grow through what you go through

my dad was my best friend. there’s no other way to say it. its been 8 years and 3 months since I lost him, and I still remember (in vivid detail unfortunately) what that day felt like. the sounds, the smells, the emotion.

it was a sunday. relatively nice out for april in buffalo, new york. I was getting ready to go to work at ruby tuesday. as I walked down the stairs, my dad was sitting at the computer desk in the living room. while I was getting ready to leave he was reminding me that I needed to call the parents of the girls I would be coaching in softball that season.

“al, you need to call them, introduce yourself as their coach and let them know when the first practice will be. If you wait to long i’m gonna hear about it” (my dad ran the league that I coached for, so there was always just a little extra pressure).

naturally, I got annoyed that he was telling me what to do, we got into a small argument, nothing major, but I distinctly remember not saying I love you before I walked out of the house. that would be the last conversation I ever had with my dad. and I didn’t even tell him I loved him.

while going through the mundane routine of being a hostess at a subpar restaurant on a sunday afternoon, my aunt walked through the door. my first thought was “where’s my uncle? my cousin? seems a little strange that she is coming to eat alone”. it wasn’t until I saw the glazed over look in her eyes, the redness of her face, that I knew something wasn’t right. I can still hear it in my head now. “I’m here to pick you up, we have to go, its your dad. he’s at the hospital”. she couldn’t even get the sentence out without breaking down.

the next thing I know, we are walking through the doors to the emergency room at a local hospital. I had never stepped foot in a hospital before then. I followed my aunt down the hall until we reached a door that was labeled “family meeting room”. I walked in and saw my mom, my uncle, my brother. all teary-eyed, no one could look anyone in the eyes. I quickly found out that my dad had collapsed upstairs in our house. they had stabilized him and he was being transferred to a bigger hospital with a specialized intensive care unit.

so we followed the ambulance there. we were met by my grandparents, aunts, uncles, my dads best friends, it was starting to feel really scary, but I really wasn’t sure at this point what was going on.

moments later, a doctor arrived and asked to speak with my mom, me and my brother. my aunt came with us because she is a nurse practitioner and at this point, I wasn’t even in nursing school so someone had to help translate when we couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. the thing is, I didn’t need a translator. I knew exactly what he meant when he said “there is no brain activity”. I can still here the guttural scream that came out of me. it was horrible. never in my life had I ever felt so broken. (this would become a false statement 12 long hours later)

I didn’t know what to do, all I knew is I needed to get as far away from that doctor as I could. I took off running around the corner back to the room we were all put in. when I turned the corner, a nurse had stopped me and embraced me. I know what her intentions were in doing so, and if I could apologize for forcefully throwing her off of me, I would. but I couldn’t let myself feel confined in that moment. my whole entire world was crumbling down around me, I didn’t want a stranger to comfort me. I didn’t want anyone to comfort me. I just needed to feel it, I needed that fear and sadness to surround me.

shortly after our conversation with the doctor, the hospital staff encouraged us to go home for a little while. the way they explained it was “nothing is going to change in the next 24 hours. he will either wake up, or we repeat the brain activity tests tomorrow, and go from there”. what I heard was “go home, get some rest, because you’re going to have to make a really horrible decision tomorrow when your dad is still brain dead”.

so that’s what we did. we went home. we ordered a pizza that didn’t get eaten and we just sat there. my uncle, my cousin, my mom and my brother. at some point my moms phone rang. it was the hospital.

“you need to come back down to the hospital, there has been a change in your husbands condition”. the first thought was that he woke up. but my cousin (who is also a nurse practitioner), explained very gently to us that this wasn’t a good change. they didn’t want to say anything negative on the phone because they needed us to make it there to say our goodbyes.

what followed was a series of traumatic events. as soon as we got there, and saw hospital staff performing CPR on my dad, the reality began to set in. everyone arrived to the hospital, at 11pm on a sunday. my grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, cousins. we sat in a small conference room on the unit, right outside my dads hospital room. it felt like a game of tug-of-war. “we got his heart beating again” “his heart stopped again”. back and forth until finally, they couldn’t save him.

I felt everything in that moment. rage, anger, fear, sadness. it was debilitating. they don’t tell you what its like to sit with your loved one while they’re being kept alive by machines. they don’t tell you what its like to sit in that room and wait for your extended family to come to say their goodbyes. but I will tell you what its like because as I’m writing this, I can feel it. I can feel exactly what I felt that day. sitting next to his hospital bed.

you feel this pain, in your chest. almost like your heart is physically breaking. like a little piece of it that he once held was being broken off. crumbling away, forever altering you as a person. you feel this overwhelming sense of grief. like you will never stop crying again. when you think that you’ve run out of tears, more continue to fall. when you think that you can’t hurt anymore, the pain gets worse.

we sat there and played bruce springsteen. and we just talked to him, to each other, and tried to absorb what was happening. he was the rock of our family. the beacon of light during every dark time. the laugh at the end of a rough day. one minute he was there, and the next he was gone. leaving us with nothing but memories of him.

eventually, once everyone arrived and we had said goodbye, they began to unhook him from every line and machine he was connected to. slowly, they were taking him away from me, little by little. until he was just there. not breathing. no heartbeat. he was officially gone. it felt impossible to leave. to just walk away from this person who was your whole world, knowing you’ll never hear him laugh again, you’ll never sing whitney houston in the car with him again, he’ll never be cheering you on in the dugout again, he won’t see you graduate, start your career, buy your first house, get married, he’ll never meet the love of your life. but we had to. he was gone. so we left.

everyone was gathered around the table in my moms kitchen until 3am. making lists of what needed to be done, who we needed to call. we were running on adrenaline. all of us. nothing seemed real yet, at least not for me. it still didn’t feel real sitting at the funeral home and picking out a casket, picking out the songs that would echo throughout the church as we said our final goodbyes. it didn’t feel real when we were at the cemetery picking out a gravesite.

do you want to know when it started to feel real?

the days following the funeral when his car was in the driveway but he would never be driving it again. when I noticed the end table in his bedroom was out of place because the paramedics had to move it to do whatever they needed to do. when all of his stuff just sat in that house, in the EXACT places he left it, but he was never coming home to put any of it away. when I graduated nursing school and he wasn’t in the audience. when I was planning a wedding and a first dance with my brother and not him. when fathers day, or his birthday roll around and he’s not there to celebrate with. THAT is when it feels real. that is when my heart breaks all over again, every single time.

grief is such a funny thing. it’s different for everyone. for me personally, it changes every year that passes without him. it comes in waves. when the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning. the wreckage is surrounding you, suffocating you. everything reminds you of the beauty the ship once was and it takes everything in you to just grab hold of that wreckage and try to stay afloat.

in the beginning, those waves are 100, even 200 feet all. they crash over you without mercy, every 10 seconds. you don’t have time to catch your breath. you just hang on for dear life, and float. after a while, weeks or months later, those waves are still 200 feet tall, but they come a little bit further apart giving you time to catch your breath. and then, somewhere down the line the waves might only be 50 feet tall, and although they still come, they are even further apart and you can see them coming. a birthday, an anniversary, a holiday. you have time to prepare. to make sure you come out on the other side. 8 years later and those waves haven’t stopped coming. but i’d like to think i’ve become a hell of a surfer since then.

its never easy to lose someone. no matter who it is. what makes it bearable are the people you surround yourself with, the memories you have, and those little reminders that come every so often to let you know they are always with you.

in the months and years following the loss of my dad, i’ve had countless people, some I know and others I don’t, who have told me how amazing he was. how great of a guy he was, how much he is missed. at first, this used to annoy me. yeah no shit you miss him, he was my dad how do you think I feel?? but then I realized, I wasn’t the only person that loved him, and Im not the only person who lost him. I lost my dad, but my mom lost her husband, my aunts and uncles lost their brother, my cousins lost their fun uncle dave, my grandparents lost their son. he wasn’t just our family. he was a best friend, a coach, a teammate, a coworker, a role model, a neighbor, a leader, and a karaoke legend.

I know I mentioned earlier how all we have left of the people we lose are the memories we made and those little reminders that they are always there. it wasn’t until a couple years after he had passed that I was playing slow-pitch softball, following in his exact footsteps. I started playing on another team with different people than I regularly play with. one day, there was a guy who showed up and played short stop, who I had never met before. I noticed that he kept looking at me in a weird way. almost like he knew me, but I had never seen him. I found out later how he knew who I was.

he was one of the first responders the day my dad died. he was in my house. he was a part of the team that tried to save him. he recognized me from the pictures of my brother and I hanging throughout the house. at first, it freaked me out. but the more I thought about it, I looked at it as my dad saying hi. letting me know that even though he isn’t physically here, he is always here.

he’s here everytime I hear a bruce springsteen song on the radio
every time I get excited about a new book
every time I watch the red sox play
every time I tear up a dance floor to whitney houston
every softball game I play
every time someone says “you are just like your father”. whether its because I look like him, act like him, talk like him or have the same immaturity level as him, I am filled with pride whenever I hear it.
every big life change, he’s here. right beside me. every step of the way. I wouldn’t be where I am today if he wasn’t.

I miss him every single second of every single day and it has taken me a lot to move past that last conversation I had with him, and it has taken even more for me to accept the fact that my life has to go on without him in it. but here I am. writing this. telling you that even though something so terrible and life altering happened to me, life still goes on. you will get through whatever it is you’re going through, stay strong, and let people in, let them help you because you can’t do it alone. most importantly, I’m here telling you to say I love you, even when your mad.

if none of that helps, here are some more books and songs that got me through some really dark times in the last 8 years

• pack up the moon: kristan higgins
• november 9: colleen hoover
• firefly lane: kristin hannah
• the in between: marc klein
• in five years: rebecca serle
• all the bright places: jennifer niven
• the things we leave unfinished: rebecca yarros
• underneath the sycamore tree: b. celeste

• born to run: bruce springsteen
• glory days: bruce springsteen
• dancing in the dark: bruce springsteen
• you should be here: cole swindell
• give heaven some hell: HARDY
• while he’s still around: florida georgia line
• to where you are: josh groban
• i wanna dance with somebody: whitney houston
• sign of the times: harry styles
• allison road: gin blossoms
• one headlight: the wallflowers
• dancing in the sky: dani and lizzy
• gone too soon: simple plan
• dance with my father: luther vandross
• dad’s old number: cole swindell
• fathers and daughters: boyce avenue
• alison: elvis costello