[femmeInterrupted]

my father passed away this summer. The grieving has been intense and has come in waves. We had a troubled, tumultuous relationship that was reconciled in his last year and a half of life. i did everything i could to stay in the moment with him, and offer only love and compassion. i spent the last two weeks of his life with him, day and night at his side. i promised i wouldn't leave, and i didn't. I wrote the following only a short time after he died of cancer.

11 Days

The summer my father died was hot and humid. I recall simply that everything struggled for life under the oppressive heat. Outside the hospice window the lilac Rose of Sharon bloomed in resistance to the torrid conditions, and from time to time, I’d watch, as birds would feed languidly in the window feeder and then fly away through the thick, damp air. I waited.

Nothing to be done as the sea boiled and the wine turned sour during the dog days of summer. I was buoyant on an ocean of salted tears, floating and striking through waves of life changes made forever in these times of sweltering deliverance.

Through flesh made damp by sweat and tears I sat and watched. A long vigil that lasted though a blur of finite nights and days, always a steady labouring towards loss. In this final delivery room there were only the sounds of fading; tortured breathing and a primal calling as he cried “Mom. Mom. Oh Mom.” Heart wrenching and saturated with unavoidable truth. And sometimes, in a quiet hush, my own weeping that grew weary and acceptant as another layer of loss was absorbed into the working chambers of my heart.

Unlike birth, where the push is towards life, this confinement was a labour towards a final release, from pain, from suffering, from life. There was karma in this vigil, this excruciating bearing witness. Reciprocity of a tender and painful kind as I returned my father’s watch, where decades earlier, when he was young and strong, he waited for my birth, for the emergence of his first and only daughter. And now I, saturated with grief and longing and loss, held his hand, and kissed his brow, and yearned for more time, more time; even as I begged for his release.

A kiss on the hand, and a promise so beautiful and true are wrapped up in love and memories that feel too raw and painful to be remembered yet, the happiest ones hurt too much at times like these. Like sunlight that shines too brightly, I must shield my mind’s eye from the sweetness of remembered joy.

I am left with the Autumn now, vibrant hues that I see only with new amazement, as time passes and I breathe deeply of the crisp cool fall air, remembering how I suffered the pain of his remorse and tasted the bitterness of regret with him, and then for him, when all he could do was his body’s work in that bed.

Eyes closed as he endured and exerted all he could. I whispered into his ear words from my heart, words of love, truth and compassion. We both knew: we had a bumpy ride but what a gift for us Meu Pai, that we had such a happy ending. What a gift for us Dad, to know how much love we had in our hearts for each other, and how all the rest, the lost and embezzled times, in the end meant nothing at all. Our eyes, locked together in moments that cannot be undone showed us all we needed. The terrible inevitability of truth, that love trumps loss, and we are we, and will always be, and these finite moments mean all.

Your final words to me gave me everything I ever needed, and can ever want or need. My woman’s heart made strong by the words that the little girl in me always needed and wanted to hear. Now I move onward, through this world, my father’s daughter, and you are closer than ever. Inside the sunbeams that turn the falling leaves crimson, on the bright dappling of sunlight that become diamond glints on gentle waves of the lake I see every day. I experience everything in my life now, again, full of the ‘first time’s’ in this world without you in it.

That vigil, unique and personal, so painfully intimate, so ultimately universal and I had come to learn this in those 11 days; that we still exist, that the absolute unbroken continuity of us weaves its way through all, and that somewhere you Are.

xoxox your nee nee.