Dionne Stroter - Decision Point

 

So, it was December 26th, 2020, the day after the world's first COVID Christmas. It had been a pretty peaceful Christmas after having a weird, socially distanced, individually wrapped Thanksgiving a few weeks before. My then-boyfriend, now husband, and I were relaxing at our house and enjoying just having a Christmas moment. And the phone rang. My cell phone rang and I missed the call, but I decided to see who it was because it was the middle of the day after a holiday. When I listened to the voicemail, I realized that it was the hospital calling. It was Denver Health calling. And the woman on the line said, "This is a nurse. We're at Denver Health, and we're part of the team that's caring for your dad, who was brought in this morning."

 

My immediate reaction wasn't panic, because this wasn't the first time that I had a call like this. Unfortunately, my dad was dying, and he had been dying for several years, not from cancer or not from some chronic, immediate disease, but from liver failure and alcoholism, and from the effects of having lived on the streets for a couple of years in downtown Denver. And so, I'd had calls like this before about my dad. I'd had calls that he'd been hit by a car one time on Colfax, and I had to go and see about it. Another time, he had a seizure and I had to go see about that. And another time, he went missing on the streets, and my sister and I drove around in the snow looking for him and didn't find him that time.

 

And so, when I got this call, something about it was a little different because of the way that she worded it, "This is the team caring for your dad, and we need to talk to you." I called back, and she explained that sometime in the middle of the night, Christmas night, my dad had a significant brain injury. She called it a brain injury, which was confusing to me, but what it actually was a stroke. And she said, "You're the oldest of his children. His girlfriend is here, and she tells us that you're the decision maker. You need to come down and make some decisions, and we've got to talk about next steps." And I said, "Okay," and I quickly said, "Okay, put me down, I'll do that," and I wasn't even sure what I was agreeing to.

 

She said, "We're going to have a conference at the hospital and bring the family and come talk, and we've got some decisions to make." And so, I rallied my sisters and we went down to the hospital and had to make it through the weird COVID strangeness of going into the hospital two at a time, because we couldn't have multiple people there, and wearing masks and all that stuff that was going on at the time. They explained to us that my dad was basically in a coma. But they weren't really treating him, and his brain was injured, he wasn't going to wake up, and he was intubated. But that was all they were doing because that was what was keeping him alive, and we had some end-of-life decisions to make. And I kept saying, "Okay, we'll talk about it, we'll make a choice."

 

But inside, I was thinking, how can I be the one to make this choice? I don't know that I've ever talked to my dad about this situation. My dad, my whole life, was two sides of a coin. He was gregarious and funny, and he was a musician, and he was into science, and we had political debates. He also struggled my entire life with addiction. He spent years, where we didn't see each other. We talked about a lot of things, but we hadn't talked about this. And so, I was trying to think of what would he really want in this situation. This feels like his choice, not mine. I immediately thought, I'm the kid here, I can't make this choice. This is really not my decision.

 

But I was the one signing the paperwork and I had to decide something. All I could think about was a conversation I had with my dad exactly a week before. His birthday was December 19th. We had talked, and we talked about a lot of things. My dad was coherent, which he wasn't always when we spoke. He had a lot to say about the election that had just happened. [audience chuckles] He was telling me his thoughts on whether or not there would be a peaceful transfer of power, and we debated about this a lot. We talked about COVID. He was afraid of COVID. He told me that the one thing he was afraid of was getting COVID and being on a ventilator and being intubated.

 

And so, I thought, well, he did tell me that, so I know something about what he wants. And so, I think that this decision, I'm going to try and do what it is that he would want me to do. And so, as a family, we talked about what to do, and we did make the decision: let's take him off the ventilator. We don't want to leave him like that. And so, they brought us all into the room, and it was still COVID strange. We had a video monitor for some of the family that was out of state, so that they could look in and see what was happening. We all had masks on. It was just a really surreal moment. 

 

We started to play music. My dad was a musician. He had played in a soul and funk band in the 1970s and 1980s, and he really loved Earth, Wind & Fire. And so, we decided to play some songs, because we didn't know if he could hear us, but we wanted to play music. When Earth, Wind & Fire's song Fantasy came on, there's a line in the song that says, We'll live together Until the twelfth of never. All of a sudden, it was like time slowed down. I realized we've made this decision, and we're going to do it. 

 

I was blinking. In every blink, I was thinking about different things that had happened in my dad's life and mine. I blink, and I think about him walking me down the aisle at my wedding. And then I blink, and I think about seeing my dad panhandling one time on the street, and I didn't realize it was him. And I blink, and I think about that same marriage that I had ending and my dad just showing up at the courthouse when I was filing divorce papers unexpectedly and doing that with me. And I blink, and I picture the room that we're in, and I can see my dad's hair growing back from the surgery that he'd had. 

 

And even though his brain wasn't working, his body was still working, and his hair was growing back. And blink and blink and blink, and thinking about my dad's life. He passed away on December 30th, just one day shy of the end of 2020. It was very peaceful. For the next couple of weeks I was kind of in a fog. I couldn't even really comprehend what had happened. Exactly a week after he died, January 6th, there were some things happening in Washington, D.C., [audience chuckles] and I thought of calling my dad, and of course I couldn't. And even now, this morning, I passed someone on the street, a homeless man who looked so much like my dad that it made me stop. And I blinked, and he was gone again. Thank you.