Home on the river
A couple of days before my dad died, I found a ladybug. It was a reddish-orangish ladybug with no spots, crawling around on the Kleenex box of our hospital room in Greenville, SC. I hadn’t been outside in two days, so when I saw it, I exclaimed, “Oh! A ladybug!” My dad, sick with an aggressive Stage 4 Lymphoma, was in his bed. He was going on his fourth week, third room, and fifth bed at the hospital. Of course, he craved nature even more than I did. He said, “Oh! Those are good luck, aren’t they?” I smiled and looked at the ladybug, wondering where it had come from. I said, “Yes, yes, they are.”
We had a good rest of our day. My dad was very sick, and while he had gotten the prescribed treatment he needed, his levels just weren’t improving. I had the MyChart tab open on my phone at all times, refreshing it every couple of hours to see what the new tests would say. Sometimes I would share the results with him — he was an extremely analytical man and had been genuinely fascinated by these numbers over the course of his sickness. He was sick for twelve years, but the fancy MyChart app only recently became available. When I came home to visit over the past year, he would show me how his levels had changed and how he was proud to have lowered his off-the-charts white blood cell count. His cancer couldn’t be cured, but this was the key to maintaining his cancer at a manageable level: Lower the white blood cells (WBCs). When he would receive his list of test results for things like hemoglobin, red blood cells, and platelet levels, they each had a visual scale. An arrow pointed to the number on a little colored line for each one, indicating the number and whether it was in or out of the desired range. For example, a typical test result for my dad would be a green line arrow for red blood cells (standard), yellow for hemoglobin (low), and red for platelet levels (extremely low). The colors varied, depending on how in or out of range it was. At the bottom of the list, he would see “WBC: Greater than 40,000.” The normal WBC range was about 5,000, so greater than 40,000 was pretty bad.
I visited my parents a couple of times over the summer. One of those times, Daddy told me, animatedly, how he had quickly scrolled through his test results, but when he got to the bottom, the WBC count was missing… Where was the magic number? Surely they hadn’t forgotten it — it was the key to his “cure” after all. He told me how he couldn’t figure it out until he scrolled back up and saw it next to all the other tests, with its own little visual color scale. It was yellow. He was no longer “Greater than 40,000.” The WBCs could be counted! And that was just so cool to him because before, they wouldn’t even fit on the chart. He had this new medicine, and he was a medical miracle! He was genuinely fascinated and simply just so pleased to be feeling better. The magic of medicine.
Fast forward to November. I’m back in the hospital with the ladybug, thinking of his fascination with numbers. I hold my breath and quietly open the MyChart. Refresh. Scroll. Look. Oh, good! The numbers aren’t terrible, and it looks like the last transfusion has worked. I was feeling good that night, as Daddy had begun to regain some strength, and I thought it was a good sign. Maybe that little ladybug really was good luck.
I made up my bed next to his and went to sleep. The next morning after they’d collected his bloodwork at 4 am (why does it always have to be 4 am?!), I checked MyChart. Crap. This number was off, and that number was off, and it’s all gone to shit. As for the white blood cells, we’re not greater than 40,000 anymore — we’re actually “Less than 0.1.” How the hell did that happen?! We’ve done a 180 (or a 360?) Either way, these numbers were not good, and they won’t seem to get better. This time, I didn’t tell him what I saw.
I walked out into the vestibule area of the room to grab him some breakfast from the cooler. It was very chilly out there; the outdoor temperatures had dipped below freezing. And as soon as the morning light showed its face, what did I see? To my horror, none other than that same damn ladybug, upside down and flailing its little legs around like a dying cockroach.
It made me so sad, and I wanted to preserve our luck, so I searched online for what to do, and sat him on a napkin with a juicy blueberry split in two. I put him on top of the berry, and if I looked really closely, I could see how he started eating it right away. I was pleased. But I also knew the ladybug would not make it for long inside the hospital room. More ladybugs were flying around inside, too. They must have come inside through a little hole, trying to escape the cold.
At this point, my dad really wanted to go home, and he seemed to be more and more at peace with what that meant. My mom and I had both been thinking separately about it, too; if he was going to die, it could not be in the hospital. He wasn’t in critical condition at that point; he was still talking and seemed to have some strength. But the treatment wasn’t working, and there was no good reason why. Things were happening quickly with every new MyChart result, and every night was a toss-up: he could either sleep through the night or have a near-death experience. Basically, if we were going to stop treatment, we needed to make the gut-wrenching decision to get him home before it was too late.
That morning, it was my turn to go home, take a shower, and work on my laptop (yeah, right, like that was going to happen). I couldn’t leave my little ladybug friend there, but he couldn’t die in the hospital either. So I decided to bring him home, like a crazy person. I wrapped him up in a surgical mask and a paper towel, and he rode home in my front seat. Did I put on the seat warmer for him? No, I’m not that crazy… Okay, I lied; maybe I am.
I put him on the kitchen counter and added some leaves to his tiny temporary home. He rested for a while and then started moving around again. Yay! I tried giving him some more fruit, but he wasn’t really into it. I was supposed to take a work call, but HELLO, I was busy saving a life here. I took the little guy outside and placed his napkin in the grass. He didn’t want to leave. I know nothing about ladybugs, but I was fascinated by him, watching him walk in circles on the napkin but not wanting to go back into nature. He seemed distressed. I now felt bad for taking him out of his environment. But in my mind, he could not die at the hospital. I tried putting him on the grass, then in the dirt, then on the concrete, and gave him some different types of leaves to crawl on.
It was an extensive process of staring at a tiny bug all day. Ridiculous. Finally, I left him alone to sit inside and work (i.e., stare at the wall — there would be no work accomplished that day). I was feeling sad all day, coming to terms with the fact that my daddy was going to die and that I would have to be okay with it. A lot of internal dialogue happened, and in the end, while I couldn’t focus on work that day, I was really thankful to have had this time to peacefully think, process, and gather some strength for what was to come.
At some point during the afternoon, I went back outside to check on the ladybug, but the wind had blown the napkin away, and when I went over and picked it up, he wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t know where he went or if he was still alive, but I hoped I had prolonged his life for just a little bit longer, or at least made him happier at the end?
Now, of course, ladybugs don’t have feelings, but this was obviously a metaphor for my dad.
Two nights later, I was back in the hospital and wrote, “I don’t want him to die in the hospital, and I want to make his dying days a little bit better.” Less than twenty-four hours later, we were home. And he was gone.
My daddy died at home. And I held his hand the whole time.
…
Two weeks later, we held a celebration of his life in my beautiful hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina. It was a small outdoor celebration in a park overlooking the Beaufort River, right between the hospital where he was born and the house where he was raised. It was a lovely idea in theory, but I wasn’t really in the mood to be there. I had been checking his email and he kept getting new MyChart notifications. I was thinking to myself, “Jeez, he is dead — you can stop running the tests now…” We also hadn’t yet picked up his ashes — I didn’t even know if he had been cremated yet — and it felt so stupid to celebrate him while his remains were still in the morgue and not in nature where they belonged. His ashes will eventually be spread into that river, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I had been feeling like he was in purgatory or something; not yet at peace.
So, I was sitting off in the distance by the riverbank, purposefully away from the gathering crowd, and my little cousin was playing in the grass. Her dad handed her a ladybug. He said, “Look, Whitley, a ladybug!” And I perked up. I looked at it in her hand. It was a reddish-orangish ladybug with no spots. Just like the one at the hospital. I said nothing but asked her if I could take a picture of it. I did, and I felt pleased. More family members started to arrive, and so did more ladybugs. They were flying all around us. I felt something on my head and brushed it away, only to see a little ladybug fluttering beside me. He was here. My dad was here! Okay. Now I could go greet the crowd. I was ready to “celebrate.”
Two of my best friends were in attendance, and I told them what had just happened. They knew the previous story; I had briefly posted about the ladybug saga on social media. Someone unaware of my situation at the time proceeded to inform me that this ladybug was an invasive species (Yeah, ok, who cares? So are humans). My friends knew how annoyed I was by that comment. But then my friend jokingly said, right there in the middle of all these people, “Isn’t it so fitting that your dad would come back as an invasive species?” Ha! It really was. I laughed so hard, and in that moment, I realized that I could breathe…
It’s all over now; I’m getting back to my life, and my dad is in a better place. He is a ladybug on the Beaufort River, free to go wherever he wants, wherever the breeze takes him. This is where he was born, and this is where his ashes will be laid to rest in the spring. And this is my forever home, too. I’ve always known Beaufort was home, but I have never cherished this place more than I do now. Daddy, I’m at home when I’m with you.
