He was laying in a small hospital bed in the ICU of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Tubes, tissues, and machines littered the room. Every few seconds I would squeeze his hand, and I promise you he’d attempt to squeeze mine back. These were my last moments with my father on January 2nd, 2016. As I sat, or stood, or paced, by his bedside I thought of one thing: my regrets.
My dad had been in and out of the hospital for many months by that time. He had been diagnosed with COPD, a lung disease. He had a terrible heart - one of the worst the surgeon had ever seen - and that morning he had suffered from an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Meaning his abdominal aorta, the largest artery in the abdominal, had swelled with blood and raptured.
We had no idea about the aneurysm until it happened, that’s usually how aneurysms work, however when I got the phone call about my dad’s condition I figured someone had gotten the story wrong. Like I said, he’d been in and out of the hospital for months due to his weak lungs, and due to the fact that both he and my mother kept smoking (a habit that drove me away from them in the first place).
My mother had been struck by a car at fourteen and was left with a brain injury, causing her to lose her short term memory and behave almost like a child. She was - and still is - an incredibly smart woman, however she often got things confused. For example she’d call and say things like “Your father had a stroke” “Your father had a heart attack” etcetera etcetera, and usually she was mistaken.
So I didn’t believe that my father had suffered from an aneurysm, and that while a surgeon was trying to close the artery my dad had suffered from a heart attack and didn’t recover. But soon enough I found out it was true.
My past with my parents is a complicated one: At the age of seven I was placed under a kinship guardianship: meaning someone (or someones) directly related to me (my aunt and cousin) took custody of me from my birth parents. It was all mutually agreed upon, and I even got to talk to a judge about it myself. My dad was an older parent, he had just turned forty-six when I was born. And my mother’s brain-injury made it nearly impossible for her to care for a child. Neither could my father really, having health problems of his own. I used to visit them every weekend. But I grew older and the weekend visits became less and less frequent until I simply wasn’t seeing them anymore.
That's what I'll always regret: I didn’t visit enough. I didn’t tell my dad I loved him enough. I didn’t thank him for making the sacrifices he made. And after he died, after the surgeon told me I had to take him off life support because he wasn’t going to come back - no matter how many times I thought he squeezed my hand - I thought I was going to drown in my regrets as well as my grief.
Several months after his death, I had a vivid dream. I was in my father's house, the trailer he had lived in since I was ten years old, everything was neat, clean, and orderly like it had been before my dad got too sick to clean (if you knew my father you knew he was a meticulously clean man; he often took two showers a day, swept and mopped the floors twice a week, and dusted furniture every other day) . My mother was there too, she was cooking - something she hasn’t been able to do for a long time - my boyfriend was with us. And my dad was happy. He was truly happy. It took me a moment to realize it was a dream, until my dad looked at me and said “You’re here for a hug aren’t you?”
A hug. That’s all I prayed for. I begged God, minutes after my father’s death, to allow me to hug him one last time, in a dream. I knew it wouldn’t be a real hug, but I wanted that dream hug more than I’ve ever wanted anything else in the world.
I got up and sat in his lap, like I used to when I was a little girl, and he hugged me tighter than he ever did before. It was real. I could feel him hugging me. He smiled at me and that smile told me everything - this was his heaven. He was finally happy and free of pain. In his heaven I was there, my mom was there, my boyfriend was there (my father really liked him, more than I thought possible).
When I woke up I understood that God was trying to soothe my pain and my regrets. I instantly felt better. I still have my regrets sometimes, I still cry, but with the help of my friends and family and with the memory of that dream, I’ve learned to let go of my regrets.
I’ve learned that my dad did know how much I loved him, I tried my hardest to help him in whatever way I could. I’ve learned that he knew how much I appreciated his sacrifices, I took advantage of them and I graduated high school, and soon I’ll graduate college all thanks to a sacrifice he made when I was seven.
No matter how you rationalize your regrets, consciously or subconsciously, I’ve learned it’s best to be prepared to experience some regret when you lose a loved one. No matter what, there will be some regrets. But with the help of the right people, and with the knowledge that a regret doesn’t have to be looked at as a missed chance or poor decision, we can learn to let regrets go, one at a time.
