Lonely Vigil

 

For the most part I was alone for the day. I awoke around 3a.m. and took over for Denise as she’d had a long shift. Textbook vigil. Dad was always a fighter – on the wrestling mats of Gardena High School, in and around the gridirons of football, in the boxing ring on the USS Point Cruz. His biggest fight, he lost. Smoking is a mother-effer to kick and he couldn’t and so we were on a vigil for the final count. Emphysema was the knockout punch that smoking threw at him and he couldn’t duck it though he fended it off as long as he could because he fought death up to his final few breaths.

With the exception of a bathroom break and a few moments to force myself to eat and stand outside to pray and be met by God’s Spirit, I stayed with him from the time I awoke until I helped carry him to the transport van and watched it roll down the driveway. We tried as best we could to keep him from being restless, as good as the uneducated can with drugs prescribed by people with M.D. after their names. I pictured the final fight scene in Rocky where he took a beating from Apollo Creed only my dad couldn’t block a punch nor throw one back and there was no referee to stop the fight, nobody but me in his corner to the throw in the towel. And I did.

Bob came by at some point in time and sat with us for a half an hour or forty minutes and we talked as he kept me company. He’d lost his own mom and had his own vigil not all that long ago. Denise stopped by from time to check on me and I told her I was okay and that I had it 'under control'. The struggle for a man in respiratory distress is violence contained in one rented hospital bed. I’d lied. That’s what big brothers do. But I wasn’t okay and I knew it but by the end of the vigil I did have it under control. God’s Grace is sufficient.

Mom came over for the last couple of hours and was there with me at the end, the two of us holding dad’s hand. She had her own massive fight going on while we helped her struggle to regain her strength and endurance. Throughout the day I played various renditions of Amazing Grace for him, mom liked that. The end finally came with the three clearest and easiest breaths I’d seen him take in years. It was a quiet end to a lonely vigil.

Now I’ve just told you about people coming by and sitting with me so how could this be lonely? It was lonely by choice. I could take in their comfort only so deeply as to get me to the next moment. If I had allowed myself to connect as much as my soul screamed for I would have lost it and not been up to the task for dad, or have been there for Denise or Bob or Mom or Stacey...

It has been 537 days since this happened, why bring it up now? Because I sit removed by a couple of short miles from friends and family on their own vigil and because I love them so much that I am on vigil as well, only somewhat removed.

These are the cruelest of vigils, the meanest of fights, when we have given ourselves over to inevitability. How I hate these things. I badly want to spare them this waiting, sit in their place for them. However, I am not allowed and must suffer my own portion as best I can and pray they have peace on the front lines of their particular fight. I grieve already for my friend, his family, and his friends.

This probably sounds like a lot of unbelief and lack of faith and that is correct. It is. And so the only thing I can really say is Maranatha, come quickly Lord Jesus.

In His grip,

jerry