loss, grief, and what i learned on my summer vacation

I was going to post this last year after we got home from our trip. I’d get the kids back to school, detox from all that gelato, reflect on what I’d learned (and loved, and loathed) while traveling abroad with my husband and kids for two months. I wrote a good chunk, chose that photo of me in my floral dress and put it all aside for another day. Then disaster struck. Multiple disasters, actually. But with one phone call, the best year of my life turned into the very worst.

My father had fallen in a New York City subway station. That’s what my mother told me. She was passing on a message after getting a call from a stranger on my dad’s flip phone. This quick-thinking woman looked at his call log and saw that my mom’s number was the last one he’d dialed. My parents were still close nearly 40 years after they split. At the time my dad was visiting NYC from his transplanted home of Portland, Oregon, and staying with my mom, in the same apartment where I’d grown up.

My worried mother referred the woman to me. In our family, I’ve got a reputation for keeping a cool head, or pretending to, when things fall apart. Seconds later, my phone rang. It was the Good Samaritan. Turns out, a fall wasn’t the whole story. This kind woman had seen my dad looking like he was in distress on the subway platform. Though he’d quietly declined her offer of help as he held onto a metal gate next to the turnstiles, trying to steady himself, she and another bystander thoughtfully kept an eye on him. He looked precarious enough for the Good Samaritan to ask the subway booth clerk to call 911. While she was doing that, my dad went down. Gently, she told me. Not a crashing fall. No bleeding, no broken bones. He basically laid down on the floor of the subway platform where I’d waited for the downtown 1 train every day of high school and countless times before and after.

At the time, I didn’t know any of these details. Sitting in my kitchen about six miles north of the unfolding scene, I pictured a tumble down some stairs or one of his brief fainting spells caused by a weak heart. My father, 74 and stubbornly independent as ever, lived alone in Portland and traveled across the country more often than I did. He had battled health challenges all his life, including cardiac issues over the previous decade, but always emerged with doctors good-naturedly shaking their heads in amazement at his hardy constitution and miraculous recovery. He was proud of his track record beating the odds. Needless to say, I had gotten this kind of call before.

My father was in New York to squeeze in visits with his family on either end of a short trip to Washington, D.C., for the wedding of a close friend’s daughter. He was rushing to the Port Authority to catch a Greyhound bus when this all happened. I’ve thought of that bus, making its way down I-95 into the nation’s capital, his seat empty. I’ve thought about the person who was supposed to sit next to him. My dad would have made pleasant conversation while taking out his neatly packed lunch halfway through the four-and-a-half-hour trip. Maybe that person was happily surprised by the extra elbow room. I would’ve been. Never would someone guess that their missing seat mate was at that moment dying, surrounded by strangers.

My dad, Tony, a journalist and author, pictured before I came along. He was a stubborn, skeptical and solitary soul who spent much of his time pursuing solitary endeavors, like the many books he wrote.

Dad (here with me at the Bronx Zoo) was also a hopelessly social person who bloomed in the company of others. Especially his kids and, later, his grandchildren.

My dad had suffered cardiac arrest. Not to be confused with a heart attack, when blood flow to the heart is blocked, cardiac arrest is when the heart suddenly malfunctions and stops beating. Like an electrical short. Paramedics got his heart started again. But as a cardiologist would tell me days later, my father had essentially died on that subway platform. No breath. No heartbeat. His prognosis would depend on how much damage his body — and most importantly, his brain — had suffered during those long minutes without oxygen.

Next came some of the many horrors that can develop after blood stops pumping through the body for a time. He’d been resuscitated, but that period without oxygen reaching all his organs left him relying on a respirator to breathe. The respirator gave a red carpet welcome to infection after infection, including more than one pneumonia and a pretty rare bacteria (stenotrophomonas maltophilia, if you must know) that caused his lungs to begin to fail. Most crucially, that brain of his — the single part of my dad’s body that defined him: the writer, the listener, the obsessive meal planner, the purveyor of bad jokes — had measurable activity but could not organize itself enough for him to wake up, even after a medically induced coma was lifted. Without full and unrestricted use of that brain, my father would not have considered life worth living.

The next 25 days were a blur of medical ups and downs. So many tests. Some nurses so kind that I began to believe in angels. A few days of “cautious optimism” from doctors. A few hard talks with tissue-wielding physicians, including one who urged us to think about organ donation around Day 3. I was a mess but I have to admit, even while he was comatose, I got a lot of comfort from seeing my dad’s familiar long, tapered fingers resting on the white hospital sheet, touching his smooth skin, and watching his chest rise and fall — even if a respirator was doing all the work for him.

Almost a month after he “fell” in the subway, we let my dad go. My world blew apart again that day. Since then, all of our worlds have caught fire. Fear, frustration, uncertainty, anger, and grief accompanied a pandemic that turned everything upside down. Through it all, I gave silent thanks that I was able to be with my dad in that ICU for all those days — a certain impossibility once Covid-19 ravaged New York City. I said silent prayers for the hospital staff who had cared for my father and now, months later, were risking their lives and facing down hell every day. I had silent moments of gratitude that I didn’t have to worry about my dad dying from coronavirus. I’m pretty sure he would not have been a diligent mask-wearer.

My father loved my Summer of Rove blog. Especially this post, about the place in Tuscany where he took 12-year-old me and my little sister during the summer of 1988. He loved all but the blog’s name, which he strongly urged me to change. Instead of a play on “summer of love,” it reminded him of Karl Rove, the Republican strategist. (If you knew Dad, this acrobatic leap of weird logic will not surprise you.) He’s gone, but I want to keep going. He was a prolific writer, and I always admired his discipline and focus while sitting at home typing away with not much more than a hot mug of coffee on his desk and some ideas in his head, much like I’m doing now. I do plan to honor his wish and change that domain name (which now doesn’t make sense for a variety of reasons), but maybe don’t hold your breath on that.

My father and my sister at the Colosseum in 1988. He kept meticulous notes from our European road trip in little spiral-bound date books. He lent two of them to me 31 years later when I went with my family.

So in the spirit of finishing what I started, here are the bones of what I’d written after our summer of (not Karl) rove. It has all gained a new dimension during my winter of grief and our spring of lockdown:

Can you guess my biggest fear going into our trip? Not a plane crash (though if I’m being honest, that was up there). Nor was it sudden illness, or our decision to skip the travel insurance. Some of you have shared with me your own trepidations about traveling for an extended period with children: financial stress; cranky kids; the prospect of under- or over-planning.

No, no, and no. My deepest worry was … my family. Two months, five countries, 24/7 togetherness. Never, ever had I had this much uninterrupted time with these three people. (Maternity leave put me and the kids 1-on-1 for a few months each, but it’s so much different when you’re recovering from childbirth and just trying to keep a tiny human alive while sleeping very little.)

I love my children. I love them with such intensity that sometimes it feels like a physical ailment. A glance at a dirty little toe, the stroke of a plump cheek, the sight of a freshly scraped knee — these cause my heart to swell and ache at the same time. Yet somehow in the swirling working-mom whirlwind I’d created for myself, I’d become convinced that while I adored them fiercely, others were better equipped to care for them day to day. My love is unconditional. But do I like to get down on the floor and play Legos for extended periods? Or have a solid repertoire of home-cooked, kid-approved meals that I whip up on the reg? Am I a crafty mom who breaks out the glue gun on weekends — and have I ever tackled that crystal jewelry-making kit I bought my daughter? Not so much, and never. (We don’t even own a glue gun.)

I love my husband too, more today than when I married him 11 years ago. But I realized that OUR time together was mostly relegated to mornings and nights, weekends, and those whopping three weeks of annual vacation I would get: a beach trip here, a holiday visit there, a few long weekends at friends’ homes, and done. How would the four of us spend all this time together and maintain our sanity?

The answer, it turns out, is that I got to know my family better on our trip. I got to know myself better, too. Legos on the floor aren’t my thing, but oh how I love to talk to these kids, share a dinner table with these kids, run (literally) for the about-to-depart train, ferry or bus with these kids, and watch these kids make friends in foreign playgrounds even when no common language is spoken.

A few other things I learned:

* My son loves black licorice, Freddie Mercury and ping-pong.

* He does not like seeing me in a dress. Dresses are not part of my usual repertoire. When I stepped out in that floral frock at the top of this post, he cheerfully declared: “Mom, you look AWFUL!” I assumed he’d gotten his words adorably wrong. “Do you mean awesome, sweetie?” “No,” he said in his cute little voice. “AWFUL!”

* When he says his “sweet tooth hurts,” it’s best to stop laughing and look inside his mouth to find the gaping cavity that will require a root canal when we get back home.

* No matter how tough a day we are having, a playground — any playground — makes things better.

* My daughter might like free samples more than I do. I previously believed that was not humanly possible.

* She loves rollercoasters. In pretending to be brave with her, I’ve come to like them too. (Sort of.)

* She can put away a full afternoon tea like a grown-ass woman.

Scones and clotted cream at the Wolesley in London during afternoon tea. We ended our trip where it began, in the English capital.

Lamby and black licorice near Stockholm.

One final push onward, or at least upward, before we flew home in August 2019.

Obviously all of this being togetherness ended up a practice run for what would come half a year later. Now, after more than 3 months of quarantine in our 2-bedroom apartment, I have gotten to know these people even better than I did last summer. Ferry rides and playgrounds have been replaced by face masks and Zoom chats. My husband is great at getting down on the floor with Legos and cooking for the kids. And he is more patient with me than … I am. The children humored my attempts at home schooling, faithfully doodling with Mo Willems and making play dough with me until I mostly gave up and embraced the educational aspects of screen time. They’ve seen me weep big fat tears over my father, their gung-gung. They’ve watched both of their parents struggle under the weight of coronavirus fears, financial stress, uncertainty about the future, and cabin fever. But there’s no challenge we don’t believe we can face together.

The most important lessons I learned from my summer vacation, from our quarantine, from my father’s life and his death?

Life is short. And the world is big.

My dad with me and my sister around 1981.