* * *
There is always something that can hurt more, a place to go inside yourself that you haven’t explored, that you don’t even know about. This morning when I woke up, I thought my pain was at a ten. I thought I was hurting as much as a person could, but when I pull back the curtain and see him there, it’s an eighty-five, a 612, it’s infinite. I’m being electrocuted from within all over again. The right side of his head is covered in a big, puffy bandage and he has a black eye making purple shimmer on his cheekbone. The left side of him looks complete, whole, normal. All his major injuries are concealed on the inside, just like mine were. They had to shave his mustache to fit the tube down his throat and it feels like an invasion, something I should have had to sign off on—and never would have. His tongue is out and he’s wearing a gown covered with little diamond shapes that’s too short for him, it hits just above the knee. He’s sort of my daddy, but he’s sort of something else, too, a magnificent shell.
I pat his hand the way he has always liked to pat mine.
“Pat, pat. Rub, rub. I love you, God loves you. I love you, God loves you. I love you more than God can count.”
I look at his eyes and not in them, because they have forced them closed. He is more of a place than a person now, just a big empty house.
* * *
Katie and John show up, my surrogate family. Jack called them on the way when I was looking at the moon and wondering if it hated its job. Katie comes to me with her arms as wide as wings when we’re back in the beige-colored room. She wraps me up, kisses me on the head, and lets me weep onto her shirt while she empties her cache of magical, limitless mom energy all over me. John talks politely to the Amish and then hugs Jack, who lets him do it even though I don’t think he wants to. Jack doesn’t want a set of arms pulling him further into the reality of today. They’ve come to take care of us because we are too broken to take care of each other, because we’re suspended over grief, not sure when our tethers will be cut, and they don’t want us to be alone when we fall in. Just past 2 a.m., Lile calls—they’re five hours away.
I go back and forth from the room to my daddy every hour, from emptiness to emptiness. Katie and John and Jack come with me and they pray. Well, John prays because he’s the best at it out of all of us. I try to be tender and together with my daddy just in case he can hear me but I fall apart into the different pieces of me within seconds every time I see his face.
I’m five years old, scraped knees and pouty lips and sobbing.
I’m fourteen and sullen and quiet.
I’m twenty-five and angry at God. I’m vengeful and I ask “Why?!” to nobody in particular.
I drape my body over his and I talk to him like he’s still here.
When I’m back in the conference room, the motions of grief continue and Katie mothers me through all of it. Jack does the best he can: he rubs my back, blank-faced, pupils almost disappeared from the chocolate of his eyes. Jack doesn’t hold me, but I understand why. Opening his arms would be an admission of defeat, an act of grief. It would mean he was accepting the unacceptable, that Lloyd Lindsey is gone, that he was gone before we even got here.
My family arrives in the morning around 7 a.m. My mom is frighteningly together, crying softly and gracefully into her hands. She says, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” very quietly, over and over again. My brothers tell me she was doing it the whole way here in the car, lying in the back seat. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
None of us can understand the consuming gratitude of someone who has been in love for over thirty years. Even in death, she’s indebted. She knows that gratitude is the purest form of healing; she learned that lesson too early in life, burying her mother at thirteen and bringing herself up.
Vicki comes back and takes us all down to him, a mama goose leading a string of her confused, dawdling babies. We hold his hands and kiss him and Tim says something meaningful that floats by me. Lile, the eldest, the rebel, the only one of us who truly felt the brunt of what happened to my daddy in Vietnam, whispers in his ear, “Don’t take any of that bad shit with you. I love you so much.”
We say our too-late goodbye to a man who has already left us; we touch him for the last time and wish he was touching us back.
A resident comes to meet with us in the big conference room and go over our options. They hand my mom an envelope with my daddy’s things: his handkerchief, Swiss army watch, Saint Christopher medal, a pack of Certs, and some spare change.
“Is this all that’s left of a life?” she whispers, and touches her lips.
The doctor shows us his films and tells us what we already know. He can’t breathe on his own, he’s not responding to stimuli, he’s gone. It’s over. He gives us fifteen seconds to let it sink in and begins to talk about harvesting the organs, the brilliant brain that held the brilliant mind, the hollow eleven ounces of the heart that nourished our family with love, the nearly blind eyes that hide behind his lids, they were useless but always full of joy. None of us can breathe. None of us know what he would have wanted or what we can bear. Lile speaks while we all realize at about the same time that we will never see my daddy wink at us from behind his glasses again.
“No. We can’t send him in pieces. I want to be with him when he goes.”
He’s resolute.
We go down to see him one last time. A nurse waits silently behind the curtains until we’re ready. Standing around him in a horseshoe, we enjoy the last bits of Lloyd Lindsey: the smell of his last breaths and the warmth of his skin. I tell him I love him. It’s all I can say. When it’s time, the nurse turns off the machine that was keeping the impostor in the bed alive, and just for a second, I look at him without the whirring chorus of the machine and I pretend he’s napping. I could curl up next to him. Within a few minutes my daddy is gone. Everything is a blur, and I keep praying to wake up from this nightmare. It makes me feel sick to leave him.
A crowd of people have gathered to support us. I smile as big as I can at them, just like I used to do in second grade, even though I’m shattered. I let my body push me onward. We say goodbye to the little room near the Nutter Butters that will soon go to another family who just can’t believe their loss, and we go. The Amish go back to Kentucky.
* * *
The city is bird-filled and beaming at us when we drive back to our pretty yellow house. The sidewalks in our neighborhood are busy again with rescue dogs and their overcaffeinated owners.
Don’t they know that the best man in the world is gone? Don’t they feel it?
I wait for the city to empty, for the sun to be snuffed out, for the world to stop, but it doesn’t. It all just keeps moving forward.
Everybody stays with us for the night and we let ourselves be cared for. Friends show up with food so we don’t have to worry about ordering pad thai, and they bring an air mattress that Jack blows up with an electric pump, and they pray for us. Miss Anna Klein, who works at Grace Episcopal in St. Francisville, finds my daddy a place to rest near a wrought-iron dove that hangs down from the boughs of a furry oak tree. It looks just like the one in the stained-glass window that we loved. Tim has friends who own a funeral home and they begin making plans for the service. Somebody from back home lends a private plane and arranges for all of us to fly home together. Nobody wants us to have to reschedule our grief, so they love on us. They show up. We don’t have to do anything except survive and it’s all we can do. Every spray of sunlight that settles on me that afternoon I silently pretend is him.