We were in Dublin, Ireland, having just awakened from a jet-lagged midday nap. This was a family trip, planned for months by my wife and me for my brother and his wife, a friend who had lost her husband, and one of my four sisters. Another sister remained behind in Chicago, and the other two lived north of Galway, but had taken the train over to Dublin to meet us and spend a few days in the city before all of us headed west to their homes and the real heart of our vacation.

It was the Monday after Easter, a bank holiday in Ireland, and nothing but pubs and taxies were operating. When my Ireland sisters arrived, we were just about recovered from the flight, having napped and showered. Our mother was in a hospital in Muncie, Indiana, scheduled for a routine gall bladder procedure earlier that day and, once we are all together in our room, my sisters urged me to call and see if we could talk to her. I had arranged to call my Muncie based sister-in-law and my brother who I guessed were bedside around then, and my sister-in-law answered on the first ring. The tremble in her voice hinted my worst fear and that feeling of stepping off a ledge from a great height rushed toward me.

My mother was gone. My wife saw the shock on my face as I absorbed the tearful words of my sister-in-law from the other side of the ocean. As I stammered what I heard to the others gathering in our room, my sister’s legs went out from under her. My wife did what she was born to do, and which she does better than anyone, which was to give comfort to those around her. The gaiety of a joyful family reunion spun into a chaos of disbelief, bewilderment, a hundred questions. The next few days were a blur of last-minute travel arrangements, tearful phone calls and a coming home to be all together. It was April, 2004.

———

I was eighteen, and was sleeping in the back bedroom of the two-flat we lived in on the west side of Chicago. I was between colleges and was working as an entry-level guy in the newspaper printing plant below the Chicago Tribune. I had been thrown from the languid pace of the college freshman into the world of hardworking, middle aged, tough men and there had been no orientation session. The work paid exceptionally well, but the hours were brutal and the environment somewhere between downright unhealthy and medieval. Up until that point in my life, it had been the hardest I had ever worked. The army would up the ante later, but I didn’t know that then.

Somewhere around 3 a.m. my mother woke me, clearly panicked. I woke my older brother, and together we ran into the living room, where my father lay on the floor on his back. He was wearing his usual nighttime summer wear, boxers and a white t-shirt. His eyes were fixed toward the ceiling, not focused, as if he were looking far beyond the plaster layer that was eight feet above him. A look of almost amused surprise was on his face.

I was working on pure adrenalin, scared, but not paralyzed. My brother had been in the army and had learned something of first aid and perhaps emergencies. He knelt down next to our dad and began mouth to mouth resuscitation. My mother had found a bottle of whisky (old Irish remedy, I guess) and poured a small glass of it into his open mouth. It ran out the corners of his mouth and onto his chest and then to the floor.

I straddled his chest and had my hands on his heart, which was beating wildly, as if it wanted to get out of his body. I felt it literally banging inside his chest for however long I can’t remember, and then a hesitation, two weaker beats, then nothing. A few moments later he gave up what I later learned was the “death rattle”, a sort of final rush of mottled air in the lungs, tinged by the smell of the whiskey. His big frame seemed to partially collapse under me. My father was gone. It was July, 1968.

——-

I have reflected on these two experiences of loss many times over since then, and especially my proximity to the two events. In the case of my mother, death reached out over 3,600 miles to touch me with its electric shock. In my fathers’ case, death had to reach only a few inches from his face. Same shock. Yet many years later, my personal proximity matters not at all, except as good stories.

I have shared an abbreviated version of these two stories only a few times, and usually only with those grieving for the loss of someone close and that grief aggravated by their not having been there to share the goodbye moment. I have shared the stories in hopes of easing that part of the pain for them. Did it help? I don’t know. I talk a lot and maybe it seemed like just so much more talk to them. Or maybe talk wasn’t what was needed at that time.

I only know that as time works its magic, when I ponder how blessed I was to have those two people in my life and as my parents, it’s the thousand little memories, the good stories, the little lessons and kindnesses they left in their wake that grow in importance and meaning. Where I was when the gift of their lives went away from where I was at that moment drifts into insignificance. Goodbye will always be goodbye, but the smiles remain. And the gratitude.