"...think the dancer mad.": A Fatherless Child's Tale

Gentle flakes of snow swirled and danced around the drab building on that chilly January morning. Cars rumbled down Harrington Boulevard, nothing amiss; it was just another typical Saturday. But not for the small, close-knit family huddled together in that dimly lit room on the fifth floor of the hospital. Life continued on outside those walls...but a life was slowly fading on the inside...

It couldn't have been real. And so soon. Just a few short hours before, she had taken a shaky hand and signed that hospice paper. Every second, before her pen touched that dotted line, she willed that her other brother would walk back in the room to sign it in her place. She was literally signing her father's life away. And now, just a few aching minutes after eleven in the morning, she watched as his frail chest rose ever-so-slightly under that loose hospital gown...listened as each of his shallow breaths grew farther and farther apart...and felt time stand still while her mind still blurred and reeled with a thousand unending thoughts.

She saw herself, 4 years old again, standing in the middle of the living room, baby doll in one hand, a plastic tea cup in the other. Before her stood a child-size, plastic ironing board, which she thought made a better table. Two tiny plastic plates sat on the ironing board, and her dad walked in with two steamy sausage patties, which he placed on each plate. They each pulled up a make-shift chair, and together, father and daughter embarked on one of their favorite pastimes. A Sausage Patty Party. For the two of them, regular ol' tea parties were highly overrated...

Now she was 7. Wrench in hand, she climbed the crisp, white stairs up to the pool deck. For her, summer truly began when it was time to help put the ladder into the swimming pool. She gently placed the wrench on the nut and washer that held the ladder in place. Calling down below to him to assure him she was ready for his instruction, she waited patiently for the sound of the rachet and the feel of her wrench being pushed against metal as the ladder tightened into place. Nothing feels greater than helping your daddy with a "very important" project...

She was 10...Christmas morning. Bounding down the hallway toward the living room, she proudly announced, "I'm double digits now!" Oh, how her dad laughed. Laughed and laughed. She could barely remember a time that she had made her dad laugh by something she said. In this moment, how clever he thought she was. How happy that made her to know that her childish wit had brought such a joy to her father...

A 15-year-old nervous wreck--hands at 10&2 on the steering wheel--sat in the driver's seat of that old Ford Tempo. She slowly pulled up to a stoplight, her ear's trying to block out the sound of her mother's fretful breathing and frantic foot-stomping on the imaginary break in the backseat. As the turn was made and the stoplight left in the background, her father, quiet and wise, merely said, "Do you know what you did wrong?" With her eyes suddenly wide, she said frantically, "No! What?!" With an almost unnoticeable smirk, he said, "You ran that red light." Had he not been so nonchalant, she (and probably her frenzied mother in the backseat) would probably have passed out. He had a way of being on even keel like that...

She was 17 that summer, just back from a mission trip to a tropical island. She patiently awaited the arrival of her parents to collect her and drive her 9 hours back to their home. They pulled up in the parking lot, and she ran out to greet them, anxious to tell them all about her experiences. The first one out of the car was her father, his salt-and-pepper hair waving in the warm Nashville breeze. He wiped away tears from his eyes as he embraced her. She was pretty certain she had absolutely never seen her dad cry. Wow...he must have really missed her a whole lot... She didn't always think of herself as "daddy's little girl". But in that moment, she realized she was...had always been...and would always be...

Now here she stood in this hospital room; 26 year's old, but feeling very much like a tiny, lost child. For the past few days, although surrounded by family and a wonderful, dear friend, she had felt very lost and quite helpless. Three nights ago, she had sat, sobbing, in the walk-in closet of another sweet friend's apartment, more than 500 miles away from this wretched hospital room. Her hands had shook as she tried to grip her cell phone that night, while her chestnut-haired friend draped a loving arm around her shoulder. "My dad isn't doing well at all. My brother said if he were me, he would come home tonight. They are gonna buy me a plane ticket," she gasped between sobs. Taking charge, her friend jumped up, offering a ride to the airport and a pick of any articles of clothing from the closet for the the trip ahead. Numb, but grateful, she rummaged through the clothes and grabbed a few items. Coincidentally that morning before heading into work, she'd grabbed her backpack with a change of clothes and her cell phone charger to spend the evening with her friend. No, not coincidentally. God had orchestrated that. He knew she wouldn't be returning to her own apartment that night.

The almost empty plane that late evening was ridden with mixed emotions. She was glad it was taking her to see her family. But angry at the reason. This only happened to other people. Only other people lost their fathers to cancer. Sometimes she was hopeful...her father wasn't really going to die. He was in the hospital, but just for another routine IV or port cleaning or something like that. By Sunday, she'd be in a plane again heading back to Nashville while her father went home to their house. But then she would realize that perhaps that hope was just denial. Her brother wouldn't have been so adamant that she come home if he hadn't believed it would be the last time they would see their daddy. She pulled out the only other *random* (but perhaps not so random) item she had packed in her backpack that morning...her blue-bound Bible. For whatever reason, she turned to Romans chapter 5 and read. A verse jumped off the delicate page at her like a hand off a hot stove, and after she read it, in a shaky hand she underlined it as tears began to fall again. "...and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us." She gently wrote the date, 1/6/2010 next to the verse and in parenthesis wrote the sweet name "Pop-o". She was probably one of the only girls around who didn't call her father "dad" or "daddy"...and that suited both of them just fine.

Relief set in that night after she arrived at the hospital and saw his weakly smiling face. He's ok for the moment she thought to herself. But he didn't really *look* ok. He looked tired, worn, weak. Sick. But at least she saw his face, heard his raspy, quiet voice. At least she hugged him and felt a feeble arm attempt to hug her back. A fitful night of sleep overtook her as she tried to rest on the blue vinyl chair in his hospital room. At some point the next day, she drove her mom's car home by herself so she could shower and change into borrowed clothes. She stepped into the empty house and made her way down the hallway to her parents' bedroom. Her father's unmade side of the bed--where he had slept and grown sicker and weaker over the past couple of months--called to her. Like an infant, she curled into the fetal position in his spot...and wept.

How could it be that just two short days later, she stood, weeping again, in his hospital room, watching him take his final breaths? How could it be that just a few short hours ago her family had placed him in hospice care? Why was he dying so soon? At that moment, she hated hospice. She hated cancer. She hated the ugly pneumonia in her father's exhausted lungs. She had hated the breathing machine in his nose. Now she hated that it wasn't there anymore, helping him breath. She hated that in the last day or so he hadn't been awake enough to talk or even make eye contact. She hated that one of her brothers had been in the room the night before and got to see their father wake up for a moment and acknowledge what was going on. And now she hated to see her mother, weeping, crawling into the tiny hospital bed, trying to curl up next to the man she had loved and been married to for the past 47 years. It was all too much. And just as her heart was about to burst out of her chest, she agonizingly watched as one last shallow gasp of air escaped his lips. Her knees gave away, a "No!' flew out of her mouth with a barrage of sobs, and she crumpled into a heap on the cold tiled floor. In a flash, her two older brothers were on each side of her, holding her, crying with her. She didn't care then--she only cared that she was now fatherless--but looking back, oh how grateful she was that they had been there...

*****

Have three years really gone by since that day? It doesn't seem possible. But it's true. Sometimes she still cries for him. And she misses him. Dearly. But she remembers that night on the plane...the verse in Romans that sprang off the page at her. And she has hope. Hope that she will see her father again someday. Why? Because a day before he took his last breath, she learned that he had made the only decision that would usher him into the gates of heaven when he moved on from this life. A decision that she (and many) had prayed her whole lifetime that he would make. She also has hope that life here continues on. That it is good. And beautiful. She has experienced the pain of a lost loved one, but she also knows the joy of new lives born, new families made, new adventures to experience. She knows the love of family and friends. The mercy and grace of her heavenly Father. As well as the memories of her earthly father. Sweet, lovely memories that she will cherish forever. How she wished her father had been there to walk her down the aisle on her wedding day, that he had been there to dance with her on the wooden dance floor. But how thankful she was that her amazing brothers, whom her father lives on through, were there that day to do what he was unable to do. She looks at her mother, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews and knows that her father lives on through all 10 of them...no, all 11 of them, including herself. She looks in the mirror and sees her dad's nose and the dark circles under his eyes. And yes, she misses him...oh how she misses him...but she knows she will see him again.