Enemy

My dad told me he once wanted to die. He said he prayed to God to relieve him of his suffering, one way or the other, but it turned out there was much more for him yet in store. There were days that multiplied into weeks and into months. There was solitary confinement in a hospital bed unable to move, to speak, to eat, to even breathe. What imagery of fire and brimstone could compare to the reality of the hell that was present there in that sterile room, his own body a prison cell. Such overwhelming loneliness for a mind caged in fear and despair. How could I imagine what that must've been like. It would be an insult to even try. 

Dad couldn't quite figure out where he caught it from, the virus. It almost didn't matter. You can take every advised precaution, follow every sanctioned guideline, and it not make any difference. This microscopic enemy had traveled halfway across the world and somehow found its way to him. An enemy we all underestimated. Before this I thought I was well-informed, that I was responsible and lead by compassion, but I wasn't. I'm not. I am selfish, hypocritical, apathetic. I have traded loving sacrifice for convenience, and this global catastrophe has held up a dark mirror to it. But you never think it will come to your doorstep until it does, not really. True disaster, when things go from bad to worse and keep on going. 

He was diagnosed with covid-19 on November 13th. Three weeks later the doctors said he only had hours left to live. 24 to 48 they said, and they thought they were being generous. Pneumonia had set into his lungs and his kidneys had failed 60%. He was heavily sedated on a rotating contraption of a bed, hooked up to a machine that breathed for him. Unaware. Alone. That night was the worst of my life. In my arrogance I thought I might be prepared for the loss of a parent, something I'd have to face eventually, but hearing the news shattered my world. Not now, and not like this. The final summation of his sixty-eight years on this earth as a statistic, as another nameless body thrown upon the mass grave of half a million others. And I would never see him again, speak to him, touch him. So sudden, unjustified. He didn't have any health issues prior, and nobody could give a straight answer to say why the virus had been so devastating to him when so many others could shrug it off, the rest of our family included.

But he lived, defying their prognosis. Thank the Lord for ventilators and vaccines and every other modern miracle through which His fingers might catch more from falling. I plead to Him that night with a kind of desperation I've never known before. Wailing like a little kid again, pouring out years' worth of affection and grief from a place deep and defenseless. Where every smug skepticism goes out the window and you're begging, practically commanding for any kind of divine intervention. I recorded it and had dad's nurse play it in his ears even though he wasn't conscious to hear it. It was meant to build up a faith that me and my mom and my sister could stand on. Blind faith. My sister said she could hear dad's voice in mine over the phone. I was just trying to keep her from breaking, to encourage and to give hope, even if I didn't know I had it myself. 

When I eventually got the chance to see him in person I was nervous. I had talked to him on the phone and seen him through Facetime calls and ground-level windows, but I was oddly apprehensive about sharing the same space with him again. So much time had passed already, and I didn't know how I would take seeing and accepting the hard truth of his condition. But he needed to see me, speak to me, touch me. And I needed it too. I had to ask a nurse to find his ICU room. As I walked in I saw a withered old man in the bed, his white beard scraggly beneath thin and unwashed hair, plugged into a litany of beeping machines. This wasn't my dad, this artificially alive husk of a man I vaguely recognized. No, not him. Must've gotten the wrong room. But he saw me, and I saw him, and we held hands and shed tears. I tried to speak life to him, to tell him that Jesus was still in the room there with him, but words are paltry and inadequate devices. He was crying. 

But he is home now, praise be. After five months and one-hundred fifty days our long cold winter has ended, though he still has a long way to go. Too long. His insurance denied him the further care he needed, forcing him home and tempering the joy there was in his return. The system is broken in ways you can only see when you're in these dire circumstances. Now mom is his full-time caretaker; she dresses his oozing bed sore and injects liquids into his feeding tube and keeps the oxygen flowing through his cannula tube. He can only walk a few steps before getting winded and dizzy. I've been there to wrap my arms around him and feel his emaciation. I've seen him cough mucus out of the tracheal hole in his throat and blood run from the catheter down his leg. And I have to remind myself that every moment is a precious gift of God that a thief had come so close to stealing. Do not close your ears, do not avert your eyes. Life is pain and struggle and loss. But there is a love that overcomes, that transcends and redeems.