This year – today specifically – marks the ten-year anniversary of my father’s passing. This particular anniversary is one I’ve been thinking about for a long time and I only very recently started to think about why that is. Obviously, our brains tend to mark ‘big’ anniversaries in five-year spans, so at first glance, that is an easy explanation; but for me I think it’s deeper.

The First Phone Call

My father had his first heart attack in August of 2000, I know this because we’d just come back from a quick trip to York Beach, Maine and that day I’d received my class schedule for my sophomore year of high school.

I was on the phone with my friend Katie, utterly devastated about the fact that I had almost no classes with any of my friends in the coming year, which also led me to assume this meant I’d have no friends to sit with at lunch. I’m sure we were also talking about other generically important things like N*SYNC, whether Matt Damon or Ben Affleck was hotter, and where we were going to be watching the VMAs.

Since this was the late 90s, I was on a cordless landline. I don’t remember much but I do remember my mother barging into my room without preamble, frantic, and demanding that I hang up right now. I’m sure I mumbled something along the lines of “ok, Katie, my mom’s being a spazz, I gotta go,” before hanging up and yelling down the hall that I was off the phone.

Our house is a split-level ranch, with my childhood bedroom at the opposite end of the hall from the living room. From my door, I could see the love seat (which, for some reason, we always called the “little couch.”) My dad was seated on the couch, head resting on the back, right hand to his chest.

Something wasn’t right.

Around then is when I noticed my mother pacing, anxious. She was on the phone. I’m not sure if I overheard the conversation she was having and have lost the memory with time, or if I was too lost in the realization of what was happening to internalize.

The rest of the night is a blur. I don’t remember if my siblings were there, or if I was home alone. I don’t remember when my dad came home from the hospital. I just remember that after that first scare, things mostly went back to normal for a bit.

The Second Phone Call

In the summer of 2001, I was working at a popular, national, clothing store. I hated the job. (To be fair: it was my first job and nothing, up to that point, had led me to establish much in the way of a strong work ethic. The fact that I was often scheduled back to back eight hour shifts on weekends while my friends were off doing fun things is also probably a big factor in how I felt. Yes, for the viewers at home, in hindsight I very much realize how privileged I was.)

I don’t remember the date, but I know it was summer. (This fact alone, if you know me at all, is shocking. I am a walking, talking, timeline of events. But this? Not so sure. I want to say it was July, but it could’ve been early August.) I’d been at the beach with some friends and was just walking in the door to the house as the phone rang. I can’t even say that I remember if I knew my dad had been taken to the hospital at that point or not. Since, as I mentioned, the house is a split level, immediately upon entering, you’re given the option to walk up to the kitchen or down to the family room.

My sister was home this time and answered the phone; one of those with the obnoxiously long cord so that you could move around while talking, you know the one, it was always tangled around itself and at least one member of your family walked through it without realizing and accidentally disconnected a call. I remember her body language shifting at whatever was being communicated to her through the line, before she held down the hook on the receiver and slid down the frame separating the kitchen and hallway, her face red and eyes rimmed with tears.

“Dad coded on the table. We have to go to the hospital. They said to pack bags.”

In that moment, I was boneless. I was just a blob of skin that could no longer support itself as I crumbled to the ground, somewhere in the middle of the staircase. I’d never heard the term coded on the table before but I had enough emotional intelligence to infer from my sister’s reaction that this was not good. I don’t know how long we stayed there, blobs of emotion, but at some point, our bones grew back, and we separated to pack our bags.

I remember kneeling on the floor in front of my closet, digging through my dirty laundry bag. I was irrationally furious that I hadn’t done laundry that week (let’s be honest, it had probably been more like two weeks) and the sweatshirt I wanted to bring with me smelled. I could not get over the disappointment that the one thing I wanted to wear was not clean.

The drive to the hospital is a vague memory, I know we got a really good parking spot. My brother met us there and my mother was in and out of the waiting room with us. It was cold. No, it was fucking freezing. (If only I had that sweatshirt!) Sometime in the early morning, a doctor came in and told us that the surgery had gone well. (Oh, right, my dad ended up needing quadruple bypass surgery.) He was being taken to recovery and was still under anesthesia (or something like that, this conversation occurred 19 years ago, so I can’t be expected to remember it verbatim).

We were sent home with instructions to get some sleep and come back in later. Oh and bring some stuff for mom and dad too.

It was a Saturday and I remember this because I was scheduled to work 3-9. On the way home from the hospital, my sister and I stopped at the retail store I worked at so I could go in and let them know what was going on. I walked in and asked to speak with Steve, the store manager at the time. (I may have changed his name, I may not have.) After hearing of my night and my request to be taken off the schedule for the day, Steve responded thusly: “sure, that’s ok. I know some people would want to come in and work to get their mind off of something like that, but if that’s not how you feel then you don’t have to come in.”

I may’ve been a somewhat shitty employee, but I’ve never been an insensitive human being. I put in my notice at the retail store I worked at a short time later.

I also washed that fucking sweatshirt.

The Third Phone Call

November 26, 2009. At this point, I’d been out of college for just over two years and had been living in an apartment with two close friends for a little over a year. I had just passed my two-year anniversary at my “first job out of college,” and had just gotten a promotion about which I was really excited.

I remember that I was not excited about Thanksgiving this year, though. 2009 was a bit of a transition period when it came to holidays in my family. It was right around then when the hosting duties were starting to shift from our parents generation and because of this (and other reasons I can’t remember), it was only going to be me and my parents for a good chunk of the day. I longed for the chaotic, busy holidays of yesteryear.

Due to my general sense of meh-ness about the holiday, I took my time getting to my parents’ house. When I walked in, things immediately seemed off; a general sense of foreboding in the air, if you will. Not long after my arrival, I found out why. My mother had to call 911. Dad was having chest pains. Again.

I should probably back up for a minute here. Eagle eyed readers will notice that we had a pretty big time jump between phone calls two and three. In that time, I graduated high school, graduated college, got a job, moved out. The Matrix sequels were released, 3D movies became a thing, and who can forget Jersey Shore? Also in that time, my dad’s heart issues became less holy shit, dad could die, we need to spend the night in the hospital! And more oh shit, dad went out in the ambulance again, do you think they can treat him at South Shore or is he going to be taken into the city this time?

In college, I lived at home and commuted to school. Often times, if my mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway when I got home from classes, that was my indicator that he’d gone out in the ambulance. The same continued when I started working, the only difference being that I was now returning from Quincy instead of Bridgewater.

It became this awkward merry-go-round where things never got better but they never seemed to get worse, and we all acted as if things were fine but deep down we all knew that something was very wrong and we were headed for inevitable catastrophe.

Friends, acquaintances, colleagues would all ask me in passing, “how’s your dad doing?” And I’d always respond, “he’s good!” Or “He’s ok.”  My answers were abrupt, leaving no room for further conversation. I’ve never hated a question so much in my entire life. I understand that it’s a polite thing to ask, but we’re at a graduation party, or we’ve bumped into each other in a grocery store, or we’re sitting next to each other at dinner, I do not want to be reminded of the thing that we’re all blissfully ignoring.

I never once watched the paramedics work on him or saw him wheeled out of the house, I just couldn’t do it. Maybe that’s one of those things that would’ve made it too real, would’ve shattered the illusion of ignorance.

On this November day in 2009, when the ambulance arrived and the paramedics walked in, I wandered down the hall to my old bedroom, now empty sans a playpen for my niece and nephew (ok, and for me that one time my friend gave me a ride home to Hingham instead of Quincy after a night out and I woke up in it, but that’s a story for another time). I wandered around the room, pacing in a way not dissimilar to the way I had when I was on the phone with Katie the summer before sophomore year, until I heard the rattling indicating that the paramedics were getting ready to bring my dad from the house out to the ambulance.

And just like that, I was alone in the house on Thanksgiving, surrounded by torn medical supplies.

The Fourth Phone Call

September 15, 2010.

I had called out sick from work on this day because the battery in the smoke detector in my bedroom was dead and it had been doing that incessant half-beep thing every minute or so for two nights straight. I was in said room (the landlord had finally come and replaced the battery during the day, thankfully) studying because I had an interview to be a Jack Daniels girl. (Yes, that’s right, I wanted to be one of those girls that hands out shots and swag at bars and liquor stores.)

Earlier in the day, my sister had texted me and said that dad had been taken out in the ambulance and things didn’t look good. But experience had told me that things would be fine. We’d had a scare in February where it was going to be touch and go for the weekend. It was, I guess, but he was fine.

Well, I guess fine is a relative term. He’d been in a medically induced coma for the majority of 2010.

He’d also gotten an LVAD (Left Ventricular Assisted Device, aka a Bridge to Transplant – that’s right folks, my dad was on the list for a heart transplant) in late 2009. (Grey’s Anatomy super-fans will recognize that as the device Denny – Izzy’s love interest from season 2 – has. Ironic that my dad’s name was also Dennis!).

I think my interview was supposed to be at 7.

It was somewhere in the 5 o’clock hour that I got the call from my sister. I remember her voice was soft and scratchy on the other side of the line.

“Hey.” I said, anticipating an update that things were fine. He was probably going to have to stay in Tufts for a while, again.

“Dad’s gone.”

Dad’s gone.

I don’t remember much else from that conversation. The plan was for all of us to meet at mom and dad’s. Mom had stuff to finish up at the hospital.

My mind immediately went to the things I needed to do: Cancel that interview. Call my actual boss to tell him that I couldn’t go to work the next day. Make sure someone put up an out-of-office for me. Were there any projects I was working on? I needed to tell people. Who should I tell? Would so-and-so be mad at me for telling this person before them? (Yes, that’s actually a thought I had at the time.) Also: was that fucking sweatshirt clean? (JK, I didn’t think about the sweatshirt this time!)

My mind was buzzing, and I couldn’t sit still, but I also couldn’t really seem to accomplish anything either.

I remember hearing the front door of our apartment open and my roommate walk in. I basically ran down the stairs to ambush my roommate Katie – the same Katie with whom I’d been on the phone when my dad had his first heart attack ten years previously – she turned and looked at me, knowing my behavior was off. I just blurted it out, “my dad died today.”

The ten years between my father’s first heart attack and his death were hard. They were filled with countless near misses, uncertainty, and pain. They were filled with years of watching someone who, in my eyes, could do anything become a shell of his former self. It was having to grieve for someone while they were still in front of you. 

This year, ten years since his passing, twenty since his first heart attack, feels like we’re closing a loop. Coming full circle on the grief wheel, if you will. It’s cliche, but I’ve heard it said grief is a process; in my experience, the process just started before the loss officially occurred. This second decade’s process feels calmer, more acceptance less denial.

In closing and in honor of my dad, I’ll leave with some immortal from The Boss:

Well now everything dies baby, that’s a fact

But maybe everything that dies, someday comes back