Ahead of Time

There is an outcome from my recent triple bypass surgery that I didn't know ahead of time. 

To fully understand that common phrase "ahead of time," I must first take you back in time, back to August 25, 1958.

On that date, my grandfather K (my dad’s dad) died at age fifty-nine. He awoke in the night with a tightness in his chest, fumbled his way to the bathroom, and fell with a heavy thud to the plush rug beside the tub. Heart attack. Gone before the first responders arrived. 

I was only two-years-old at the time, but in the years to follow, whenever we visited Grandma K's house on Griswald Street in Port Huron. my brothers and I shared a fear of going to that bathroom alone. Silly, I know, but the thought of our grandpa dying there never left us. I drive by that house sometimes, some sixty years later, and I know that if I went inside and looked down that hallway, the same eerie feeling would come over me. 

Secondly, I must share another backward glance to April 1, 1995, the date my own father suffered a similar heart attack. He and my mother had gone out for dinner. They had just shared what would be their last dance. Then walking back to their table, he suddenly fell limply to the floor. CPR from a stranger in the room, and a twenty-minute ambulance ride with my mother close behind. My sister met her there. Hurrying into the ER, they saw the A.E.D. paddles applied for the final time. "Clear!" Nothing. Gone. 

My dad was in excellent physical condition, an avid cyclist. He thought nothing of peddling his touring bike along the river from New Baltimore to Algonac to St.Clair to Port Huron and back (a distance of 100 miles) with a quick dip (swim) under the Blue Water Bridge in between. Yet, at age sixty-six, he seemed genetically destined to his father's fate, outliving him by only seven years. To my family it seemed Dad died "ahead of his time," but we also know that isn't true.

I was thirty-nine when we made that trip from Iowa to Michigan for my dad's funeral, and for many years thereafter it seemed I secretly lived in the shadow of grief. It was not a constant state of mourning but rather the sense that we are not physical beings awaiting a spiritual life after death--but rather we are spiritual beings navigating a passing physical life on earth. This gift is short-lived, "a vapor,” as scripture says. We share our allotted time with loved ones and millions of others ordained to live in broader and broader circles around us. It's all summed up in that dash between the two dates on the stones that mark our graves.

In the months and years that followed, I was not depressed--not in a clinical sense. In fact, I and my family experienced many wonderful things during the thirty-one years since 1995, but in that first decade or so, out of the blue, I sometimes missed my dad so much that I would sit alone someplace and sob. I thought of him whenever I tied the laces of the black shoes I wore at his funeral. I wore his tie when I interviewed for the "Head of School" position I enjoyed for twenty-four years (retiring in 2024). Once I was driving home from school alone and thought of something I wanted to talk to Dad about. I had to pull off to the side of the road until my eyes could see clearly again. If I thought this sort of thing were unique to me, I'm not sure I would share it.

Living with the acceptance of this quiet grief in the context of my faith and duties as a husband, father, brother, and grandfather changed my personality. My sometimes somber outlook changed the tone of my interactions and writing. It tinted the lens through which I saw ordinary things. You may notice this tone in a post I called "The Ache of Joy." Or in poems like  "Only the Roots Remain," in "Nothing Like the Heart,  in "Tender to the Ground," in “Something Short of Sorrow, and in many other poems and "chapters" I"ve shared here at Patterns of Ink. Literary melancholy is not unique to me. The most sensitive work of many writers--from Emily Dickinson to Abraham Lincoln to C.S. Lewis and countless others--was prompted by the pain of losing a loved one.

So what happened with my triple bypass surgery that I did not know ahead of time? 

Well, a few years ago, I did the math and realized that each month I lived was a month longer than my father’s time on earth. Who thinks that way? It’s positive and negative at the same time. Along with that private calculation, I secretly embraced the likelihood that I would someday pass in the same way, and I dreaded putting my loved ones through the same heartache my father knew in 1958 and that I knew in 1995. The diagnosis and timing of my surgery confirmed that, medically speaking, those thoughts almost came true.

What changed with my November hospital stay is that I no longer carry the secret sense that I am doomed by family history. I no longer sit at family gatherings quietly envisioning all of them there in the future, in the same familiar settings... without me. (As hinted at in "Seeing Through,") 

This is not to say that bypass surgery comes with guarantees. There are a million ways to die in west Michigan (sounds like a movie title). That final BREATH still lies ahead for me as it does for all of us. The hymns of my childhood were written a hundred years ago when thoughts of death were inseparable from images of heaven. Scores and scores of hymns foreshadowed "When we draw our "fleating breath" to "cross Jordan" and go "beyond the sunset" to that “ sweet by and by.” We seldom sing the old hymns anymore, but I still know the words by heart and take comfort in the belief that to be "absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." For now, however I feel like God has granted me more time…more hope… for whatever His plans include. 

I now share a "heart zipper" with the bravest little boy I know, and it makes me smile.

Ahead of time, I did not know that there would be a sense of community among the 15 strangers in my cardio-rehab sessions for three months. And yet, I will miss them when I am done next week. I'll miss the encouragement of smiles and head-nods we share across a busy room of exercise machines. 

Ahead of time, as I ate Thanksgiving dinner in the hospital, awaiting my surgery the next day, we were all praying for a good outcome—but I did not anticipate a new outlook afterwards. I thank God that both my heart and my mindset have been restored. I see every day as a gift and the thought of tomorrow as a blessing.

“Time does not pass—it gathers; it is not spent but shared.” [from  "The Ache of Joy."]

Tom Kapanka