box, so whenever I felt sad I could just look at it and be happy. Which was often, because I kept on taking out my dad’s letter even though it made me cry and rereading it over and over again, trying to memorize the words, trying to figure out some secret meanings behind the hasty scribbles. I even tried to figure out what “pharmacy” meant at the bottom of the page. I knew what it was literally, but maybe it meant that I should go to a pharmacy and maybe my dad would be there, having faked his death, and we could bring him back home and everything would be normal from now on–

But no. I was just grasping at straws.

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