The Tree That Finally Sang

For as long as I can remember, my family has joked that I wasn’t just born — I blew in like a storm. They’ve called me Hurricane Nicole ever since.

So when the hurricane that shared my name barreled toward Florida in November 2022 — its eye locked on my father’s home the same week his body began to fail — it felt like the universe was winking at me in the cruelest way. A storm outside, and another inside me.

My dad, Vernon, was the man everyone called when something needed fixing, lifting, or building. He stood over six feet tall, heavyset and broad-shouldered, with hands that could build a house from the ground up and a stubborn streak that could hold the roof on in a gale. A civil engineer to his core, he measured every task in beer: “Two-beer job or a six-beer job?” he would mutter before getting to work. He loved his beer cold, his independence colder, and could turn the world right-side up with a grunt and a socket wrench.

Months before the Atlantic churned up Hurricane Nicole, Dad began to complain that he was “out of gas” — a fatigue that clung to him like Florida’s humidity in August. Mowing the lawn, once a two-beer job he could knock out without breaking a sweat, became a marathon. Soon after, he replaced his weekly grocery shopping trips with Walmart delivery.

“Why should I go out and deal with all the ‘Julios’ at Walmart when they deliver straight to my door?” he quipped.

Then came his breathlessness. The swelling in his ankles and legs. Twenty pounds gained in a single week. Even the daily stream of political cartoons he sent me sputtered to silence. That was the real alarm bell for me. No matter how Dad was feeling, he never missed a chance to turn a parody into a political debate.

Hundreds of miles away, I begged him over the phone to see a doctor as Hurricane Nicole roared closer, and he was too winded to prepare for her. I’m no doctor, but after years of navigating health scares while raising two kids, I knew we were dealing with more than fatigue.

“Dad,” I said with gentle firmness, “I don’t want to scare you, but I think you might be suffering from congestive heart failure. At least go to urgent care and have them check you out.”

He scoffed. “I’ll go to the Doc-in-a-Box when the hurricane is over. I’ve got this. Sit in the truck.”

That was his way of telling me to back off. I had no choice but to oblige him, even though I feared he wouldn’t make it through the storm.

Miraculously, he did. But by then, he could barely get out of his chair without collapsing. He called his friend and neighbor, David, who rushed him to the ER.

Later, in classic Dad fashion, he texted me a selfie from his hospital bed — tongue hanging out, eyes rolled back in mock despair — his way of making light of a terrifying situation. I knew better. I was packed and on his doorstep by the time his doctors discharged him.

As soon as I pulled up to his house, I saw how his failing health had let a quiet neglect settle in. Outside, the house’s exterior was a tired whisper of its former color; the grass stretched to my shins, and palm fronds lay like fallen spears around the pool, where brown algae clung to the concrete in uneven patches. Inside, dust rimmed the baseboards, and a faint sourness rode the air. Bear, his faithful Chihuahua, had left random “territorial signatures” all over the floor like a graffiti artist with no sense of restraint. This kind of slow decay doesn’t happen overnight; it happens when someone stops expecting tomorrow to look any different from today.

Dad didn’t reveal his diagnosis to me verbally. He simply handed me his discharge papers when I asked for them, leaving me to read and process the words he’d refused to say out loud: congestive heart failure. His heart was functioning at a mere 25%. Bad, but not hopeless. The doctors believed they could buy him time — if he followed their orders.

Dad begrudgingly obliged, all the while grumbling about the crooked pharmaceutical industry and the doctors he called “practitioners for good reason.” Beneath his bravado, I saw a flicker of fear he would never admit to.

I offered to clean his house, but he flat-out forbade it. He truly believed he would rally enough to do it himself, despite being unable to walk from one room to the next without having to rest. The cleaning still had to be done.

I texted his brother, my uncle Keith, who offered to distract Dad on FaceTime — their daily ritual — while I attacked the filth that had gathered since I’d visited a year earlier.

There was so much to do, but I believed time was on my side. Dad and Uncle Keith often talked for hours, and if my uncle could lock him into a debate about the downward spiral our country was taking under the Biden administration, I was sure I would have the whole house sparkling by the end of their call.

I tackled Dad’s bed first, determined to get his reeking sheets — one of the culprits behind the sour smell hanging in the air — into the wash. I moved on to scrub away Bear’s territorial markings until the bedding was ready for the dryer. As soon as I reached for the load, Dad emerged from his office to investigate “all the racket” I was making.

The instant he realized I’d been cleaning against his wishes — like some trespasser in his crumbling little kingdom — he exploded with rage. He stormed over to the dryer, wrenched the wet bedding out, and made his bed himself as I stood there pleading with him to at least let me dry everything.

He turned to me, jowls trembling, and snarled, “How am I supposed to know if I’m getting better if you do everything for me?” His words landed like a blow to my chest — sharp, sudden, and unfair. I was startled, offended, heartbroken, and scared for him — a mess of emotions colliding all at once.

I knew his outburst wasn’t about the cleaning. It was about the only power he still had: the illusion of control. He eventually relented and allowed me to dry his bedding and make his bed after I promised not to touch anything else.

“Just to be clear,” he said, wagging his finger at me, eyes locked on mine, “don’t touch another thing. Understand me?”

I stayed only a few more days. I’d planned to spend the week with him before driving to Goose Creek to pick up my daughter for Thanksgiving, but Dad wasn’t interested in my help. I wasn’t about to sit around like dead weight while he held court at his desk like a stubborn king on a decaying throne, glued to Fox News and griping about everything wrong with the world as his castle fell further into disarray. For my own sanity, I decided to leave early and spend the time with my daughter instead.

When I told Dad of my change of plans, his face fell — a knife through my heart — but his resolve to refuse my help didn’t budge. My leaving felt like walking away from a crumbling fortress I had no power to shore up.

For a time, Dad held the walls himself. Over the next several months — November through August — he became determined to win back his health. He took his meds as prescribed and went to every doctor’s appointment. He even cut down on his beer and Tastykake consumption — no small feat for a man who could put away a 12-pack and a box of baked goods on a rainy afternoon without blinking.

Dad wasn’t thriving, but he was holding steady, certain the restoration of his health was just around the corner. He talked about it like a project he could muscle through: a six-pack job, not a death sentence. But while the medications and lifestyle changes gave him the edge he needed to keep going, they never gave him back the life he wanted.

I knew Dad — the stubborn old goat. He would follow the rules for a while, but rules and he had always made for an uneasy alliance. He hated doctors. He loved his beer and his Tastykakes. And I was right. Eight months later, he stopped taking his meds, insisting the doctors were idiots and the prescriptions were poison. He hatched a new plan — the kind of half-baked scheme only someone fiercely convinced of their own resilience could believe in. He subscribed to a holistic website that sold beet juice and random supplements, convinced they would pull him out of his funk.

They didn’t.

Then came the call I’d been dreading. Dad had collapsed while feeding Bear. His ejection fraction was dangerously low, and without blood thinners, he’d had a stroke. It took him two hours to drag himself from the kitchen to his office with the working half of his body — twenty feet that might as well have been a mile. When he finally reached his desk, he grabbed the phone and called David for help.

Luckily, David always seemed to be around when Dad needed him. He was a semi-retired realtor whose client list had grown thin in his old age. Dad had been his best client for years. When Dad was strong and restless, he would buy fixer-uppers from David, flip them, and sell them for double the price. That work built their friendship long before Dad’s health began to collapse.

While I was grateful Dad had David, I never fully trusted him. He made no secret of his financial struggles or his desperation to find money wherever he could. I set my unease aside because, like it or not, he was the only connection in Florida I had to Dad — one who could make or break Dad’s outcome. He was also brutally blunt in his description of Dad’s decline. “He looks like he’s got elephantiasis of the legs! He needs his family. You need to get down here.”

I immediately packed my suitcase and made the long, draining twelve-hour drive to Florida.

When I walked into Dad’s ICU room, I froze. My father — a man who once filled every doorway he walked through — sat hunched over, his hospital gown hanging loose, his cheeks sagging as he heaved in shallow bursts of breath. For all his size, for all his strength, he looked so small. Withered. Shrunken in on himself.

The doctor on duty was comically small, yet in that moment, he seemed to loom over Dad, who clutched the bed rails like they were the only thing tethering him to this world. I’d seen my father stubborn, proud, furious — but never fragile. I knew we couldn’t face this alone, so I called for reinforcements.

My uncle Keith flew down from Idaho the next day. My sister, Alexis, and her husband followed soon after. Dad’s Christian friends, Tom and Anna, rushed to his bedside too, praying over him for the better part of the afternoon.

Doctor Shrimp was gravely concerned. Dad’s lungs were full of fluid, and none of the meds he administered made a dent in Dad’s spiraling condition. There was a quiet alarm in Doctor Shrimp’s updates, echoed by his partner, a spunky redheaded doctor whose chipper tone wrapped the same news in a ribbon of forced cheer. No one said it out loud, but the message was clear: Dad might be damned to that hospital bed until the good Lord came for him.

A heaviness settled in my chest — the kind that doesn’t lift, no matter how many deep breaths you take. I retreated to the chapel in search of the peace that passes all understanding, the kind only God can provide. I prayed harder than I’d ever prayed in my life. I begged Him to heal Dad, not take him.

I was ankle-deep in tears when I heard a soft knock at the chapel door. A young Black man cracked it open and stepped inside. “Why you cry?” he asked in broken English, with a fierce, unshakable conviction. “God got you in palm of His hand. He got you! You no cry no more. You trust.”

His words cut through the weary fog in my head like a bell — calm, firm, impossible to ignore. They stirred a hope in me that I carry to this day. I glimpsed the name tag on his shirt, the one all visitors were required to wear, but the name blurred in front of my eyes, like it was never meant to be read. As he turned to leave, I scrambled to follow and thank him. But when I stepped into the hallway, it was empty.

I swear that man was an angel.

With that hope burning in my chest, I returned to Dad’s room and prayed again at his bedside, clutching his hand, willing him to hold on. Dad squeezed my hand tight with gratitude.

Later that night, back at Dad’s house, I jolted awake on the air mattress I’d settled into while my uncle slept in Dad’s room. Something was wrong. I tried to take a breath, but my lungs would hardly budge. I started coughing up fluid, choking on it in the dark. I was hacking so loudly that I hurried outside so I wouldn’t wake my uncle. Sputum kept coming up.

I truly believed I had taken on my dad’s ailment through prayer. I should have been terrified, but a strange calm settled over me instead. My mind harked back to my encounter with the angel in the chapel, and his voice filled my head: God got you. Trust. As my lungs began to clear, I was flooded with hope. Something was shifting.

The next morning, I got my confirmation. The fluid in Dad’s lungs had drained. He was breathing clearly again, sitting up without the bed railing, though still weak. There was a strong sense of optimism in Doctor Shrimp’s voice that hadn’t been there before. He hadn’t expected this turnaround. None of us had.

This wasn’t a big cinematic miracle for anyone but me. No trumpets blazed. No one applauded. Everyone just reveled in this quiet, inexplicable turn when everything had felt lost.

But I knew the truth. This was a God moment. Divine intervention. A promise the angel in the chapel had given me.

A week later, Dad was discharged from the hospital and transferred to rehab, where the doctors hoped he would regain enough strength to walk again — a condition of his release to return home, his greatest desire.

He hated every second of it.

He snapped at anyone who so much as dared to weigh him before his “morning dump.” The one staff member who tried was met with a chocolate fountain disaster that took a team of janitors to clean up. At one point, Dad grabbed a nurse by the arm and refused to let go when she delayed his physical therapy session because of a staffing shortage. She screamed for help, and after that, at least two staff members were assigned to him at all times.

Dad hadn’t acted out of cruelty; his anger was his armor — a false protector he wore to keep from confronting his body’s decline. It was easier for him to be furious than to be afraid.

Eventually, Dad surrendered to his captor: the reality of limited mobility. After weeks of confining himself to his room, he finally agreed to let me wheel him to the cafeteria to join some fellow residents for meals. This was exactly what he needed: a connection to something other than his illness and the steady drumbeat of defeat. That tiny shift changed everything.

Once Dad opened his mouth to speak, the old storyteller in him came alive. One man in particular hung on every word. Clyde was a gentle old soul with a beard as scraggly as his long white hair. He had the faded hands of a man who’d once been an artist but was now too frail to continue his passion. Dad and Clyde lingered in the cafeteria long after it closed, swapping stories like old friends.

I sat with them, quietly observing, watching the light in Dad stir again. For the first time in a long time, I saw the man he used to be — the larger-than-life man who built, fixed, and lifted everything with his own two hands. Hope radiated through the room until even the overworked staff felt its pull.

Much to everyone’s delight — and the manhandled nurse’s relief — late September rolled around, and the rehab center discharged Dad on a conditional release: he had to continue his rehab care at home and have a private caretaker check in on him multiple times a day.

Uncle Keith had hired David for the job. David’s close proximity to Dad’s house and their long rapport made him the practical choice. But my uneasiness about David never left, nor did my fear that letting Dad return home alone was a grave mistake. I knew the second he walked through his front door that he would fire everyone in his path to reclaim his independence.

And I was right.

He declared he didn’t need help. He was fine.

Well, his newfound “freedom” didn’t last long.

By the end of October, Dad was living on borrowed time. COVID and flu season were wreaking havoc on his community, and his doctors required all patients to wear masks during their appointments. Dad scoffed that masks were “like screen doors on submarines.” Perfectly useless.

He launched into a lecture about nanometer measurements and virus particle sizes like the brilliant civil engineer he was — as if presenting a thesis at a convention. He used his expertise as an excuse for refusing to wear a mask and to cancel all his medical appointments, even as his prescriptions ran out and his life hung in the balance.

I frantically called the doctor’s office to get his prescriptions refilled without an appointment, but they wouldn’t budge — liability reasons, they said. Without proper testing, they couldn’t renew anything.

It didn’t take long for Dad’s health to spiral again. Within days, he could barely move. He stopped eating. He started wearing diapers because he couldn’t make it to the bathroom on time anymore. The house grew heavy with that same quiet neglect as before — only this time, it carried the weight of a traumatic ending closing in.

When Dad’s lungs filled with fluid to the point where even talking became a struggle, he called David for help. David drove him to the hospital and then called me.

“This time,” he said, “your dad is beyond bad. Really bad.”

Soon after, Doctor Red — the spunky doctor who had cared for him during his last hospital stay — called me too. Once again, the chipper lilt in her voice didn’t match the weight of what she was saying. It was the sound of someone trying to wrap bad news in soft edges. Dad was in rough shape — and, honestly, she’d been surprised he’d survived his previous stay.

My uncle, sister, and I knew this day would come. We knew Dad wouldn’t be able to care for himself after rehab without help, and he would end up right back in the hospital, worse than before. But none of us wanted to fight his stubbornness again. We were angry. We were tired. He’d stopped trying, and it felt like we were the ones paying for his defiance.

I called Dad after I hung up with the doctor, ready to rage and scream at him to get his act together. But the second he spoke, my insides caved in. He sounded weak and garbled — a sound I’d never heard from him before. He said he felt worse than he’d ever felt in his whole life. When I asked if he wanted me to come down to be with him, he said, “You are always welcome,” through staggered breaths.

Those four words landed like a stone in my chest. They were simple, unadorned, but I heard everything he wasn’t saying. Somehow, I knew they would be the last words he would ever speak to me.

The next day, his best friend, Mac, drove down from Ocala for a planned visit that had originally been scheduled at Dad’s house later in the week. I’d called Mac to cancel, telling him Dad was in the hospital again and this time the outcome looked grim. Mac immediately got in his car and headed south to be with Dad. The two of them had met in college and, through all their boyish shenanigans, became lifelong friends.

Mac called me after their visit, his voice shaking as he choked back tears. He said they’d had a long, emotional talk — that Dad had said he was “about ready to check out.” They cried together. In his own way, Dad was already saying goodbye.

My cellphone rang at 6 a.m. the next morning, Tuesday, October 31st. It was Doctor Red. Her tone was serious, stripped of its usual bounce. This was the call I’d been bracing for. Dad had gone into cardiac arrest overnight. They’d revived him, but he was now on a ventilator. “You asked me to tell you when you should come down to see him,” she said. “And now is the time.”

I immediately hung up and called my sister.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“At work. In my office. Why?”

“Can you close your door and sit down?”

She did, and I told her what had happened.

A long silence crackled at the end of the line as she tried to pull herself together. Alexis is one of the strongest women I know. She’s never been the type to fall apart in public the way I do. She suffers those moments in private, with as few witnesses as possible. I, on the other hand, wear my heart on my sleeve, waving it like a freak flag I don’t care who sees.

Alexis booked her flight, and I packed my car for another long, weary drive to reach Dad’s bedside. We were both set to arrive by noon on Wednesday, November 1st.

When I pulled into Dad’s driveway the next day, everything felt heavy — the air, the house, even the light. Late fall in Florida brought with it a dense, humid air that clung to the world like it didn’t want to let go.

Alexis had flown in earlier that day. David picked her up at the airport, but instead of bringing her straight to Dad’s house, he took her to his own, giving her a full tour — a shrine to his career. It irritated me. Alexis and I had bigger things to face than David’s self-promotion. In that moment, the uneasy feeling I’d long had about him coiled tighter in my gut.

David was determined to get every last dollar out of our tragedy. Whether or not Dad survived, we all knew he wouldn’t be able to return home. David seized the opportunity to woo Alexis, the executor of Dad’s estate, into a plan he’d likely been weaving for some time. He tried to charm her with an offer to manage the property if we rented it out. When she declined, he quickly shifted gears, proposing to act as the listing agent and handle the house clean-out — but only if he could keep the profit from anything he sold.

Exhausted and overwhelmed, Alexis and I accepted his offer. We would sort through Dad’s things and keep only what mattered to us. The rest we would leave to David.

With our pact all but drawn up and signed, Alexis and I drove to the hospital to see Dad. He was hooked up to the ventilator, but conscious. His eyes flicked toward us as we entered the room. He couldn’t speak, but his presence filled the space the way it always had — even now, so diminished.

Alexis took her place on the nearest side of the bed and held his hand. I stood back for a moment, taking everything in. Then Dad gave a little shoulder shimmy — the kind of gesture I’d seen him give so many times in my life — as if to say, come on over here.

I sat opposite Alexis and grabbed Dad’s other hand. Even affixed to a ventilator, he still had his spark.

Doctor Red entered the room, delivering the grim news — Dad’s heart function had dropped to 14% after his cardiac arrest. She and her staff had tried and failed to remove him from the ventilator; each attempt to get him breathing on his own had nearly caused him to code again. “The next 24 hours,” she said, “will be crucial to his outcome.” Long gone was the spunky lilt in her voice. We had reached the precipice.

I texted my uncle Keith with the bleak update. This time, he couldn’t make the trip from across the country to be with us, but he and his wife, my Aunt Barbara — who loved Dad as much as the rest of us — FaceTimed him. None of us knew this would be the last time the two beloved brothers would speak to each other on this earth. Uncle Keith and Aunt Barbara showered Dad with love and encouragement, their voices weighted with everything they didn’t want to say. And Dad — his lips working around the ventilator — mouthed, “I love you, too,” in reply.

When the call ended, Dad fell asleep. Alexis and I left the hospital and returned to his house, weighing all of our losses and marveling that despite everything, we were somehow piecing things back together. For years, she and I had carried a strained relationship, but in what would become Dad’s final days, we laughed more than I ever expected to. It was a bittersweet, fragile truce — forged in the shadow of losing the man who had given us both life, a bond bound by blood.

The next morning, when Alexis and I returned to the hospital, Doctor Red told us Dad was continuing in his rapid decline. He’d suffered a stroke in his kidneys, and they were failing. My eyes shifted to the urinary drainage bag attached to the catheter. His urine was black. I didn’t need a doctor to confirm what I already knew. The truth had hit the moment I walked into the room, long before the words left her mouth.

Death has a scent. It’s subtle, but once you’ve smelled it, you never forget it. It hung heavy in the air, wrapping around everything.

Doctor Red was gentle but frank as she urged Alexis and me to decide whether to let Dad linger on the ventilator or let him go peacefully.

We told her we would discuss the matter privately, but we’d already wordlessly agreed.

In the end, we chose Friday morning, November 3rd, as the day we would set our father free. If God wanted to call him home, we would accept it. If God wanted him to stay a little longer, we would support his next move.

Friday came far too fast.

The sun had barely risen when we walked through the cold, sterile hospital doors for the last time. My sister had Bear — the little Chihuahua who had been Dad’s shadow for years — tucked in an oversized black handbag. Doctor Red spotted him instantly and gave us a small wink as we passed. “I didn’t see a thing,” she said. Normally, animals weren’t allowed in the ICU, but Doctor Red wouldn’t prevent us from making Dad’s last moments as loving as possible.

Normally, Bear would scramble into Dad’s lap the second he laid eyes on him. But this time, when Alexis lowered him gently down onto Dad’s chest, he screeched, squirmed, and launched himself into her arms. Bear knew Dad was dying, and he wanted no part of it.

I took Bear from Alexis and tried to brush him against Dad’s hand so Dad could at least feel his faithful companion one last time, but Dad just lay there, still, his chest rising and falling to the rhythm of the ventilator. He was heavily sedated after trying to pull out his tubes overnight. This time, he wasn’t able to express any want or desire for either of us to hold his hand.

As I sat at Dad’s bedside, Alexis took Bear from me and settled into a chair at the far side of the room, her legs bouncing anxiously as her expression grew desperate. Bear clawed at her chest as she held him, whimpering with equal desperation. A few minutes later, Alexis looked at me — eyes wet, face crumpling.

“I can’t do this!” she gasped in a whisper so Dad couldn’t hear. “I can’t sit here and watch him die!” With those words, she collapsed into the chair, muffling her sobs into her hand.

I wanted to slap her. I wanted to scream, “Our father is dying! We both need to be here for him!” I also wanted to beg her, “Please — oh please — don’t leave me to face this alone.”

But I knew her well, even after years of estrangement. She’d never been able to handle a loved one’s death or even a serious illness. Family is everything to her, as it is to me, but she’s terrible with goodbyes, especially permanent ones that involve the people nearest and dearest to her heart. It’s her Achilles’ heel. Luckily for me, after a lifetime of neglect at the hands of a mother who, for reasons I never understood, hated me from the day I drew breath and made sure to prove it every chance she got, my threshold for emotional pain is quite high. But that is a story for another time.

As Alexis’ collapse fell into inconsolable territory and Bear began to howl, I called her daughter, Hayle, who had flown down to support her mom.

“Hayle, you need to come get your mom,” I said. “Take my dad’s truck and get over here.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“Main entrance.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

The trick was getting my sister there. At this point, she was so beside herself she couldn’t even stand, let alone walk. And Dad needed our support more than ever. I had to get this situation under control so I could be there for him.

I hurried to the nurses’ station and asked for a wheelchair, which they initially denied me because only patients were allowed to use hospital equipment.

“Look,” I said, “my sister is falling to pieces in there over our father’s impending death. Either you give me the wheelchair, or you’ll have another patient on your hands — and I promise you I will sue you into oblivion over it.”

They released the wheelchair to me.

I quietly wheeled it into Dad’s room and helped my sister into it. The last of her composure went out the window as I rushed her and Bear down the long, sterile maze of hallways. Her cries echoed off the tile in a way that will forever haunt me. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” she sobbed as a stream of doctors and nurses looked on in confusion.

Hayle met us at the hospital entrance, loaded her broken mother and Bear into the car, and took them back to Dad’s house. I dutifully returned the empty wheelchair to the nurses’ station. Then I hastened back to Dad’s bedside — alone.

Time seemed to crawl. The mere two hours the hospital had allotted for Dad’s transition to hospice and the removal of life support stretched far beyond that. And I was alone to face it all.

I kept waiting for Dad to suddenly rally. Some foolish part of me believed he still might. I thought of the chapel angel and hoped he would make good on his promise again: God’s got you in the palm of His hand. I couldn’t see how losing my dad would be part of the deal.

When the hospice nurses finally arrived, five hours later, I was beyond weary. They warned me of what I might witness when they removed Dad from the ventilator: the gurgling, the mucus, the way his body might seize. They were matter-of-fact about it, trying to prepare me for the worst — and, I assumed, trying to convince me to leave the room to make their job easier in case I couldn’t handle it.

But I refused to let my dad die alone. He was terrified of death, and for all the mightiness he’d shown me when I’d needed him most, I vowed to be that strength for him now. And I was determined to ensure the safety of his soul in the process.

Dad was a devout Catholic, so I requested that a priest come and read him his last rites — quietly, so Dad wouldn’t know what was about to transpire. He may have been sedated, but he could still hear. I didn’t want his last moments to be filled with fear. I wanted them to brim with hope.

When the priest entered the room, the air shifted — softer, sacred. He stood at Dad’s bedside and murmured the ancient words meant to guide a soul home. I bowed my head and prayed alongside him, clutching Dad’s hand as if I could anchor him to this world a little longer.

At the close of his prayer, the priest left, and the hospice nurses began the process of removing Dad from the ventilator. I held his hand tight, squeezing it in reassurance. And although my heart was splintering, I kept my voice steady as I said, “Okay, Dad. Here we go. We’re going to get you off this ventilator and get you breathing on your own again. Are you ready? You can do this.”

The hospice nurses dosed Dad heavily with fentanyl. But all the while, he seemed aware. His eyes fluttered at my promise that we were going to get him off that ventilator and back on his feet again.

To this day and beyond, that will likely be the most painful lie I have ever had to tell. In that moment, loving him meant lying.

As the nurses pulled the ventilator tube from Dad’s lungs, a rush of mucus came up with it, just like they’d warned, but nothing more. They quickly and quietly left the room, drawing the privacy curtain closed behind them so that passersby couldn’t see the harrowing scene of a daughter about to lose her father.

“Come on, Dad, breathe,” I kept chanting, still hoping for a last-minute miracle. “I love you so much. You’re doing so good. Just keep breathing. You’ve got this.”

I could feel my soul tearing as I fed him these lies to protect his peace.

Dad moved his mouth like he was breathing, and I couldn’t help but sink with each fruitless breath. While this scene wasn’t nearly as violent as the nurses had prepared me for, emotionally, it was far more tragic. Dad was dying when he thought he was rallying, and I was a horrible liar, desperate to protect his peace by cheering him on. I don’t know if I will ever forgive myself for cheating him out of his death.

As his vitals began to fall and I continued to cheer him on, his breaths grew shallower. I never let go of his hand.

Three minutes. That’s all it took.

In the end, there were no alarms. No rushing staff. Just me, Dad, and the soft hiss of a machine going still.

I somehow managed to pull myself together to text my uncle Keith and Alexis that Dad had passed, then I sat there with him for a while.

The early sun broke through the hospital window, streaming across the floor in warm, golden bands. It felt like something bigger — like the light was reaching down to carry him home.

Then, suddenly, I felt this unrelenting urge to sing Amazing Grace. My voice cracked through each note, but I kept singing. It was the only thing that made sense to me — the only thing that felt big enough to fill the silence he left behind.

Then my phone buzzed. It was Alexis.

Don’t forget his necklace!

Dad had always worn a heavy gold chain with an even heavier solid gold cross attached to it, tucked discreetly against his chest. Slipping it over his slack head felt like stealing a piece of him. But it was better to take it with me than leave it to burn with his body upon cremation. As I stripped him of his most sacred love, I kissed his forehead and whispered, “I love you, Dad. I love you so much.”

Upon emerging from his room and stepping into the hallway, my surroundings felt too bright, too loud, too wrong. The world buzzed on as if my dad’s death were just a blip in the day. At the nurses’ station, I stopped to talk with the staff — Doctor Red, Doctor Shrimp, and all the nurses who’d cared for him through every stubborn, cranky, impossible day.

“Thank you,” I said, my voice cracking.

Their faces softened. There’s a certain kind of quiet people give you when they’ve stood in the presence of death too many times. No platitudes. Just gentle silence.

I trudged out of the hospital and drove back to Dad’s house, numb and broken. Alexis, Hayle, and I hugged on my arrival — three women bound by loss, not words. We opened a bottle of wine. No toasts. Just silence.

None of us could have imagined the beautiful thing that would happen next.

The day before Dad died, my sister and I had gone to Walmart to buy a Christmas decoration for the house. November 1st had come, and anyone who knows me knows I always put my Christmas tree up on October 31st — like clockwork. It’s my thing. But Dad hadn’t decorated in ages, so Alexis and I bought a small, cheap tabletop tree. Nothing special. Just a placeholder for comfort that I believed we would eventually throw away.

The tree was battery-operated. It was supposed to spin and play music, though I didn’t realize that until we got it home. At first, I was annoyed by the prospect of a spinning, singing tree. But the speaker didn’t work. No matter what we did — shaking it, punching random buttons, even smacking the bottom like an old TV remote — it spun in awkward silence.

I almost returned it, but didn’t want the hassle of replacing it and redecorating. I was under enough stress.

Now, sitting there in the family room — Hayle, Alexis, and I raw from the morning — the tree was on. Spinning. Still silent.

We were in the middle of talking about losing Dad and how devastated I was that I could no longer feel his presence when the remarkable happened. I felt a rush of energy — like wind, but without the air. It was the unmistakable feeling of someone rushing into the room, only no one was there. Yet the air had shifted. It was charged and alive.

The tree’s tiny speaker crackled to life, and the tree started to sing!

All three of us fell silent. Hayle covered her mouth. My sister stared at the tree in shock. I started to cry, but then laughed through my tears. Of course, Dad would send us a sign that he was okay through a cheap Walmart “Julio” tree with a busted speaker. It was so perfectly him.

In the end, I took that tree home with me. Every year since, it’s the first thing you see when you walk through my front door at Christmastime — perched on a little pedestal, spinning and singing like it had never been silent.

Not because it’s pretty. But because it’s him.

Because sometimes love lingers in the most ridiculous, unexpected places: In a hospital room bathed in sunlight. In a gold chain still warm from your father’s skin. In a cheap Christmas tree that finally finds its song.

Grief doesn’t leave you. It just changes shape.

My dad was a stubborn, loud, beer-loving, brilliant, flawed, impossible man. He was also mine. And even though those last years were filled with hospital stays and endless heartbreak, they were also threaded with laughter, prayer, and love — messy, complicated, beautiful love.

Every year when that tree starts singing, I can almost hear Dad say, “Alright, knock it off. I’m fine. Merry Christmas.”

Dad’s not gone. Not really.

He’s in the light.

He’s in the song.

He’s in me.

© 2025 Lowvee Cole. All rights reserved.

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