Father's Day Card

(Please be advised that this story contains topics that may be harmful or triggering to those who are affected by loss, grief, mental health, mentions of suicide and hospitalizations. Proceed with caution.)

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get you a Father’s Day card this year.”

When I said this to my father, back in June of 2019, I felt nothing but disappointed in myself. I had been so busy as a nineteen-year-old college student, navigating the financial aid office of the local community college that it had completely slipped my mind. My mother wasn’t well enough at the time to get it for him, her eyes were going, and we couldn’t let her drive. My younger sister had just finished her senior year of high school and needed some support. I was busy helping her navigate through selecting her classes to join me at college the upcoming fall.

Something as simple as a Father’s Day card wasn’t on my list of priorities and my father shook it off, saying that the presents we got him, some white shirts and socks, were all that he needed.

Little did I know that I would regret that forgotten card for the rest of my life.

My father was sick, really sick, from the middle of 2018 until August of 2019. It started off with me taking him to the emergency room, and he put up the fight that any immigrant provider with a family of four would when someone is worried about them and "I just want to get you checked out" after he was let go from the mechanic shop he worked at for over fifteen years. He couldn't move a tire, much less work on a car, and his bosses called my mother and told her that they couldn't bear to see him like this, then sent him home.

I remember sitting in a chair in the corner of the sterile emergency room as my father laid in the bed, frustrated and uncomfortable regardless of how kind and attentive the nurses were. I was in school to get my degree in criminal justice to become a cop or start a fast-track degree to becoming a paramedic. I wasn’t sure just yet, so I was chatting with everyone, and they were happy to answer my questions outside of my dad’s condition. The atmosphere was tense, yes, but I tried to lighten it where I could. I don’t know if it was just my anxiety or my people-pleasing tendencies to provide everyone around me with comfort. I even made jokes with my father about how good he looked in the gown they put him in. He wasn't amused by it but I saw him hiding a smile.

When the doctor came in and read the results that my father’s white blood cell count was “astronomically high” and my father and I met eyes, I felt the beginnings of dread settling into my chest, in my stomach and ribs. My father, confused, asked me if that was a good thing and I let out a long-suffering sigh and told him that it was not.

Watching my father change from being a healthy man, or as healthy as you could get while smoking cheap cigarettes and being an alcoholic, to dropping dangerous amounts of weight and struggling to walk around our house was painful and terrifying. He was sick and the emergency room visit proved nothing other than an infection that the doctors and nurses had no idea where it was coming from, so they sent him home with antibiotics. My father chose not to go to any more doctors and with his stubborn personality, we did not push him. I knew something was wrong, but I knew better than to pry too hard or else he would shut down completely.

I took the role of provider in mid-2018, being the eldest daughter and scrounging every penny from my waitress job to keep our lights on, water running, and the mortgage paid. We had government assistance to a certain degree, so I supplemented what I could while still going to college and making sure my sister could afford prom, the senior trip, and weekly allowances until she graduated. My mother’s health had taken a turn, with needing a triple-bypass open heart surgery on the day of my sister’s graduation, in addition to her dialysis treatments three times a week and her macular degeneration.

I still had my father, though. He was at home that entire time from mid-2018 until August of 2019. He had quit drinking and smoking because he was so frail, but it was peaceful knowing I could come home to my full family, not having to wait for my sister to come home from school or my dad to come home from the shop after a long day. Despite their conditions, my parents were happy and spent hours upon hours talking to each other about everything. My sister and I fell asleep most nights listening to their quiet voices, an occasional cough, and someone scolding the other about a fart or a stolen blanket. It was genuinely the most peaceful and stressful time of my life.

Then, he died.

My father had, a little less than two weeks prior to his passing, suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm and underwent brain surgery. I drove my mother to her dialysis appointment the raced to the hospital with my sister after the ambulance took him from his bed. I covered her eyes and ears as I watched as he struggled to breathe mid-sentence to us and then he was intubated, and tubes and wires were connected to him. They rushed him off somewhere, I wasn't in the right mind to ask where. I sat in the waiting room of the hospital, alone, for hours during his first surgery while my mother was at her appointment and my sister had been picked up by a friend so she could get some food and coffee for us.

I didn't want to move. Everything in my head was so loud and so quiet all at once. I was terrified and calm at the same time, reminding myself that I have always been prepared for this. I have always been prepared to take over, that's how I was raised as one of the oldest.

I just didn't expect it all to happen when I was nineteen.

He had an infection in his heart and after the second surgery, the doctors no longer found it safe to operate on him. They were worried the infection would spread to his brain and take him completely from us. We knew of his heart issues, my father always said he had "something with his heart" from childhood but growing up in Trinidad in the 1960s, I don’t think he really thought to get it checked out. Even when he came to the United States in the eighties, it wasn’t on his list of priorities.

We were devastated. My mother was broken, her heart was lying in that ICU bed. She was a tiny blind woman who was deathly sick about to lose her husband and best friend, and I just tried to keep it together for her and my younger sister who had only graduated high school barely three months ago. The decision to put him into hospice was hard and ultimately, we did it because his quality of life if he recovered would be miserable. My father always asked to be let go if he ever "became a vegetable" and we obliged.

I sat in the ICU with him, one afternoon before we signed the DNR and papers, and my mother and younger sister were out in the hallway. I just started to sing for him. All I could think of was “You Are My Sunshine” and my voice was quiet and shaky. I tried to make my voice loud enough that he could hear me, but my throat was so closed up with all the tears.

He had always loved to hear me sing, playing the credits over and over to movies I loved as a kid just so he could shout "sing it!" I don't know what possessed me to sing for him, but I knew in my heart I had to, whether it was closure for me or to offer him some peace. I wanted him to hear me and to know that I was here, and I was going to keep our family afloat so he could leave when he was ready. I sat at the foot of his bed, nervous to touch him because this shell of a person was both my father and not my father.

I lost everything. The provider in my life and strongest man I knew. He was the example of how a man should conduct himself, how I needed act as a provider and how I needed to be from then on. Strong, prideful, and determined to make sure everyone had what they needed. He was clueless in some ways, but it was awfully endearing, and I still don’t know a better mechanic than my father.

I also lost the most loving and caring person in my life, my anchor. As a teenager, when my failed suicide attempts and in-patient psych ward stays were over and I was sent home, my father knocked on my door nearly every five minutes with a simple “you alright?” Then, a soft “alright, just checking” when I answered him with or without words. He did it for years. It was the reassurance that I had someone who would always come looking for me that got me through all of that. As I write this, I can still hear the soft raps of his knuckles against the door I’ve painted over hundreds of times in the back of my head, and it’s been five years since he passed.

All I can think of, to this day, is how lucky I was to have a father who wasn’t afraid to love his family openly. He let us be girls, indulged in our childhood needs for pink, my teenage needs to wear all black and have fringe, my sister’s obsession with video games and anime. He never once shied away from buying anything we needed. He found a way to get the money, regardless of us living paycheck-to-paycheck my whole childhood. 

I remember I started my period, on the first day of seventh grade, and he drove across the whole city looking for an open CVS before school to buy me what I needed. We were both scared and clueless, me because this was my second one and I was with my dad, and I could see on his face he was trying not to panic, but he made sure that there were always a few pads and tampons in the car after that. I still laugh at that story with my sister sometimes because it’s such a practical thing he would do, keeping extras in the car in the center console.

My father and my mother weren’t always on the best of terms throughout their marriage, but every sporadic evening they spent on our patio as they danced together to “Too Much Heaven” by the Bee Gees on the old stereo-slash-radio, fueled by a few drinks, showed that they still loved each other and gave us a good example of what truly being loved and being there for your family meant. I have a lot more peace now, years later, knowing my mother and my father are together somewhere in the universe. He is not alone, and she is not without her best friend anymore.

I just wish I could tell you one more time that I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry I forgot your Father’s Day card. I still buy one every year, but I never write in it. I’ve stopped writing in them two years after you died because I don’t see the point if I can’t give it to you.

Now, I find myself perusing the card section during June every year to find the perfect card to buy and hold on to. I don’t think I’ll ever forget a Father’s Day card again.