Excerpt: The Vortex

From 7 Days:

I recently read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. An amazing read, on so many levels. With just about every passage I related my experience in the death of my father to her experience in the death of her husband. The parallels were not always the same, yet even in the differences, there was comfort in familiarity. One of the parallels this happened with was something she called "the vortex effect."

The vortex of thoughts that drift us from memory to memory, linking the present to the past, to the further past, ultimately separating us from the reality of the present we're sitting in. I guess it happens that way in a trauma but that’s not exactly how it was for me.

After my mother died I had dreams of it all being a joke—I could forgive the bad joke, the inappropriateness of faking her death, if only she would come back and say that’s what it was. But with my father it was never like that.

Where Joan Didion's vortexes were post-trauma, mine were pre- and mid-trauma. I think about my father sometimes, but I don’t get caught up in thinking he’s still here. I don’t get caught up in wondering when he’s coming back. My mother’s death taught me that they don’t come back. They never come back.

While my father was dying, I prayed for his healing. I prayed for him to get better. I prayed for him to be well. I prayed for his pain to be gone. And even in all that, I never prayed for him to live longer. There was an innate sense that he would not live longer; that he would die soon, sooner than he expected, and all I wanted was for him to be in peace. In order to bring that peace about, I prayed for my father to die. 

The vortex I ended up in was the guilt of praying for his death before it came. I did not want his pain to go on. I did not want to take care of him. I did not want to see the look in his eye of shame in not being able to take care of himself. I did not want to know what he was once capable of and pity him for the state he was in. 

These are not the thoughts a daughter should have about her father. 

I sat for hours at a time, lost in an inner battle of what I should and shouldn't think about my father's death. I wanted to believe everything would be fine. I wanted to believe that his prayers to God for a miracle healing would be answered. I wanted to believe that I was living in a third dimension and would soon find the tunnel back to the world where my father would not be buried at age fifty-five.

I have not yet found that tunnel.

These hours, minutes, seconds spent in the vortex were snapped only by reality, often by a simple peripheral notation of a car passing by, a knock at my office door, the ring of my cell phone. And there I was, in the reality of life moving on while I quietly mourned a life with my father on this side of the tunnel.