This is a hard post.
As my brother Scott alluded to in his Eulogy at Dad’s Celebration of Life, Post-It Notes were an endearing part of home life and how Dad kept track of the myriad thoughts within his brilliant ten-steps-ahead-of-everyone-else’s mind. He let no fleeting thought go to waste, they were pure potential energy. In fact, he wrote about this himself in one blog post: https://tothineownselfbetrue.ca/2019/07/07/staying-organized-post-it-notes/. It is very painful for me to share that even in the hospital he used them, to track medicine, lists of concerns for doctors, and unfortunately his symptoms and suffering.
The morning of his quintuple bypass and heart valve surgery, Mom and I met him early in the morning to wait for the surgery pick up. We tried to keep spirits light. I remember telling him how he was in the best care possible. How great it will be to have the surgery behind us all and be on the other side. I told him on a scale of concern, and this coming from worst case scenario Heather, I was not worried. We were all laser focused on optimism and the future. spoke about looking forward to finally making it past the rubicon and onto a journey to healing.
At one point that morning Dad picked up a yellow post-it note from the hospital bed table and pressed it into mine. I glanced at it, and put it in my pocket. We passed the nervous time away with further light talk and my brother Scott joining us brought additional joy and added hopefulness to the morning. The core four – the “fab four” of our family would face this together and make it through, leaning on our collective strength and love.
It was days later I found the note in a pocket. Days after unsuccessful attempts to stop sedation, come off the ventilator and into full consciousness. The note is below (I apologize, in this picture it is stained with my tears):
“If you can stay warm, you shall not perish from the cold”.
Reading it a first time, it seems deceptively simple. But my Dad was a man of great depth. I knew it meant so much more.
In the days that followed I would stay with him during the most impossibly hellish, darkest, coldest nights in ICU. I have never witnessed such levels of suffering. I filled the space with warmth and light and hope and love and beautiful music as best I could. I read messages of love from my friends around the world wishing him well and spoke for hours until hoarse about current events, family loves, passions, and plans and hopes for the future.
As the lights would dim and evening turned to night in ICU, a bone-chilling cold would descend, the likes of which I’d never felt before. One night a respiratory therapist working in the shadows saw me shivering and brought me a warmed blanket. An angel of mercy amongst many cold, (understandably) hardened and (some) fundamentally defective night staff. She whispered apologetically “nobody here knows why it gets so cold at night, not even the staff” and disappeared back into the darkness. I later spotted staff in coat and scarf in the hallway.
During that time in cardiac ICU and in the time following July 29, pain and loss and grief has brought winter to my heart and spirit. I’ve lost my connection to my own life source and spark within, in turn that connection to the life breath and energy of the universe.
I continue to struggle with the mysteries of Dad’s last note. I know that within this note is the road map for survival but there is a puzzle wrapped inside. How do I stay warm and keep from perishing from the cold in a world without him in it…