Nicole Sweeney

“They told me there’s a 0.8% chance of failure.” My dad shared this over the phone, a statistic meant to reassure me. Three days later, he was dead.

It has been three weeks since then and also three years and also three hours. I don’t know that you can ever be ready for this kind of loss but for the record: I was not ready. I was ready for the 99.2% world. I was ready to adjust my life for a month or so to help him recover. I was ready to help take care of him because I loved him and would do whatever he needed. I was not ready for the 0.8% world. I am still not ready to live with this. I am still not ready to keep going when he cannot.

My dad went to the hospital on a Tuesday for cardiac catheterization, and they found that he needed a bypass surgery. There is only one surgeon in all of mid-Missouri who is capable of doing that surgery, so an ambulance took him 30 minutes away to a new hospital, where he would spend the final days of his life.

We talked in the hospital about how, statistically speaking, the most dangerous part of this process was the 30 minutes he spent in that ambulance. Probability dictated that the greatest threat to his life was the 30 minutes of highway-driving in a very large vehicle. There was less than 1% chance that we were wrong.

In the three weeks that have been three years and also three hours, I keep thinking about where in my dad’s recovery he is supposed to be. His “elective” surgery kept getting pushed back for emergencies. On Thursday, the day before his surgery, a social worker came and gave me all this paperwork explaining who we could turn to for help with his recovery. His surgery finally took place on a Friday and he was meant to come home on either Wednesday or Thursday of the following week. Those were the days of his visitation and service, respectively.

Somewhere on the dining room table, buried under old photos, and condolence cards, and ignored mail, there is a scrap of paper where my mom and I mapped out our upcoming plans. We made sure one of us would always be home this month. We read the information packets. We made such thorough plans for the 99.2% of possible outcomes. The hospital gave us no packets, no social worker consults for the 0.8%.

This week, I should be moving his extra monitor and equipment upstairs so that he can sit at the dining room table during his recovery. Just a few hours each day, if he’s up to it. Instead, my little brother has been sitting at that table because he is in town to be with my mom. (In the 99.2% of possible alternate realities, my brother was moving into his new apartment this week.) I can hear the muffled sounds of his calls from where I have been working each day, and every now and then I catch myself thinking it’s my dad. A distant echo from the universe I thought I’d be living in right now.

Because of course we have to just keep going. The 0.8% reality still dictates that we have to go back to our jobs and our lives and all the other bullshit that I suppose is meant to fill the hours and weeks and years of this new existence.

He was 69, which is old enough that I suppose few people will describe him as having “died young” but it is young enough that I know so many people who are older. I am old enough to have friends who have been through this, but only a handful. I have so many elderly relatives and neighbors. So many people in my life who maybe should have been able to talk me through this moment, but can’t because they have not yet lost either of their (older) parents.

At some point in the interminable space where we sat in a hospital room with my dad’s lifeless body, my mom called her own father. She wanted to talk to her dad because she didn’t know what else to do but then she looked up and made eye contact with me and said “but you’ll never get to do that again.“

There was a 99.2% chance that I would get to call my dad again. The very phone call where he told me this number was, in fact, my last phone call with my dad. Don’t worry, there’s only a 0.8% chance we’ll never do this again.

My parents got married on June 6, 1987 and 10 months later I came into the world. I always loved the fact that for two months my age matched the age of my parents’ marriage. My dad just missed his 35th wedding anniversary, which means that the numbers will no longer grow in lock step as they have always done. I am 34 and June 6th has come and gone. OK sure, it’s close enough — we can call it 35. Put this off another year. Delay the inevitable. But even so: next year I will turn 35 but they will never, ever turn 36.

The hardest part to live with, right now, is the anger. Picking a “hardest part” is an utterly absurd exercise because of course the answer is: all of it. The hardest part is to keep on living when someone else does not. The hardest part is the seismic disruption. The hardest part is that my very existence — the sum of all my hours and weeks and years — now has a gaping hole in it. All my remaining best days will have an asterisk beside them. See footnote: “she thought about calling her dad to tell him and then the day was a little less good.”

But the anger is hard because I can feel it changing me more than any other feeling. It’s the anger and bitterness and resentment I feel at all the other lives that keep going. It’s the rage I feel at people celebrating a 70th wedding anniversary when my parents just got cheated out of their 35th. Death is inevitable, and that happy couple neither stole my dad nor had any power to give us more time, but none of that matters because it just feels so infuriatingly unfair.

Both of my mom’s parents and my dad’s step-mother were all present at his funeral. 3/5 grandparents outlived my father. And yes, of course they should have come. But also: they shouldn’t have been there. There is no way around how absolutely sick and selfish it is to say “it should have been someone else” but I feel absolutely sick and selfish and, in my heart of hearts, I know that I would make that deal without blinking. I would make that deal and carry the weight of that choice and never think twice about it.

Maybe in the 99.2% of alternate realities I am a better person. Maybe even in the rest of the 0.8%. Maybe this is the only one where I have to live with that truth about myself.

Of course I am still the sum total of the 34 good years I had with the very best dad. I am still the product of everything he ever taught me about airplanes and computers and travel and road trips and how to appreciate people for precisely who they are instead of who you might want them to be. But I am also the person who lost that support, and it’s impossible for that not to change me.

I like myself a little less and the only person who might have helped me come to terms isn’t here to do that.

I want to make this tidy and clean and tell you how I am getting through it, but that kind of cleanliness doesn’t have a place in the 0.8% reality. In the world where three weeks is three years is three hours, I am bitter and angry and devastated because someone else’s improbable failure cost my family our entire reality.

I don’t know what comes next. Who we become next. How we let go of the 99.2% of alternate realities we won’t get to live in. I don’t think we will get to let go. I think that’s just a weight in our pockets that we carry now. A heaviness that stretches on forever.

I wish I had something kinder or gentler to say — for his sake, because I know he would want me to. My dad, who I loved so much, hated conflict and discontent, and was always looking for the fastest route to harmony and happiness. He hated movies that didn’t have a happy ending. He would have hated this story.