Beech Tree News Network

My brother called at four a.m.last Monday morning.  My father had had a heart attack and was on a ventilator at Baptist East in Louisville.  The medical team was giving him meds to stabilize his blood pressure in order to get him to the point that he could withstand open-heart surgery.  By the time I got to the hospital, he was unconscious.
    The waiting area of the ICU was packed with friends and family.  There are seven children in my family and several grandchildren.  Some of my aunts and uncles were there, as well as friends of Dad’s.  We took turns going into Dad’s room to check on him.  He was unresponsive.  I watched the green, blue and red lines that represented his vital signs.  Although I couldn’t understand the information they registered, I did understand they indicated my dad was still alive.  That’s all that mattered to me.
    Over the course of the day and well into the evening, we kept vigil.  There were several times my brother, Mark, led us all in prayer; prayer that asked if possible, Dad could be spared; prayer that affirmed we knew God knew what was best.  Mine is a faith-oriented family.
    My sister, Monaca and her husband, Douglas, arrived from Indiana at eight-thirty that night.  A couple of times, the medical staff called my mom and the whole family to his bedside because they believed Dad was slipping away.  Still, Dad clung to life.
    At nine-thirty, the attending physician asked to speak to Carl, the older of my two brothers.  She told him they had done all they could do.  Dad’s liver was in shock, and his kidneys were failing.  Keeping him on a ventilator was prolonging the inevitable, she said.  Carl and Mark talked to Mom, and she made the toughest decision she has ever had to make—to let her husband of fifty-three years leave this earth without her.
    Despite our differences, I have always recognized the great love story that was my dad’s and my stepmother’s.  They were each other’s world, true companions who thought and acted as one.  I watched as she made that decision, truly expecting her to collapse onto the floor, but she didn’t.  She stood with the family she and Dad had raised together outside Dad’s room as they removed the ventilator. 
    The nurse on duty told Mom if Dad was going to be responsive before he passed, it would be in the brief time right after they removed the ventilator.  Sure enough, Dad moved his hand as if to motion us back into the room.  We got Mom to the bedside as quickly as we could.  He squeezed her hand and tried to open his eyes but didn’t seem to have the strength.  She kissed his face and told him she loved him.
    I don’t know which of my siblings said it first, but someone said, “I love you, Daddy,” and soon the whole room erupted into a chorus of, “I love you, Daddy.”  It was one of the most beautiful moments I have ever experience.  As I looked around the room at my brothers and sisters, my sisters-in-law, my brothers-in-law, and my nieces and nephews, I realized that we were this man’s legacy.  We were what he left to this world, representatives of what he thought and believed; his faith in God, his ability to make the impossible happen, his compassion for the down-trodden, his inexhaustible sense of humor.
I saw my father take his last breath.  I heard the sound of the flat line on his monitor.  I watched as the nurse checked his heart with her stethoscope one last time, then I cried as I have never cried before.