The Life Givers
The Life Givers – Remembering Tom, 30th in a 30-piece series
My sister-in-law, Samantha, and I were talking about blogging the other day. I mentioned the 30-piece series about my dad and referenced having completed it. She said, ‘I thought you had one left”. I was quite sure I had done 30, but I just checked. 29. You were right, Sam. I am glad someone is keeping me honest! Thank you.
Well, as usual, divine timing. Because today is filled with lots of heart felt memories of my dad. A perfect way to end my 30-piece series, though it will not be the end of anything, really. Just a goal I accomplished. I have found that through writing, I get to keep my relationship with my father. Like my dear friend, Kathie, who recently became a widow wrote in her blog this week “I have decided that this journey of ours will continue…for now it is enough to believe that somehow our decisions to love can continue.” I realized, we can continue to love in any relationship, with the living or the dead. We can love in the way that is just right with that being and in that time. And for me and my dad, it is through my writing.
So – here it is.
Thanks for the inspiration, dad. I prefer you were here instead of writing memories of you. But, next best thing, and that’s sometimes what is needed.
Today is July 7th, 2021. 18 years ago, this evening, my father beat the odds (some pretty serious odds) and walked out of University Medical Center, Tucson AZ, with a broken, but beating heart. He had suffered a massive cardiac event 10 days earlier on June 27th. A blood clot dislodged and clogged a main vessel to his heart. As good Irish luck, or fate, or chance would have it, he was sitting in the waiting room as a new patient at the cardiologist’s office when he turned gray, collapsed, and was without a pulse. The staff defibrillated him in the elevator on the way up to surgery. They kept enough blood flowing to give life until they could bypass his vessel. But there was so much damage to his heart, they told us the chances were grim that he would make it.
I was nine months pregnant.
It was my due date for my first baby, my dad’s first grandchild. My stepbrother, Rich, rang. We love each other and occasionally chat, but a call from him was odd. “Farrah, he said, my mom is going to be pissed that I called you, but I know you need to know, its your dad…” She didn’t want me to know because I was about to pop, and my dad was on life support with a balloon pumping his heart. That is about as bad as it can be, without already being dead. And I knew it.
My birth story for Liam always begins with this story. It is as much a part of his birth as pain, pushing, surrender and joy. It might actually be the main thread that led to his cesarean birth. There was no way I was going into labor with my dad on life support, 3000 miles across the country. The physiology of labor is a primal map, and our bodies follow it like the good humans they have evolved to be. Fear, anxiety and its undercurrent, adrenaline, are in direct competition with oxytocin for receptor sites in smooth muscles (like the ever-essential uterus at that moment in my life). When I teach childbirth preparation classes, I sometimes use this story (not as my own, but “once, I knew a mom” kind of story), to share how incredibly our bodies respond to what is happening in our world, even if we wish it to be different. You see, evolution made it so that we cannot go into labor when we are afraid. I mean, what if our tribe was in battle, or a tiger was near? We had to get somewhere safe to give birth, just like all mammals. And though I may have been physically safe, my body did not know the difference. Fear is fear is fear is fear. I did not want him to die, and I wanted to be there. I couldn’t get on a plane to be with him, I couldn’t fix it, and I couldn’t do anything except get on the phone with the nurses every two hours around the clock and wait. Wait for my dad to pull through, or not, and wait for my baby. With high levels of adrenaline zipping through my veins at probably the same rate that the nurses were giving it IV to my dad, oxytocin didn’t have a fighting chance.
Six days later my dad came off life support. His room was filled with photos, cards, notes, and signs that we had made and sent. There was a photo of my Buddha belly (my nickname for baby bump because it looked like the Buddha’s belly) and the ultrasound pics. He was in the ICU another day or 2 getting pep talks from the staff, then to the cardiac unit, some rehab and miraculously, actually miraculously, he walked out of that hospital, where I spent hundreds of hours training as a nurse just a few years before. What must it be like for a team of medical professionals to say to you “hey dude, you were dead, we brought you back, as far as practical medicine is concerned, you really shouldn’t be alive, but here you are.” That has got to be a surreal experience.
So here is the crazy, labor physiology part of the story. He walked out of the hospital, got home, and settled. We had a good chat on the phone. I started looking at flights. We still were not sure if he would fully recover, and his life was feeling very fragile to me. I wanted to get there asap, but knowing he was home, alive and safe… even in this moment as I write, I sigh with relief. Visceral memory.
I went to bed around 11 PM. I woke up at 3 AM. In labor.
Adrenaline – poof. Oxytocin – incoming.
Liam’s labor was long, hard, very painful, very much in my sacrum and tailbone. I did keep eating for those 10 days. And he was already a good size since I had indulged in brownie sundays on a pretty regular basis throughout the pregnancy. Generally, pushing is what ultimately gets those humans out, but it was not bringing him any closer to me. “Why Buddha?” I said to him (not knowing he was a him for sure, but that is what everyone told me, so I mostly assumed it. “What am I doing wrong?” was my mantra. It was fucking rough. Fear of hurting him with oxygen deprivation further complicated my thoughts and the experience of my body. Being a nurse makes having a baby slightly more complicated I think, we just know too much. And that point, I had seen lots of bad outcomes.
22 hours in – time for surrender. The one thing I wanted to avoid, a cesarean birth, was the thing I was going to have to do to get this human into the world. My one forbidden thing. There will always be one thing in birth, that must be surrendered, for the baby, and the mother to be born. For life to be given. There were many for me ultimately, beliefs about myself as a woman, about the power of positive thinking, about asking for and receiving help. And so, surrender I did. And off we went to the operating room, 12 days and 3000 miles from my father’s time on the table. Except he was coming back into the world, and Liam, was just entering it.
Liam called me “life giver” today and realized as I started thinking about his birth and my dad, that both were given life in the operating room. Yes, I am Liam’s mom, and of course I gave him life, but his life, was in part, given by others. Both he and my dad were given life on an operating room table, with help, with bright lights and machines, with scalpels and skilled fingers, with determination and love. With surrender.
My family kept my dad updated. Liam was born at 1:21 AM on July 9th, my mother’s birthday. No one guessed I would go that long past my due date, but there I was. I was so relieved that Liam was out and ok. His poor head had been quite squished, and I had told my mom as they wheeled me on the stretcher into the operating room, “his head is going to look really bad, don’t be alarmed, it will be ok.” What a good nurse I was, taking care of my own family like that as I was about to be sliced for his entry. He was good and stuck. I tried real, real, real hard. And if I did not know that already, his head sure told the story. It was bad, but after a couple days, it was ok.
And so was my dad. I flew out to Tucson five weeks later, wearing Liam in a baby wrap for the whole journey. People behind me did not know I had an infant until we walked off the plane. We spent a couple of weeks. I loved on my babe. I loved on my dad. They loved on each other. We named him Liam Thomas, because well, Thomas pulled through and got to meet this grandbabe, which I am sure was one of the most joyous moments of his life, good medicine for that broken heart of his, and a pretty remarkable part of Liam’s birth story.
My dad lived for nearly 11 more years. He was 67. “I am not here for a long time, just a good time.” He would say. And he meant it.
