Back Home

The last few weeks have been some of the darkest, hardest moments of my life.

On January 20th, I was snuggling with my babies in my bed and enjoying a peaceful, sweet afternoon. Aaron had gotten some hard news in the morning that 12,000 people had been laid off from his company. Thankfully he still had a job but he took the afternoon off to process the loss of some pretty close co-workers and to process through all of the change. He came home around lunch and then went to the driving range to clear his head.

Around 3pm he called me and asked me if I saw a text from my mom. I hadn’t— I had two kids wrapped in my arms and wasn’t paying any attention to my phone. I put him on speaker and looked at my phone. Dad had fallen from a ladder and mom was asking for prayer.

Dad is a contractor and has had all sorts of experiences with weird building related incidents. This didn’t feel new. Even Aaron almost lost a finger from a sander at one point early on in our marriage. I read the message and wasn’t immediately alarmed (Dad always bounces back) but called mom to check in.

It wasn’t good. The ambulance wasn’t there yet but my Aunt Beth was administering CPR to him. He was turning blue and cold, so my mom retrieved blankets to cover him to try to keep him warm while Beth was giving him oxygen. Mom kept having to hang up and I kept calling back. They tried air lifting him to the hospital but the helicopter arrived and couldn’t find a place to land. They ended up putting him in the the ambulance and the medics immediately began to try to save him. They found a pulse I think once they hooked him up to the machines (my aunt who is a nurse couldn’t initially).

The next few hours (minutes?) are a blur. I curled up in one of our living room chairs and sobbed. Our kids were still in my bed but they heard me and came in the living room. Travis always sees me try to distract Charlie by tickling him when he’s having a melt down, so our sweet boy came up to me and started tickling me telling me everything going to be ok. Aaron came home and I kept rocking in that chair.

Next thing I knew, Aaron had booked me on a flight that left in an hour and a half to go to Jackson. My Uncle Will (dad's brother) who lives in Dallas was going to meet me during my layover in Dallas and fly the final leg to Jackson with me. I opened my suitcase, swept everything on my counter into it without looking through it, pulled random clothes out of my closet, and packed a funeral dress just in case.. not that I would need it. Dad would be ok. He always is.

Aaron and the boys drove me to the airport and then went back home to pack up. They were going to drive through the night to meet me in MS in the morning. 

Will and I got to Jackson and some sweet friends of ours picked us up from the airport and took us immediately to the hospital. Dad was still in the ER. Visiting hours had long passed but they let us in anyway.

Dad was in a neck brace, lying on the ER bed, sedated. He was intubated (a precaution?) and had blood in his hair from the fall. I held his hand for what seemed like hours and told him that I was there with him and that I loved him. I wasn’t going anywhere.

I face-timed my sister Nikki who lives in Medellin, Colombia so that she could see him too. She was still trying to figure out how to get back to the states ASAP (international travel is more tricky). I kept holding dads hand and Nikki started praying for him over the phone. In that moment he opened his eyes. I’m convinced that he knew we were there with him. I just felt it. We cried and prayed and prayed and prayed.

They did an initial scan and the preliminary reports showed that he hadn’t broken any bones, wasn’t paralyzed, etc. We were so relieved. I left the hospital that night (they made us leave around 1 am) thinking we were all going to be ok. Dad was going to be ok. It was going to be a long, hard road ahead of us, but dad was going to be ok. They planned to do an MRI during the night, and we would get the final results back in the morning to know more about his brain functions, prognosis, etc.

I went home and went to sleep. Exhausted.

Aaron arrived the next morning (left our kids with his parents in Louisiana) and I was so relieved that he was there with me. We headed to the hospital with my mom and they called the neurologist to give us a report. Will was holding dads hand throughout the morning, reading the news to him so he wouldn’t miss a beat while we waited.

Finally the doctor arrived and she took us to her station to show us the MRI. She was very straightforward.

There were severe disruptions through the C3 and C4 disks with a severe spinal cord injury. He was paralyzed from the neck down. He was not doing well and almost coded during the night. He was not stable. Even if he was stable enough to go through surgery, it wouldn't change anything. He would not be able to breathe on his own ever again. They recommended making him comfortable and letting him pass.

I’m not sure exactly what happened in that moment in my body. My world was swept away. I think I fell over and maybe Aaron caught me? Then I started dry heaving. I really can’t remember. It was all a blur. It still all a blur. How could this be? Make him comfortable? Dry heave again.

My sister Lacey was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2017, three months after Aaron and I were married. She passed away in April, 2021, widowing a husband and leaving four beautiful young children behind. We had been grieving Lacey’s death for 20 months. God, don’t we get a pass? Is this really possible? I know that’s bad theology but the feelings are so real. Our hearts are already so heavy. This absolutely cannot be happening. Again. And to my dad. The person who has been my person, who has been in my corner for as long as I can remember. One of the most solid rocks in my life.

But it was true. The rest of the family arrived within hours and we began to make arrangements for what would be next. Organ donation became a discussion and all of us immediately knew that it’s what dad would have wanted. He would give the shirt off his back to anyone, and I could just hear him saying “Absolutely— take it all. I won’t need it. Give it to someone who does.” They asked if we had any specific requests of organs not to take and we said no. Take it all.

End of life care is so new to me. Because of the organ donation process, they had to take him to the OR to pass so that they could begin the harvesting procedure immediately. I won’t go into details on these few hours but it felt excruciating. They gave us a 30 minute heads up and one by one, each of us took a turn to hold his hand one more time and say goodbye.

When they wheeled him out I chased them out to the elevator and watched it close, then fell to the floor. And then we waited. At 6pm, he was at 0% oxygen and they declared him dead almost on the hour.

We went home. I’m not sure what happened next. There were friends and family there. I think we ate? It’s all a blur.

The next days were filled with planning. My default way to cope with stress is to try to control (healthy or not, that’s what I do) so I went into crazy planning mode. I was up at 5 am every day and then late into the night.

We went to the funeral home, made arrangements, picked out flowers for the casket and service, and went to the cemetery to pick out his burial plot. Nikki hadn’t been back to MS since Lacey’s funeral and what came next took us all by surprise. The cemetery director wanted us to go to the actual plots on the ground rather than looking at a map in the office on this cold rainy day. We said ok, and then drove around to our family plots. Getting out of that car felt like a kick in the gut. I had been to visit Lacey’s grave site before, but never in a million years did either of us imagine that the first time that Nikki would be able to go would be to pick out a space for our dad. We stood and looked at Lacey’s name and epitaph on her gravestone and then looked around to determine where our dad would be laid.

We picked the spot right above Lacey so that they would be together. It was horrible and beautiful.

I’m going to take a break here in writing because I’m exhausted. There’s so much more to say and document with the funeral and what happened in the days following, but I’m going to skip ahead a few weeks to today.

We’re finally back in Austin. We arrived last night. My mom had given me some of my dad’s family art from her house (she’s moving) and I decided to make a gallery wall of it this afternoon. It’s so special.

All of the art except the portrait and the middle piece were created by members of our family. The drawing of the home on the bottom right was done my my dad’s mother’s father (my great grandfather) and is the house where my grandmother grew up in Belhaven, Jackson, MS. But I think my favorite two pieces are the pieces by my sister, Lacey—the two smallest ones

On the far right is Lacey’s cardinal. Lacey was afraid of birds for her whole life. It was honestly kind of bizarre. When she saw them she was totally creeped out and ran away. It was always a thing. But when she was diagnosed with cancer, she came face to face with some of her greatest fears in life. In the midst of being in that place that she never wanted to go, she discovered the depth of God’s kindness and love to her in those moments. The big things that she had feared (cancer, sickness, etc) became beautiful in that she saw God’s character more clearly; the little things that she had always feared, like birds, became not only less scary, but a part of God’s creation/story. So she started painting birds to represent her fear and God’s love for his people. She painted this one as a gift for me and I discovered the significance of the cardinal after her passing. Cardinals represent a loved ones presence who is in heaven, and also the hope that we have in Christ through his blood.

Her other painting is hitting home with me particularly right now. It’s the top middle/right square painting. Towards the end of her life, the cancer moved through her body and took away a lot of her functions on her right side. She couldn’t move any muscles on the right side of her face, from smiling to using her right hand. She started painting with her left hand and decided to paint pictures of deserts, as that’s where she felt like she was. It was hard. The day to day battle was truly hard, and sometimes painful, but in the midst of the hard she discovered God’s goodness. Her focus on painting the desert was not that she was just in a hard place. Her focus was that even in this drought, even in the dry hard places, the Lord was good to her. Even here. And she praised His name in the midst of it.

Some of you know that I have “Even here” tattooed on my right foot for Lacey. Little did I know that that little tattoo would be cutting into my soul, trying to teach me to believe that truth just 20 months after Lacey passed.

I cuddled my kids tonight on this couch and looked at these beautiful pieces of artwork tonight and I can’t believe that the last 3 weeks, or even 6 years are true. I’m so deeply sad. I keep looking around feeling like I’m in a complete haze. But I’m thankful for the truth that Lacey taught us in those deserts that even in those dark places, God loves us and is carrying us through.