Everything is transient, even death. It never happens like this, yet it always does.
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Back in September, my dad was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and underwent intense chemotherapy. He was told if the treatment failed, he had a 1% chance of living beyond six months. Against every last fiber of goodness garnered from our hearts, it failed.
Six months. We had just six months left with my father. As many who have experienced this kind of news will agree, there is no way to explain its anguish.
There is no way to overstate the shock and disappointment of having your time together cut short and the regret of all that you’ll never do.
To hear you are going to lose a pillar of your soul is a singular sort of despair, and there are no words emotive enough to convey the gloom of impending grief.
Five months. To speak of the profound significance of one’s father is challenging in healthy circumstances, for how can you illustrate, in any objective way, half of who you are? And now, with a terminal sentence looming, it choked us.
To say my father was like no other was true, but it didn’t come close to honoring the mark of his deeds or describe his brilliant modesty.
Everything sounded hopelessly inadequate. I struggled to simultaneously preserve and examine his role in my life, to memorize his influence and duplicate its effect. Like all daughters of kind and virtuous men, I owed my own view of the world to his.
Four months. Sixteen weeks. A dozen-and-a-half Saturdays. Time becomes scarce when it’s measured from a finite source. Rationally, we know our parents can’t be with us forever and that, in fact, we will live a sizable portion of our lives after they’re gone.
Only if we remain blissfully unaware do we manage to live in denial about this inevitability.
But who counts down this fleeting time? Who tallies every last occasion? How many more times would I see my dad wear his Torch Lake sweatshirt? How many meals were left to share? Had I already walked alone with him in the fields behind our barn for the last time? We became actuaries of the mundane.
Three months. Life thinned—all the way down to its essence. What mattered stayed and what didn’t—withered to a wisp.
We ceased all talk of the future, which was agonizing to a family whose favorite pastime was planning.
It was, no doubt, the worst for my mother who had lived only three years of her life before meeting my father—first as a toddling neighbor, then as an annoying friend of her brother’s, then as a ride to school, and finally as her partner in the truest sense. To my husband, whose affection for my father rivaled mine, this was the most devastating loss he had ever faced. We were a pitiful bunch.
Two months. Neighbors noticed we were gone every weekend and commented how lucky we were to go gallivanting.
I spat back that we were indeed lucky if you consider watching your father die a recreational diversion. I was awful and I didn’t care.
My daughter complained just once about always having to go see her grandfather when she would rather be home playing. I foolishly, selfishly, callously told her that death would change all that soon enough. She slept in our bed for the next week.
One month. My dad spoke to each of us privately to tell us how proud he was and ask that we take care of our mom. He spoke prophetically about dreams he had, dreams of being a boy ice-skating across a wide, frozen pond, weaving between tall shoots of cattails that stuck out of the shallow ice.
He would wake in his hospital bed and try to get up, forgetting for a moment the paralyzing pain.
He spoke plaintively of dying and how he always thought he would live to be ninety. He spoke of how dear his whole life had been.
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Two weeks. We visited in shifts. No one could bear to acknowledge the looming deadline, so we spoke of compulsory things like yard work and house repairs, school reports, and piano lessons, and how the dogs needed baths. But before leaving, we hushed into my mother’s embrace of how nothing felt right, especially saying goodbye.
One week. My mother called in tears to tell me two things. The first was something I could hardly decipher about food in the fridge. The second was that my dad tested positive for a rare genetic mutation and now qualified for a very promising clinical drug trial. Prayer upon wish upon hope upon plea had delivered a reversal of destiny—did I remember the 1% chance?
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If you have ever been told that your parent is dying and then been told he is not, you will agree there is no feeling quite like it. It is not the sudden elation you would expect nor is it instant relief; you simply don’t trust what you’ve heard. Our sadness had been building for six months, gathering momentum, snowballing, accelerating. It was too enormous to dissipate in a matter of minutes or hours or even days. This news was every bit as shocking as the other and would take time to absorb.
I would like to say we never gave up hope, but that isn’t true. We most certainly did. We left all hope for the 1% and cashed in our six months instead. We turned those months into life and, in turn, those months gave us back the years we had lived together. Everything is transient, even death. It never happens like this, yet it always does.
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Photo: Getty Images
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