Thy Will Be Done

I posted this on the Writing Bridge, and received some positive feedback. I have some editing to do, but I'm putting it out there in its rawest form for now.


I sat at my dining room table, clicking my nails on the glass top in repetition: pinky, ring, middle, index, index, index.
I focused on the cordless phone, inches from my fingers, and I heard my mother’s voice in my head.
A watched pot never boils, and a watched phone never rings.
Regardless, I couldn’t help but stare, only breaking the monotony by picking it up every few minutes to check for a dial tone. Then I would hit redial.
Four rings, followed by the mechanical message that came standard with every cell phone, instead of a personal greeting. My mother hated the way her voice sounded on “answering machines.”
I hung up without leaving a message. Again.
Pinky, ring, middle, index, index, index.
Pinky, ring, middle, index, index, index.
Again, I picked up the phone and waited for the dial tone. This time I stabbed out my sister’s cell phone number.
After the third ring I received a breathless, “Hey!”
“Why the fuck isn’t anyone answering their phone?” I demanded, my fingers finally stilling on the table.
“I’ve been calling you at work,” my sister said.
“How in God’s name did you expect me to work today?” I asked, cutting her off. “What’s going on with Dad?”
There was a brief silence. In the hush, all the blood in my body sprinted for my heart, making it so heavy it dropped to my feet.
That morning, 750 miles away from me, my father had gone on for a “routine” heart catheterization. No big deal, my mother had said when she had called three days ago, just to let me know.
He may have some blockage, may need to have a stint put in. All normal, all outpatient procedures, nothing for me to panic about, no need for me to be there.
Yet my mother and my older sister had accompanied my father to the hospital, while my two older brothers remained on call, less than 15 minutes away.
And it wasn’t normal. It was my father.
“You need to get on a plane,” my sister said.
The fingernails that had been rhythmically rapping the table drew blood as they curled into the palm of my hand.
“Why?”
“Dad’s scheduled for bypass surgery on Monday morning.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“No.”
“Where’s mom?”
“She’s right here, hold on.”
There was another pause, some shuffling, and I heard my mother. A very scared, tired version of my mother.
“Hey, babe.”
“You OK?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, her voice shaky and high-pitched. Breathless.
“I’m booking a flight,” I told her.
“Yes,” was all she said, and sighed. “Good.”
“OK. I love you mom. Give me back to Jen.”
My sister got back on the phone.
“I’m going to have to fly into JFK, can you come get me or do you want me to call Adam?”
“I can come get you. Do you have money?” she asked me.
“Does it matter? I’ll call you back when I get a flight.”

At 3:30AM, after reaching near hysteria when my flight was delayed, I finally arrived in New York. My sister was waiting in the baggage area, my mother right beside her. Both women looked burdened and weary, but pleased to see me.
I ran to my mother and clung to her. She didn’t cry. I found that odd, since for the past nine years, she had cried every time I came home to visit, and every time I left.
The two hour car ride from the airport to my parent’s home was silent. Everyone was afraid to speak.

I felt the emptiness the minute I stepped through the front door. Something was missing. Our protector was gone.
My mother gave me a hug in the front hallway, and simply whispered, “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Where else would I be?” I asked, before letting go and shuffling off to my room, which no longer resembled my room at all. It had become a guest room, but still referred to as “Nanci’s Room.” Just as the room next to mine would always be “Jennifer’s Room,” and the two rooms downstairs, in the converted cellar, were “Adam’s Room” and “Paul’s Room.”
Privately, and affectionately, I referred to the rooms as “Chamber of Evil,” “The Dungeon,” and “The Scary Basement.”
I had been born eleven years after Paul, nine years after Adam, and eight years after Jennifer. Jennifer never forgave me that fact. My arrival changed her family status: she was no longer the baby, and she was no longer the only girl. Her disdain only became stronger as we became older, and I forged a unique and unbreakable bond our father; one she had never managed.
I snuggled under the blankets of my childhood. The window above me was cracked so I could smell the Autumn air, and hear the rustling of dry leaves. I would freeze, I knew. I had been spoiled too long by the Florida climate. But other than Christmas, Autumn was the only thing I missed about living Up North. I thought of my father as sleep evaded my bed.

Walking toward my father’s hospital room, I was terrified.
I approached the doorway and stopped. My sister was already in the room, stirring coffee, gathering napkins, and she saw me first. She looked at my dad. “Your daughter’s here,” was all she said, sadness in her eyes. My father’s face lit as he turned. The prodigal returns. I rushed to him, hugged him, carefully making my way around the wires, the IV, the hospital paraphernalia.
“You don’t look sick,” I told him. “There are easier ways to get me to come home.”
He laughed, and his chest rolled and rumbled under me, and I felt ease for the first time since I had heard of the impending surgery.

Sunday morning the phone rang, and I walked toward it before realizing that it wasn’t my phone anymore. I saw the hospital number on the caller ID and snatched it up.
“Dad?” I asked
“Hey, Nanc.”
“You OK?”
“Fine, I just wanted to ask your mother to bring me some things.”
“Oh. She’s at church.”
“You didn’t go with her?”
“No.”
“Well, I got permission to go to mass in the chapel downstairs at noon. You can come with me,” he said.
It wasn’t an invitation.
“I’d like that,” I told him.
I could never tell my father about the quarrel I took with God.
I certainly couldn’t tell him that I was pretty angry with God right now.

Monday, 4:00PM. We had been in the CCU waiting room for seven hours. We had been told the surgery could take eight hours, maybe longer, and we were starting to get restless. My mother and I had both read complete novels, though I’m not sure either of us could tell you what those novels were about. My mother, my brothers and I played Scrabble. We all watched Jeopardy. After eight and a half hours, the surgeon came into the room and addressed my mother. I froze in my chair, registering the phrases, “came through fine,” “more than we expected,” and “quadruple bypass,” “see him if you want, but not advisable.”
It was then I collapsed. I hadn’t cried yet, and it had even started to bother me. I felt cold and uncaring when, really, I was paralyzed. I had been holding it all in, fully expecting my father to die on the operating table. The panic had overcome all other emotion, and now the relief flooded out. My mother and my siblings stared on in shock as I sobbed; I’m sure they had been as baffled by my lack of tears as I had been. Daddy’s little girl, daddy’s favorite - not affected. How wrong that assumption was. I was more like my father than anyone knew.

The recommendation from the surgeon has been to wait at least an hour after the surgery before seeing my father.
“He won’t look like your father”, he had said. “He’s going to be bloated, blue, scary looking.”
No one cared. We needed to see the proof that our father-husband-hero, had made it through this horrifying and complicated ordeal. Two at a time, the surgeon had said, for five minutes, every hour. It was a given that my mother would go first, but who to go with her? The three eyes of my siblings turned to me, and I didn’t argue. I took my mother’s hand and followed the cardiac nurse. As we walked down the hallway, the nurse tried to prepare us, same as the surgeon had. Bloated. Blue. Breathing tube. Warming blankets making his chest look bigger. Machines. Monitors.
As I entered the room and looked at my father, all I could think was that they only needed one word to attempt to prepare you.
Dead. They should have just said, “He’s going to look like he’s dead.” Because he did. He looked like my father, no doubt, but he looked like my dead father. I had seen people in coffins look better. But I could see his chest rising and falling, and I could see the monitors telling me that his heart was beating steadily, that his body did, indeed, have life. So my mother and I, we held his hand, and we told him what a great job he had done, and that we loved him. After a few minutes I left my mother standing at his bedside, and I fetched my sister, who spent two minutes with dad, and then fetched my brothers. And so it went every hour until visiting hours ended.

To fill one of the spaces between visits, my brothers and I trooped out to the parking lot to get some fresh air, and to talk freely, away from my mother. After a while, my brother Adam looked to the sky and breathed, “Thank God.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
The exclamation had irritated me on two levels.
One, Adam had been a whole-hearted atheist up until a year ago when he had “rediscovered” God.
The second, I expressed out loud. “This is the shit that makes me not believe in God.”
My brothers looked shocked. “How can you say that?” Paul asked.
How could I not? My father had spent his entire life doing everything that God “asked.” Yes, he had smoked, but he had quit 30 years before.
Thank God for getting my father through the surgery.
Thank God for forewarning my father with the experience of chest pains, which brought him to his doctor, and unearthed the need for bypass surgery. He could have dropped dead on the golf course from a massive heart attack.
Thank God.
However, based on that logic, God was the reason my father needed the surgery in the first place, and how fucking contradictory was that?
Therefore, I leaned toward the “life sucks, get a helmet,” religion.

Five days later we were able to take my father home.
It had been, and continued to be, excruciating watching my father perform the simplest of tasks. He would struggle to sit down, to get up. He held a pillow to his chest each time he needed to cough, or move, because the pain of his cracked sternum was excruciating. It was unfathomable, and it broke my heart. Yet, all the while, my father persevered. He did not get depressed. He did not feel sorry for himself. He refused to falter on the path toward recovery. He would not allow himself to be defined by this temporary disability.
At home, my father chose to sleep in his recliner in the living room. It was a little easier for him to get out of on his own, though he needed some help getting back in.
The first morning that my father was back in the house, I woke to his silhouette in my bedroom doorway.
“Dad?” I asked, groggy.
“Want to help me for a second?”
“Sure.”
I didn’t say anything else, just stumbled out of bed and followed my father to his chair. I knew how hard it had been for him to even ask. I wondered how long he had been standing in my doorway, waiting for me to wake. I stood aside while he clutched his pillow to his chest, slowly sat into the chair, and scooted himself back. I carefully raised the footrest, guiding it with my hand so that it would not snap up.
“Good?” I asked once he was settled.
“Good.” he sighed. I could hear the pain in it, the weariness, and I felt like my own chest had cracked in half.
I leaned down to kiss him, and went back to bed.
I didn’t go back to sleep. I lay in the dark, waiting for the sounds of my father’s snoring, knowing that he was as comfortable as he was going to get, and asleep.

That Monday, I booked a flight back to Florida. I had been in New York for 10 days. I had been neglecting my job, my friends, and my life. I had to go back. I desperately wanted to stay.
That night, my father sat at the dinner table and ate with my mother and I. After the meal, as my mother cleared the table, I sat with my father, and asked him the question that had not left my own mind over the past 10 days.
“Are you angry?” I asked. My voice cracked, and tears began to stream down my face, because I was angry. “Don’t you wonder why this had to happen to you?”
I saw pain flicker through my fathers eyes, but he only paused a moment before responding.
“No.”
I wiped the tears from my face and stared. He took my hand. “Pray with me?” he asked.
I stared. My father nodded.
“Our Father,” he began.
I chimed in, the words engraved into my memories from childhood.
“Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,”
My father tugged on my hand to stop me. I gazed at his calmly smiling face until I got it. Thy will be done.
“Billy Taylor called yesterday,” my father told me. “He scheduled a physical. So did your uncle. So did your brothers. If this happening to me saves it from happening to one of them, then it was worth it.”
I took a deep breath, and banished the rest of my tears. Suddenly, everything was different. How could I be angry? The man with wire holding his sternum together was not only not angry, but was grateful.
It didn’t exactly restore my faith in God, but it strengthened my faith in my Father.