The Night My Father Died and What Happened After

My father passed on a Thursday in March, at the county hospital in Harlan. I was in the room. I had been there for four days straight, sleeping in the recliner the nurses wheeled in without being asked. He was not conscious for most of it. At around 2 in the morning his breathing changed and I moved to the bed and held his hand, and at 2:41 he was gone. The nurses came. There were forms. I called my sister. I drove home in the dark on Route 119 and I remember almost nothing of the drive. What I want to write about happened three days later. I was back at his house, the house I grew up in, going through the kitchen because someone had to do it. His reading glasses were on the counter next to his coffee mug. He drank exactly one cup of coffee every morning. The mug still had a faint ring in the bottom. I picked up the glasses and I completely lost it. I sat down on the linoleum floor and cried in a way I have not cried since I was a child. And then something happened that I cannot explain and am not going to try to explain fully. The grief did not stop. But something came into the room. That is the only way I know how to say it. Not a sound or a vision or anything I could point to. A presence. Warm and steady, the way a wood stove is warm, radiating from somewhere I could not locate. And underneath the grief there was suddenly this certainty, just planted there like it had always been, that my father still existed. Not that his memory would live on, not that he would live in my heart. That he himself, the person, still existed somewhere and was okay. I am not a man who has many spiritual experiences. I grew up going to church but I stopped in my twenties and I do not have a clean category for what I believe now. I know what I felt on that kitchen floor. I know it did not come from me. I have told two people in my life: my sister, who cried, and my friend Dale, who nodded and said he believed me. I am writing it here because I think there are other people who have felt something like this and do not have a place to put it. This is a place to put it.