How Does Anyone Survive This?

The day started just before 5am, when the hospital called to tell us we might want to come up there, to say you weren't responding to treatment, to say that it was all ending.

Mom knocked on my door then, and I jerked awake and it felt like someone pounding their fists into my gut.  I leaped out of bed, heart going a mile a minute.  I had only gone to sleep a few hours ago; I'd been with you until pretty late the night before.

It's like when the phone wakes you up in the middle of the night, or from a nap, and you panic: what is wrong, what have I missed, am I late for something.  Usually it's fine, you come out of your groggy state and nothing is wrong.  But this was the actual call, the call to say that everything was just as wrong as it could possibly be.  The call to say your Dad is about to die. 

I opened the old wooden door to the bedroom that used to be yours and moms, and looked at Mom, stood close to her.  She told me to get dressed.  I went downstairs and my heart was pounding through my skin, I wanted to vomit.  Trembling, I had to keep saying out loud to myself "It's okay.  You have to be strong.  Be strong.  You can do it.  Be strong.  Be strong."  I've never felt so far from strong.

It was the worst morning of my life, but not as bad as it was for you.  A few hours into our hospital visit, right after you were pronounced dead, we shuffled out of your room and into the hospital waiting room.  Numb and raw.  Uncle John and Aunt Terry were there too.  One of the nice nurses came out of the elevator, saw us, and asked how you were doing.  I shook my head in reply, stifling sobs.  Oh, no, she said.  I am so, so sorry.

Megan and Marc and Mom and I split up the calls that had to be made immediately.  I called Peter, your dear tennis partner and friend, and he broke down crying on the phone.  He'd been in the hospital every day, he was a doctor there.  He always looked white-faced when he came into your room.  I don't think anyone could believe how quickly it was happening.  

Someone had to call the funeral home, and so I volunteered.  There was a body, things to do, a business.  Looking back, it feels like I was seeing through a veil that day, nothing is real and at the same time it is all hyper real, too real.  I talked to the funeral director.  We agreed to meet at 2pm.

I don't know why me and Mom and Megan and Marc all took separate cars up to the funeral home, but we did.  Maybe I had an errand to run beforehand, I don't know.  But, I got there early (I know, you can't belive it) and I called Melissa from the parking lot.  I was sobbing like a maniac sitting alone in my Subaru, blowing my nose on the rough brown napkins from Starbucks.  Melissa had been through this before, or at least something similar; her Mom died from the same sort of awful cancer that took your life.

How does anyone survive this?  I asked her.

And she said, for a while it's just going to feel like someone's ripped out your insides.  

And it seemed so dramatic, hyperbolic even.  I thought okay maybe it'll feel like that for a few days.  But, Dad, it's been close to two months and your death is still present in everything I do.  Is it possible I never realized how much you meant to me, how much of a rock you were, my constant?  Or did I just take it for granted that you'd always be here?

Everything I do now, no matter how much joy or laughter is involved, is done in the shadow of your death.  I am not me, I am someone whose father has just died.  But not just any father, you.  I'm someone whose just lost you.  Even when no one knows, when I am with strangers, that's who I am.

So how the hell does anyone survive this?  When I asked Melissa that I was rubbed absolutely raw from your death, from being there, from watching your life expire.  From the days in the hospital leading up to it, your decline, the shock of it all.  And it just seemed too horrible to bear.  I really didn't understand how anyone came through it.

So how do they survive it?  

It helps to have friends like Melissa, who call every single day even though I almost never pick up.  Just checking in, her voicemail always says.  And it's such a comfort to know I'll get a call from her, a new constant.  And to still have Mom and Marc and Megan and to know that they are going through this too, that they are consumed by your loss, but are surviving.

And other than that, I guess it's just by carrying on, by continuing to live, and laugh, and exist.  And then when it hits hard and it's just too unbearable to go on, pausing on the staircase on the way back up to the apartment.  Pausing and breathing and waiting until the unbearable part passes enough that I can keep going, keep ascending the staircase to the apartment, where I will cry until there's nothing left.  

And I still can't believe that we all just walk around with these wounds inside of us, and it still baffles me that anyone can survive it.  Because, Dad, really, it feels like there is a hole in my heart.  

It feels like someone ripped out my insides.  Not all the time, but sometimes, and for a while.  And at this point I know I'll survive it, I just wish I didn't have to.

a