My dad is dying: on loss, love and gratitude

It’s the last night in September, which means tomorrow I will be even closer to nine years. Nine years since I walked into a hospital room in St. Lucia, where my dad would take his last breath. Nine hard, healing, impossible years since October 15, 2012.

I have written many poems about my dad’s death, about loss and all I continue to learn and struggle with. About the joy and sweetness that seeps through the devastation, the way the heart mends…completely unlike what it was before, and yet, if we allow it, softer, braver, more generous and compassionate.

This poem is one I wasn’t expecting, as it came before one of the lesser-charged Father’s Days in more recent years, tumbling into the peace I carried and drawing me right back to the ache of those agonizing last days.

“Miracle Way”

My dad is dying, I say, after the call comes
when I have to tell my boss, my best
friend, more friends, the man who will fly
to be with me when his body is lowered
into the dark emptiness.

I say it, like a practice for letting
the light fracture, the roots uproot,
for the gnarled moan that enters where
I cannot find breath, hold silence,
where the phone line tightens,
truth too bare to be bribed, to be
cloaked, caw on the tongue
that tastes what was rationed — reconciliation,
time, love —

no… not love

because we want to believe we’ve given
enough and given well, that the unspoken
flows through blood.
When we break our promises, isn’t the pain
we carry a weighted love?
What’s created in the chasm but a ringing
of every tenderness we think
we don’t deserve?

My dad is dying, I say,
after the call comes in,
after the mind leaps, rupture
and revision, and the body staggers
into a dream of rampant thieves
and the heart keeps its beat

open

wild miracle
making the way
we will walk.

I don’t usually deconstruct my poems or offer much in the way of meaning and insight. But in this ninth anniversary year, I am struck by the word “dying.” A word we so often avoid, making of death a leaving, a passing, a going, a losing, a calling home, an eternal sleep…so many euphemisms to obscure the simple truth. To disguise, or make more palatable, this indisputable fact: we live and we die.

And I think of not knowing how I would do any of what I was being summoned to when that phone call came. How I would get on a plane and walk into that hospital room. How I would face my dad. What I would say, do, who I would be with reality seared between us.

But there was the word, “dying,” which I chose to say, couldn’t turn from if I tried. My dad was dying. And somehow the naming, a trembling willingness to inhabit that fact gave me the courage I needed. To meet his eyes, fall into his arms, put aside our freighted and quietly tempestuous past — and be there. In the room. In the presence of grief and love. Resolute and devastated. Trusting I would be held.