Goodbye, Daddy

My Father died last night. I walked into the hospital and no one who worked in the hospital had greeted me or mentioned that my father had passed away just moments before. This was Mercy Hospital in Rockville Centre, NY.   I had just been visiting my mother in Merrick, ten minutes away, and the hospital never bothered to call my cell phone to inform me that my father was in the process of dying.

I walked into the room and there was an eery silence and an absence of machines and technology around him. I stood before him not knowing if he had really died. It was surreal. He was bathed in white light, looked rested and peaceful, and his body was warm.  Very warm.  Because no one was coming in, not a nurse, and this being a Catholic Hospital I thought surely there would be a priest or a nun, or even a volunteer to let me know of his passing. I thought surely he isn’t dead. Maybe he was breathing ever so quietly or that his heart was beating so faintly that I couldn’t hear it when I put my head to his chest. Ten minutes passed and I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.  No one from the hospital staff had yet come into the room.  I remembered that the phone had rung a moment before I entered the hospital, and so I checked the call at the same time I sent T.J. down the hall to go ask what was going on. I realized it was my father’s doctor who had called telling me my father had passed.  Just then T.J. came back with a nurse.  She made some lame excuses as to why no one called.   Basically she said they thought he had no family, although all of us (his grandchildren, sister, children)  had visited him many times over the last four weeks. I am only glad it was me who witnessed this absolute neglect and insensitivity and not my father’s aging sister or my niece, Star, who had visited him yesterday. She would have been traumatized beyond words.

My father was a difficult man to say the least.  But he was a saint the last two years as he took care of my dying mother.  Ironically, she’s still hanging in there because of the quality of care he provided for her.

When I told my brother, Frank, that my father had died before I got there, he was overcome by sorrow that my father needlessly died alone.  I read that email this morning right before I headed to the funeral parlor to make arrangements.  The song playing on the radio as I drove was In the Living Years, by Mike and the Mechanics.  It was my message from my father that he appreciated our sentiments.

This was the next email I received from my brother, Frank:

When I awoke this morning from the deepest of deep sleep I was awash with a blanket of joy and happiness like the newly fallen snow.
I felt father’s presence and the heavy burden of his final years.
The prison that became his body and his great pain all have been lifted.
May he rest in the place of sacred energy and lightness of being.

I must say I was a taken back by such rapture…F.

Sleep well.  Sleep deep, Daddy.