Baptized By Death

The call I’ve been expecting for more than a decade came on Saturday afternoon just after St. Patrick’s Day. Looking down at my phone buzzing on the bathroom vanity, I see ‘Aunt Theresa’ and our photo from twenty years ago displayed somehow more intensely on my screen and I know it is here. All awareness left my body as I stood in my apartment, staring blankly into the bathroom mirror as my aunt heralds the message that the time has come to say goodbye to my father. In the midst of the long-awaited news flooding my hazy awareness, I’m ashamed of myself; ashamed the news Daddy’s time has come to cross over Jordan is not enough to keep me from noticing how dirty the bathroom mirror is and I need to do better about cleaning it.

For some time, my heart and mind have been doing their own thing, independent of each other, and this is the moment they both decide, in unison, to take off on an ill-timed vacation and leave me engulfed in a dense fog that felt like a weightless, un-godly baptism that suffocates but never drowns. The details of the next few hours remain unclear in my memory as a result of the slow drowning. This isn’t the only memory I have of recent years that has been tainted by this slow drowning, but it remains the most devastating. The unapproved sabbatical my heart and mind decided to take remained committed to keeping me under, rolling in the suffocated awareness for years to come.

The meticulous Saturday night planning and preparations that were, admittedly, too much for the smoky, honky-tonk Saturday night I had in store, came to a halt and I left my apartment in the chaotic disarray that only comes from an indecisive young woman desperate to project and protect her carefully curated persona.

I drove in silence to Summit Medical Center and made my way through the unfamiliar corridors of a new hospital. I don’t like new hospitals. Why couldn’t Dad pass on in a hospital that is familiar? A place I know? This is not an unreasonable request. Over the past two decades, I have become unsettlingly familiar with each of the hospitals and medical facilities in Nashville, except Summit. As if letting go of your Daddy at the tender, yet almost grown age of twenty-five isn’t bad enough, adding the social anxiety of navigating a new place certainly didn’t help combat the foggy awareness.

Mercifully, I found his room without interacting with any staff or visitors. I was the last of the family to arrive and my first thought upon entering the room my Dad would leave this world in was, ‘Are they mad at me for not being here sooner?’ I crossed the threshold and stood beside my mother who came to say goodbye to the father of her children because there are certain bonds that divorce can never break. Since I was the last to arrive, my presence signaled it was time to turn off the machines keeping him alive long enough for each of us to say our goodbyes.

We each took the opportunity to approach the hospital bed and whisper our last goodbyes to our father, brother, son, friend, or lover. How can one verbalize the deepest goodbyes to a soul you have been connected to for a lifetime in a room full of others? Maybe there are some who can, but I am not one of them. I feel things deeply and passionately. How can I speak the last words my father will hear me say to him in this life with other people watching and listening? How can I bare my soul next to a minister I don’t know, in front of people who have no right to those precious final words? I couldn’t. I just stood there in suffocated silence and held his hand, looking down on him as he went to the other side. This became the first of many heartbreaking, people-pleasing, self-betrayals that I would regret for the rest of my life.