Part 6 (Saturday & Sunday): The Aftermath

At some point during the last 11 minutes of possible brain activity, my mother left the room. My husband might have been floating around. The angels could have been fully visible and screaming further instructions or warnings, but the only thing I could focus on was my father. I was locked on his face as the minutes went by. One of his pupils dilated and the other did not. I have since learned that this symptom is called Anisocoria and can be a “symptom of serious medical problems.” Also, certain cats are born with this feature, and Marilyn Manson does it to look cool, which I suddenly resented.

My mother was in shock in her bedroom sitting quietly on her bed. Nina was in the kitchen gathering medical supplies. Mike came back in the guest room with my dad’s body and I fell fully apart, wailing “I need to make sure my mom is okay,” which is ironic since my mom was keeping her cool and I was a basket case after all the horrible days of keeping it together. I tried to stand up but I am fairly certain Mike was just keeping me from crumbling to the ground. I wailed biblically.

I got in bed with my dad’s dead body and clutched him. I knew that after this I could never hug him again. I understand why in crime scenes, cops are always pulling away frantic, screaming loved-ones. In some ways, the alive-person is in denial. There might be something he still needs. There might be even just one cell of him that would like some comfort. I am sure that the medical community could give me clearer picture, but for reasons I feel are complete bullshit, I was never given this picture during my 13 years of public school education. I am left with handfuls of arbitrary details, like a person’s hair or finger nails kept growing. Upon writing this, I have come to find out that even this is not actually true — hair just looks longer as a person becomes more dehydrated. Death, however, is not like a lightning bolt. Instead, death is a series of events. The difference seemed obvious in the moment, but also shocking.

I talked to him, but I don’t remember what I said. I cried and cried and cried. It was around midnight. In the moment, I realized I was laying in bed with a corpse. I thought if “Another 48 Hours” (or in this case a less-violence-based, boring version of the show where people die of cancer) was doing a reenactment, I, as an audience member, would have agreed with the lead police-detective that hugging my dead dad was bizarre behavior.

“It didn’t feel strange at the time,” I would explain to the detective. “A dead person doesn’t stop being the person you love.”

“But he couldn’t hear you. He had been dead for 15 minutes.”

“Yes, but I felt like I could hear him,” I would tell the police detective. He would exit the room and tell his partner that I was an unreliable personality going forward. Then, they would drive around drinking burned coffee and driving through socially-disadvantaged neighborhoods.

They would be wrong.

I went in my mom’s room. She was sitting on the bed. “I am like a stone,” she said.

“You’re just in shock.”

“I was like this when Sarah almost drowned. What is wrong with me?”

“You are good in a crisis,” I told her. “It’s a really good quality.”

She paused, “…what do we do now?”

“We need to call someone from the church to put him into his priesthood robes. I think it needs to be priesthood holders.”

Before all of this, I used to say a lot of sassy shit about Mormons. I was raised in the church my whole life, but fell out of love with it around 15 as an angsty youth. As a little girl, I’d held up the church on a pedestal and, as I tried to climb onto the pedestal of my faith in my teen years, the structure came crashing down on top of me. By 16 my faith was gone. I was afraid that the God I didn’t believe in wouldn’t like me, and I was afraid my family, who I did believe in, wouldn’t love me anymore. I lied about my beliefs (or lack thereof) to my family who, end the end, didn’t judge me at all. The transition from curious, proud Mormon 12-year-old to bitter ex-Mormon 17-year-old was harrowing. That having been said, the Mormons are a particularly supportive people with their round-the-clock-willingness to bring meals, drive people to and from the airport, and dress a dead body in the middle of the night according to their customs. I can take issues with their politics or their doctrine all I want, but theirs is a spirit I admire.

“Jim Smith said we could call anyone. He said that anyone from the church would be honored to help.” Jim Smith was one of my father’s church-best-friends. He is a mechanic with a wicked sense of humor. He and his wife Dina had been perpetually available during the last year and a half to cheer up my dad, make us food, and fix things that broke.

“Let’s just call Jim Smith.” Poor Jim Smith, I thought. He was casually helping us make a plan, and instead, he’s going to have to get wake up in the middle of the night, find two other priesthood dudes, and dress my dad in his outfit.

I went back in the room and Nina was there. I gave her the rundown. “Three priests are coming over and they’re going to put a ceremonial outfit on my dad.”

“That’s wonderful,” she told me.

“I don’t know when they’ll be here. Here is his shirt. We’re allowed to put this one on.”

“We should do it. Once rigor mortis sets in, it is going to be really hard to dress him,” she informed me.

I was glad to be helpful again. Being helpful is much easier than swimming in your own choking sadness. Nina cut my dad’s catheter tubes and helped me get him dressed. We rolled him side to side to put a white, button-up shirt on him. I buttoned the buttons. I put a towel over his mouth upon Nina’s professional advisement. At this point, he was just a body. He was heavy in the way that a three year old can make themselves impossible to pick up by just going completely limp. He seemed too heavy for his size. Nina showed me the trick of rolling him from side to side instead of trying to push him up. Nina went downstairs to continue her work.

I noticed his robes on the bed. I thought to myself “what if I just started putting them on him? That way, when the priesthood gets here, they won’t have to do much.”

“Don’t fool around with those,” I felt my dad say, and I thought “oh, sorry,” as I left the room.