My Longest Day

It was an intense night. I spent most of it in my lazy boy in the basement, sipping ginger ale, fighting off waves of nausea and dizziness. I had gone to bed feeling tired after yardwork and a sumptuous supper of pierogies and sausage. After a couple hours of fitful sleep, the doorbell rang. My heart raced, but I didn’t answer. Probably a bored teenager. Then there was loud pounding on the door, followed by rings. My heart erupted in arrhythmia. Was someone breaking in? I went downstairs and looked through the peephole to find an officer from the county sheriff’s office. I opened the door and he said that a family member had called him because they couldn’t reach me. Family emergency.

One event turned into another in a domino effect. Several phone calls and texts later, and I learned that my wife had collapsed in Haiti, suffering a medical emergency. I tried to stay calm. The embassy doctor called. It was a neurological event, he explained calmly. And her prognosis was grave. She was in critical condition.

Impossible, I thought. Tresja is in excellent condition. She swims four times a week, walks, stretches, does weights, observes a healthy diet. Yet somehow, my healthy wife of nineteen years had gone into cardiac arrest multiple times on the helicopter. We needed a miracle.

On Hilton Head Beach, December 2020.

Five hours felt like 5,000 pounds lying on me as I spent the night sending messages, praying, and struggling to manage the thousands of thoughts barraging my brain. No wonder my body was a mess.

Somehow, the bullfrogs crooks penetrated the windows. They’re awfully loud tonight, I thought. I saw the steamy dusk slowly give way to dawn. The beginning of the longest day of my life.

The wait was excruciating. Should I pack a bag? Order plane tickets? What do I do with my kid? It’s picture day today. Won’t Tresja want me at her side, imploring her to fight like hell for her life? They said it was grave. Maybe it’s better to wait.

I called the hospital. No news. Then they called me back. It was the ER doctor. I steeled myself. She’s a fighter, I told myself. She’s alive. Get ready to pack that bag, to fly out, to be her cheerleader, to love her into living.

The ER doctor was awkward. ‘Has anyone updated you?” “No,” I replied, worried. “They told me her condition was grave. What’s her prognosis? Should we fly out? I’m ready to book tickets right now.”

“She passed away a little while ago. I’m so sorry,” the ER doctor said softly.

I didn’t know what to say. My brain sent too many messages and I was stupefied. For some reason, the light breaking into the room caught my attention. It was silent. No bullfrogs. The cats had gone back to sleep.

I sank in my chair, the life seeping out of my limbs. I had to tell my daughter, my wife’s parents, our family and friends, and start the process of making arrangements. I couldn’t wait too long since it was picture day and my daughter was about to miss a lot of school. The neurons all fired at the same time again. We did not own cemetery plots, though I knew that my wife wanted to be buried in our home state. A funeral, big expenses around the corner, one income, and now I’m a single parent…

I sank deeper into the lazy boy, unable to move. The sun began to shine through the ground-level basement window. I heard voices and car doors opening and closing. People were going about their daily business, but time had stopped for me. I was frozen in place.

My brain insisted on trying to go through the motions. Brew some coffee, you’ll need it. Eat a banana. Take your normal one-hour morning walk.

For once in my life, I did none of those things, because normal had just died.

I finally mustered up the energy to go upstairs and be the herald of disastrous news for my child. Our child.

The day stretched on. There was no coffee and I only nibbled on a little food. I moped around the house, occasionally moved by sudden bursts of energy to open the laptop and share the news with people who needed to know. I alternated between the dinette and the bedroom upstairs, fielding over 30 phone calls, curled up in a fetal position, overcome with a nasty headache from violent crying fits and no coffee.

It was like a nightmare where the worst-case scenario is real and you just hope to wake up. Except there was no waking up. Seconds moved at a sloth’s pace, the light of day would not fade, and time slowed down because I couldn’t escape the reality that my wife had died, in an instant, a single moment.

How could it be, that a process of initiating a courtship that developed into a commitment, to share everything, walk on the same journey, day after day, get to know each and every nook and cranny of the other, all with the knowledge, somewhere, that it could all be taken away, but with the firm belief that we could and would fulfill the ideal of a long marriage, from our youth, deep into the final chapters of human life in this world?

Each one of us has a daily agenda, appointments to be kept, tasks to be accomplished, with variation from one day to the next, and yet held in balance by the reality of a covenantal bond with another, to and with whom we have promised to give all of ourselves. It takes years to create this habits and patterns, to suffer, rejoice, achieve, and fail, always together, contingent on the grace of forgiveness and the promise of entering into the new day as one flesh.

A life that felt so secure it could not be undone, not by employment problems, personal force, uninvited interventions, our own inner insecurities and failings, had been blown into pieces by a brain aneurysm - one we didn’t even know she had.

Our life together was our eternity. And it came undone in one day.

August 19, 2021 was the longest day of my life. Death struck my soul at its heart. It battered my mind. It caused my body to be numb, as if I, too, were lifeless.

But even that day eventually came to an end. And there was evening and morning.

Malibu, May 2017