Letting Go

*Trigger Warning: Parent illness, hospital imagery, death*

"But I- I…" My eyes widened in horror and disgust. "I can't do that!"

"Yes, you can. You can do anything you put your mind to doing. Watch." I sat speechless as I watched my father, covered in sweat and dirt from the rich Alabama forest, lift the wriggling grub worm, toss it in his mouth, and begin to chew. His face was stoic while his jaws worked.

"That’s so gross!" My eight year old self was repulsed.

"I think you mean 'nasty,' or 'sick'ning,'" he said. "'Gross' means large. I promise you, it's not large. And they just taste like dirt, really. It's not fried chicken, but it'll keep you alive until I find you if you get lost out here." He went back to digging.

Thirty years later, I don't remember why he was digging, but I do remember the wet smell of the dirt underneath the tall pines. I remember him teaching me how to read a compass and what wild fruits could and couldn't be eaten. Between his years in the military, his love of nature, and the nightly news reporting increasing instances of children falling down forgotten wells or being lost in the wilderness, his main priority was keeping his children safe and informed. He taught us that even the scariest things in nature had a purpose. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to be back in those woods foraging with him. This time, maybe I could show him ways to stay alive.

"But I…" My raised voice cracked and trailed as I struggled to find the words– any words, really.

My fists gripped, white-knuckled, around the hard plastic armrests of the small, uncomfortable chair the nursing staff brought in for me only a few hours earlier. I should've known then. I should've put two and two together, but my panicked brain was in no state to perform even the most elementary of mathematical equations. I should've told myself that if now, after eleven days of standing in this room avoiding moving for fear of accidentally dislodging one of the countless tubes or wires tethering him to the machines and this side of life, them bringing me a chair and saying to stay as long as I wanted was not a good sign.

"This is so stupid," I finally managed, though these words were insufficient and, judging by the puzzled look on the doctor's face, not what they expected me to say.

My mom reached for my hand, but I did not reciprocate. I was in true fight or flight mode, and everyone and everything was something to be rallied against right now. Enemies. She finally laid her hand on top of my fist. "J," she said softly, "you've got to tell him it's okay. You've got to let him go."

My pulse beat hard on the pads of my fingertips and against the cage of my chest like a child scared of the dark and locked in a closet at a sleepover banging on the door begging to be let out. Everyone else in this room was the bullies chuckling from the other side of the door, pulling it tightly against my efforts.

As a child, my dad's main bully had been his own father. When he was ten, my grandfather beat him with a hammer handle because his tiny frame wasn't strong enough to hold up a fence post. Though one of many similar events, this was the story I overheard most from other relatives regardingn his childhood. All Daddy ever said was that he decided very early that he wanted to become the opposite of his father. He succeeded. And he would live his life to abide no bullying. I remember as a teen finding out that my dad had another child named after him. I overheard the conversation he had with my mother.

"When I was in high school," he had said, "I came up on a group of guys beatin' the hell out of this little fella. I was one of the bigger guys in the school. I broke it up and told 'em if they wanted to pick on somebody, better me than him. They took off. That little guy thanked me. Said I saved his life, and that if he ever had a boy he was going to name him after me. Lo and behold, I ran into him at the store today, and he introduced me to his son. He did give him my name. It kind of threw me off. I didn't even remember it."

I looked up and caught my mother's gaze. "No," I said. Weakly at first, but then found my fortitude, "No! I am not just going to give him permission to leave me!"

"Baby, his body is tired," she said. I saw the tears in her eyes that she had fought back so hard. "He's ready, but he's not going to let go until you tell him it's okay."

"I am never going to tell him that." How could she even ask this of me?

The doctor intervened, "Ma'am, he will die with or without you telling him it's okay. The only thing keeping him alive right now are these machines. We have done everything we can for him." He said these words as though he had said them a thousand times already today. He was unmoved. Sterile. Unconcerned with the gravity his words carried. Anyone who had ever recited the old sticks and stones adage had never been on the receiving end of these words by this man. In that moment, I felt like I could've used my bare hands to pluck the doctor's ribs out one by one, ripped his still beating but hardened heart from his chest, and replaced it with rock salt just to watch him writhe in the closest resemblance of pain to that he had just delivered to me.

My mother stood up with the folder the doctor had handed her outlining what "hospice" meant in this situation and what to expect when his life support was stopped by the doctors and nurses who would soon flood the room wearing scrubs in various shades of blues and greens, like the final crashing waves taking under a drowning victim. There was a checklist inside the folder instructing her on what to do when everything was over. Through gritted teeth and tears she said, "I have to go make a few phone calls… let the family know what's going on. Talk to him, J. Hold his hand. He knows you're here." She left the room with the doctor right behind her.

I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. The hot weight of the tears my eyes had been holding became too heavy. It started as a trickle, then quickly turned to full-blown sobs leaving my face wet and stinging underneath the steady, salty flow. I desperately wiped the tears from my eyes so that I could see him more clearly.

"Dad, come on. It's not too late. Don't listen to them. You can pull through this. You are the single most stubborn human I've ever known. No one has ever been able to limit you. Ever." Truth be told, his stubborn nature was what got him here. Had he awakened Momma when the pain started in his chest, they may have gotten him help in time. At 62 years old, he had not yet made peace with the fact that he needed to go easier on his body. He was no longer the young man who had sparred with a future heavyweight boxing champion. That said, he also wasn't yet old enough for this.

The low, rhythmic hiss of the ventilator and the sporadic beeping of machinery was the only sound on our side of the curtain separating us from the rest of the CICU. Past the pastel, geometric-patterned fabric intended to bring a sense of peace to the room I could hear the staff at the nurses' station planning their lunch breaks, laughing at a joke the housekeeper told them while shuffling through with his cart, and chatting about how nice the weather was that day. The rest of society seemed to be moving along at its conventional speed. In my isolated corner of the universe right in the center of it all, I felt my entire world rocking out of control on an unrecognizable axis.

When I was two years old, I remember waking up to my dad gently lifting me out of bed. "Shhhh," he said. Mom's job at the time was an overnight shift at a sewing factory. She had surely not been asleep long, and he didn't want to disturb her. He wrapped me in a blanket as I laid my head on his shoulder. My cold hands reached for the warm creases under his arms. He quietly opened the back door and walked with me in his arms into the back yard. "Look," he said, pointing at the dark, early morning sky to a small streak of light. "That's Halley's Comet," he explained. "This is the first time in my life you've been able to see it from Earth. When it comes back again, I won't be here anymore." I had no idea what that meant, but I stared in wide-eyed wonder at the anomaly. "It's a once in a lifetime experience, Sweet Cheeks. I just wanted to share it with you," he whispered as he rocked me back and forth in his arms, covering the back of my small head with his large, calloused hand and guiding my sleepy face back to the warm nook of his neck.

"Daddy," I said softly, "I don't want you to go. If you have any control over this, please don't leave me." I begged him. There was no change on his monitors. No miraculous twitching of a finger or sudden opening of eyes. I squeezed his hand hoping he would match my grip in a show of consciousness. But nothing happened.

Our silence was deafening. He had always reminded me, "People have two ears and one mouth for a reason." He said, "That’s because you learn more by listening than talking." This wasn't a lesson I wanted to learn. I wondered if he was learning any of the universe's truths at that moment. If he was, I hoped they were more pleasant realizations than the one before me.

I continued to sit quietly at his bedside still holding his hand. I had a million things in my head I wanted to say, but didn't know how. As he had always labeled me "quite the talker," it was one of several ironies I recognized in those final hours. Another, and probably the most profound, being that the best fathers are the ones who teach their daughters to be independent. The ones who never allow you to doubt your ability to work out life's most complex problems without needing a hand to hold are the fathers whose absence leaves the biggest voids.

It wasn't that I needed him to stay; I wanted him to stay. I wanted him to be there to give his grandkids the lifetime of encouragement and truly unconditional love that he had given me. I wanted more than I had ever wanted anything before to see him talk about them with the level of pride he had when he told people about my accomplishments the way that only he had or even could. The compliments of others had always been hollow in comparison.

My father was a mountain of a man who did not require the attention that his stature demanded. At six feet, five inches tall and roughly 300 pounds, the love, compassion and light he brought to the world was much larger. He was there when I took my first breath. I sat there, still holding his hand and lost for words when he took his last.