I turned 42 this year. The age my dad was when we almost lost him to a heart attack. I was 7 years old when life inoculated me against the illusion that everything you love will always be there. I became familiar with mortality and the precariousness of life. That seismic event set our family on an altered course and underpinned our lives with a fear of loss, negotiations with fate, and a reckoning with control. As my strong, brave 40 year old mom single handedly lifted a living room sofa out of the way so that paramedics could work on my dad in the predawn of that October morning, we became acutely aware of the superhuman strength that crises, trauma and fear forge within us. Often, a byproduct of that combination of fear and superhumanity is a belief in a powerful myth: that, if we play our cards right, if we channel our mettle, we might be able to control…everything. That we can make the uncertain certain. That we will.
"Heart attacks are noisy” I wrote in the opening line of a poem in my second grade class later that week. Awakened by the doors and boots and voices and beeping happening elsewhere in the house, I had wandered sleepily upstairs toward the noise. I came upon a scene that set into motion a cascade of somatic sensations etched into the deepest layers of my nervous system to this day. My dad on the living room floor. Paramedics kneeling beside him, defibrillator paddles in hand, hovering above his chest. Spotted in my mom’s periphery, I was shuffled lovingly and urgently into the adjoining room, the door closing behind me as life itself hung in the balance on the other side.
The week that followed the heart attack, the local fire department visited our school in the high desert of central Oregon to teach us about fire safety. In the parking lot in front of our school, small groups of us took turns practicing crawling through a smoke-filled trailer in simulations of what to do in a fire. An abiding fear of fire ensued. I spent many wakeful nights playing over different escape routes from our house, wandering up to my parents room long after bedtime with the same refrain, “I’m afraid of a fire. What will we do? What will happen? How will we stay safe?” The fear, of course, was about more than the fire. Or possibly not about the fire at all. I expressed the fear I could understand on behalf of the one I couldn’t.
My dad recovered. My family recovered. We adapted. Parts of us transformed while other parts seemed to petrify within us. My 10 year old sister holding me that night as we huddled together in the next room. My 4 year old sister waking the next morning to learn that her dad could no longer hold her. My mom held us together. My dad held on. We lived and loved. We held our breath.
When I was 26, my dad and I exchanged letters amid the aftershocks of another seismic event. We were shaken. Searching for scraps of certainty and solace in the face of the freshly reopened fear that his body would again betray him, that we could not save him, I urged us both to find a way out of the fear, but I didn’t know how.
It took me time to understand that fear isn’t an impossible puzzle handed down by a cosmic scorekeeper that I’d yet to figure out. That pain can’t always be transmuted into a lesson. That there isn’t always a reason for suffering. That shame isn’t an escape hatch. That control is not a key. That we can’t solve for uncertainty.
The month before I turned 40, my family gathered in a hospital room. Our own children back at home, my sisters and I became our father’s children at the side of his bed. Standing at another threshold, my father faced an impossible choice between life on his terms, fraught with uncertainty and the likelihood that he would have less of it to live, and a decision that held a tenuous promise of more time but for the price of his sovereignty. My father stood steady. Full of grace and wisdom and courage, he stared down his mortality. My mother asked the unwitting palliative care doctor, “Why? Why do we pathologize death? Death is life.” Looking my father in the eye and shaking her head no when asked if they had any regrets, I saw my mother surrender and reveal a strength that did not require her to be a hero, to be superhuman, to hold in or to hold on. We opened the door we’d pressed closed with the weight of our bodies and our fears for so many years. I see you, death. I see you rage, terror, grief, loss. I see you, uncertainty. Come in. With my hand on my dad’s blanketed feet, a raw and aching heart, and a knot in my throat, I witnessed transcendence.
My son turned 7 during this pandemic. The age I was when we almost lost my dad. Life over the last two years has inoculated him against an illusion that the world is safe, that grown-ups have all of the answers, that everything you love will always be there. Vaccinated the week he turned 8 against a virus that has indelibly shaped this season of his childhood and the world in which he will grow up, he emerges from this experience a different kid. I am a different mom, a different daughter. No longer convinced of a myth that we can, must or will control what is uncertain. Life has instead forged within us a humility and a strength that comes from knowing that we can, must and will be with uncertainty itself.
Grace, wisdom, courage.
Standing with uncertainty.
How my dad faces death is how I try to live.