When I was in high school I used to imagine my parents’ death. Not in a macabre way. I mean, it’s not like I sat in study hall picturing how it would happen — there weren’t visions of car accidents or plane crashes dancing in my head. No, it was more the aftermath I pictured — me as an eighteen year old bravely working two jobs while selflessly putting my younger brother and sister through school, my own academic ambitions sacrificed on the altar of family fealty. Or, when I was feeling particularly anxious, I envisioned myself as a skinny sixteen year old, separated from my siblings and living in the basement of some faceless nameless relative.
Thankfully, my parents were alive and well as the three Seery siblings graduated from St. Dominic High School and beyond so, despite my overactive imagination, there was no need for me to forgo higher education or spend my adolescence in anyone’s spare room. Thus saved from my imagined melodramatic fate, I marched through college and law school and eventually marriage and motherhood without thinking too much about my parents’ ultimate demise. For decades, my parents were happily retired in Florida, golfing and bowling and gambling to their hearts content and, I suspect, they didn’t give their final destinations too much thought either. That all changed with my father’s first heart attack. Still, they the parents and we the children, weathered that particular storm and the ones that followed. Life, as it must, continued. Christmases were celebrated and grandchildren graduated from sippy cups to drivers permits and we all focused on our daily routines. My macabre “what-if” scenarios were, for the most part, successfully held at bay.
But then my father’s heart started to give out. He had procedure after procedure and the time periods when they would “work” and he could resume a somewhat normal life became shorter and shorter. I thought about what I would say to my father as his time grew near. I imagined all of us gathered around his death bed, taking turns telling him how much we loved him. I even selected the songs I would sing to comfort him as he crossed the veil from this world to the next.
Of course there was always another procedure. Another reprieve. When I saw my father last Christmas and he looked, to me at least, better than he had in years, we played cards and talked about my new pool and Biden and the Florida real estate market. And then a month later when I had a few extra carryover vacation days and decided to take advantage of cheap post-Christmas airfares, we talked about Ukraine and whether I should interview for a new job and what type of car I should buy when my lease was up later in the year. It never occurred to me that I should tell my father any of the wonderful things I imagined saying at his death bed. I certainly didn’t croon for him his favorite Irish ballad because he was fine. Sure he was getting another heart ablation the following week but that was no big deal. He’d had them before. Piece of cake.
His ablation went perfectly and when I spoke to him on the phone that week and the next he sounded great. And besides, I’d see him in April when we were all coming down for his eightieth birthday. There’d be plenty of time to talk then.
My father ruined all my plans by collapsing in the kitchen. There were no last words. No favorite ballads. No chance to hold his hand one last time. Within an hour, he was gone.
