by Megyn Kelly
I wouldn’t let it go.
He’d had it. He turned and walked out of the kitchen. That was the last exchange I would ever have with my father.
I watched him walk toward the living room, and then I stormed up to my bedroom without saying good night or even acknowledging him. I turned out the light and went to sleep angry. The last image I have of my father alive is of him alone on the couch, staring at the Christmas tree. That sight would haunt me for the rest of my life—the picture of a good man, exasperated and alone.
Just before midnight, Suzanne ran into my bedroom.
“Wake up!” she shouted. “Daddy had a heart attack.”
I ran downstairs just as the paramedics arrived. They began performing CPR on Dad. Red lights were flashing into our living room. Mom, Suzanne, and I struggled to push our large German shepherd, who was trying to be by my father, into the basement to keep her from getting in the way. The EMTs hastily loaded my father onto a stretcher and then into the ambulance. One of them was a friend of my brother’s. I remember his face vividly—it was grave, and he had tears in his eyes.
The ambulance raced to the hospital. Mom, Suzanne, and I followed behind, driven by our neighbors, who had heard the commotion and come over. When we arrived, we were told to wait in a private room. It seemed like we were there for many hours, but it was probably less than one.
At last the doctor came in and looked at us, shaking his head.
“There was nothing we could do.”
I remember standing in the corner of the room and feeling my knees bend. A small green metal trash can sat beneath me, and I felt it hit the back of my legs as they buckled.
They invited us to see him. To take a look at my dad, who had been alive two hours earlier and looking at the Christmas tree. To say good-bye to my dad, with whom I had argued over a class ring, and whom I had disappointed with my selfishness.
He was lying on a hospital bed with a cut on his upper nose, where his glasses hit him when he went down. He looked peaceful. And it was clear he was gone.
One by one, we held his hands. It was too much to bear.
We were all in shock. At about three o’clock in the morning, as we were leaving the hospital, I stood next to my mother in the parking lot under a pitch-black sky.
“Will you ever be happy again?”
“Of course I will, honey,” she said. “And you will be, too.”
Mom couldn’t afford to take time off from her job. Just a few months before my dad died, he had canceled an extra life insurance policy, thinking that he was forty-five and healthy, and we needed to save money. When she got home from work at the hospital, she would sit in the garage and sob, alone, before she came inside. She tried to put on a brave face for me. But I knew.
Money was certainly a stressor. My dad had bought a new car a couple of weeks before he died. The car company gave my mom a terrible time about the payments, even though they knew the situation in full. She just wanted to give back the car. It was two weeks old. It hadn’t seen a lot of wear and tear. And yet they wouldn’t take it and were threatening to sue her. It was more than she could handle at that moment.
Our family lawyer, Peter Walsh, had been one of my father’s closest friends. A well-respected attorney in Albany, he shared my dad’s passion for religion, philosophy, and music. He told my mother not to worry.
“I’m going to handle this, Linda,” he said. And he did. He sent the car company a one-line letter: “Go fucketh thyselves.”
As someone who later became a lawyer and a communicator for a living, I think about that letter often. Sometimes less is more when it comes to showing someone what a moron they are.
The company took back the car.
But money was such a small piece of what my mother had to deal with in her grief. A person can encounter such inadvertent cruelty after losing a spouse. Most of my parents’ friends were married. Once she lost her other half, so many people seemed to write her off. It was as if she had ceased to exist outside of her marriage to my dad. This was driven home when some friends of the family were in town right after the funeral. The husband and his wife took my mom to the store, trying to get her mind off of things. They meant well. When she came home, it was clear she was upset. Later she told me how affectionate the man had been with his wife. He held her hand. He helped her in and out of the car. He kissed her. My mom saw it all, and felt so alone. He didn’t do it on purpose, but sometimes people don’t recognize life’s little cruelties.
The number-one thing I remember from that time was overwhelming sadness, which we each dealt with in our own way. My mom was strong but in deep mourning for a very long time; for the next year, she went to church almost every day. I preferred biking to my father’s grave, to sit there and be with him. His tombstone has a fishing pole on it—Dad loved to fish. Every time I’d see an impossibly long book, or hear a word I didn’t know, I’d think of him. I still do.
One of the only releases we had was TV. Mom loved The Golden Girls and The Jeffersons. It’s actually one of the reasons I love TV as much as I do today: during that awful time, it was an escape for both of us, something we could do together on the weekends. Mom would say, “Let’s have a TV marathon!” We’d light a fire in the fireplace. Kelly would come over. We’d all get under blankets, order dinner in, and watch a marathon of Little House on the Prairie. And for a while we would forget how sad we were.
My other strategy for coping was to throw myself into school life. I had been voted homecoming princess and started dating a popular boy in the junior class. Socially, I felt accepted. Kelly and my other friends were there to cheer me up and to make me feel cared for during that awful time.
We asked God for signs a lot in those days—signs that my dad was still around. Every time we asked, we received. Not long after he died, Mom had a bad asthma attack and wound up in the hospital. She was upset and overwhelmed, and asked for a sign. Sure enough, later that day, she was looking for something in her purse while still in her hospital bed, and out popped a small card my father had sent her with some roses years earlier.
I realize this kind of thing can be explained in any number of ways, but my own belief is: Who are we, as mere mortals, to say there is no power beyond? To presume all of this energy, this beautiful, strong, complex energy, just dies when our hearts stop beating? I believe my father’s spirit lives on, and I believe somehow he got that card to my mother that day.
Whether it was through sitting at his grave, or in church, or in front of the TV, we had to endure. It was like giving blood at the doctor’s office. Sometimes you have no choice. The needle is going to pierce your vein. Your blood’s going to pump out. It is going to hurt. So too it is with grief. There will be a bloodletting, whether you want it or not. You grit your teeth and bear it until the acute tenderness has passed. And then one day you realize it has.
It took years to feel anything but deep regret about the terms my father and I were on that last night. I wished I’d made up with him before I went to bed, or that I’d been less shallow. Me being bratty and him being fed up—that had never been what our relationship was about. I hated that it ended on that note, rather than after any of the days we’d spent talking about books or playing music and dancing. It’s taken years to get to a place where I can believe that my father has forgiven me for my pettiness and vanity in those hours before he died.
I try not to let that memory make me paranoid about my relationships with others. At first, when I would fight with my husband, Doug, I would wonder if we should try to make up before bed, because what if . . . When they say you should never go to bed angry, I know why firsthand. But the truth is that even after my dad’s death, I found this adage unrealistic. Sometimes you’re angry. Sometimes you’re tired. Sometimes you can’t resolve things before you close your eyes. If I ever fall asleep mad at Doug, and then die before we make up, I just have to trust that he knows I love him. As for my kids, I’ve never gone to bed angry with them; in fact, I’ve really n
ever been angry with them. Of course, they are not yet teenagers who want meaningless and expensive class jewelry. Still, like my mom, I believe strongly in conflict resolution. And never more than a day will pass before Doug and I work out our differences.
For a very long time, I was consumed by thoughts of our loss.
“Mom,” I said one night, “I keep dreaming about Dad. Then when I wake up, I remember the truth. It’s awful.”
“Why don’t you think of it as extra time with him?” she said. “Try to enjoy that time.”
I looked at her, thinking of everything I was going through and how she had to be feeling just as much, and more. I felt like I would never be as tough as my mother.
“How are you so strong?” I asked her.
She came over and held me.
“Anything is doable as long as it’s time-limited,” she said. “This pain will never go away, but it will get easier.”
My mother was so sad, but so brave at the same time. Once, when she was at work during this time, she had a contentious exchange with a table full of doctors at the hospital. Uncharacteristically, she burst into tears. While crying, she choked out: “These tears are not about you. They are about my husband. But don’t let the tears dilute the content of my message.”
What a great line.
She is so right. Like my mom, I am by no means a woman of steel. And as the years have gone on, I’ve come to realize the truth of what she modeled for me: It’s okay to get emotional. It’s okay to cry—and this is key—as long as you can play hurt. My mom always told me one of the tests of an emotionally healthy person was how quickly they could recover from a setback. The test of strength is not avoiding emotional distress; it’s functioning in the face of it.
Those first few Christmases after my father’s death were rough. We took comfort in each other, and in the maintenance of our family routines. Mom would always cook a big breakfast Christmas morning—she even did it the Christmas right after my dad died, a week to the day after we buried him on a bitingly cold, gray, snowy day. Every year thereafter, we always got a tree and decorated it, drank eggnog, and sang Christmas carols, with one less stocking by the fire.
We worked hard in those first years after my father’s death to find opportunities to smile. One Christmas, Mom sent me and Suzanne to get the tree, insisting as she always did that it be a Fraser fir. She said Douglas firs shed their needles everywhere.
“No problem,” we said.
“Go now,” she said, “or they will all be gone.”
But we were watching our favorite Christmas special, The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t, and this was before the invention of DVR.
“We’ll be fine,” we told her.
“Go!” she cautioned.
Sure enough, by the time we got to the tree farm, there were no more Frasers.
We bought a Douglas, and before we brought it home, my sister looked at me. “This is a Fraser,” she said. “Got it? Repeat after me: This. Is. A. Fraser!”
When we got home, Mom took one look at that tree, and with hands on her hips, said, “That is not a Fraser!”
“Yes, it is,” Suzanne said.
“It is,” I said.
We had barely gotten the tree decorated when needles started falling off. Suzanne and I doubled down.
“This year’s Frasers seem off,” we remarked.
My mom rolled her eyes.
To this day we have never admitted it was a Douglas. (I’m having my mom skip this chapter.) It was an extra boon that the sheer absurdity of our lie, and the intensity with which we maintained it, gave me and Suzanne a good laugh in a dark time.
In the years since my father’s passing, I’ve found different ways to remember him at Christmas. The very first time I played a guitar was Christmas 1997, twelve years after my father’s death. I wanted to surprise everyone by playing “Today” by John Denver, which has always been such a special song in our family, as it was one of my father’s favorite campfire songs during our summer trips. My friend at the time said, “I don’t mean to discourage you, but it is two weeks until Christmas, you don’t know how to play guitar, you don’t own a guitar, and you don’t have the music to the song.”
I was undeterred. I bought a classical guitar for $100. I found the sheet music by walking into about seven guitar stores and singing the song until someone knew it and how to get it. I taught myself how to finger-pick the tune late at night after work. And then I sneaked the guitar home for the holiday, having a cab instead of my mom pick me up at the train station so no one would see I had it.
On Christmas morning I came downstairs in my red pajamas, and told my brother, my sister, and my mom I had a special gift for them. And I started to sing.
Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine.
I’ll taste your strawberries. I’ll drink your sweet wine.
A million tomorrows shall all pass away,
’ere I forget all the joy that is mine today.
I played and sang “Today” for them. And I wrecked Christmas. I could barely make it through the song without breaking down. Okay, I did break down. And so did every member of my family. It was like I set off a sadness bomb. I went to the bathroom to clean up my tearstained face, and my sister Suzanne came in.
“Meg, that was wonderful,” she said.
“No, it wasn’t. I ruined Christmas.”
“You didn’t,” she said.
“I made everyone cry.”
“You made us feel him, Meg. You made us remember what it was like to have him here. You didn’t ruin anything.”
In truth, even now, all these years later, I’m never far from my father’s life and his death. Ever since his passing, the fear of my own mortality has haunted me. For many years, I worried that I had some gene that would take my life early. There were some advantages to this. After my dad died, I started eating well. As soon as I could at sixteen, I started teaching aerobics and did that for ten years. I was determined to try to stay alive. And then when I started having children, that desire became even more acute, and I began to obsess over mortality.
For years, starting in high school, it was as if I could hear my heart beating, each thump a reminder of the passage of time. Every time I hit that brick wall of unhappiness, I hear my heartbeat grow louder. Because of that night, with my sister coming into my room and the paramedic’s face and my dad on the gurney and my mom in the parking lot, I know I only have limited time here. I mean I know it, not just in my head the way everyone does, but in my heart and in my gut, the way those who suffer great loss do.
But this newfound sense of urgency didn’t immediately bring a higher level of clarity or calling to my life—on the contrary, it sent me reeling. Recently, I came across my old journals, which I’ve been keeping since I was a kid. Here is an entry from June 12, 1989, three and a half years after my father’s death:
I feel so helpless sometimes. I know that my destiny is in my own hands, but to what extent? There is so much to think about—family, friends, career, LIFE! Will my grandchildren read this, years from now, and see it as the only thing to remember me by? No legacy? We’re here for such a short time.
But what exactly are my ambitions? I thought ambition was viewed as bad, as wrong. It turns out it’s the key to everything. Where will I be in ten years? I want to be successful.
What do I believe in—really believe in? Hell, Megyn, what do you even know about the world? I want to know what my teachers know. Where is it all? In books? I know where it is—it’s in years and years of research and experiences. That’s not something I can just have. I have to get it all for myself. I’m just sitting here wondering who I really am inside and—who am I to become?
A few years after my father’s passing, Mom met a wonderful man, Peter Kirwan, in a support group for widows and widowers. He’d lost his first wife to brain cancer and nursed her himself to her dying day. Peter was great for my mom, and for me, too. He could never take the place of my father, but he w
as a good-hearted, good-humored, strong male presence in my life at a time when I really needed that.
Peter came to the relationship with three children of his own—Paul, Patrick, and Liza. Paul was strong, good-looking, and easygoing—he’s now a police sergeant in Albany. Patrick was about the gentlest soul I’d ever met, quirky and loving and all kindness. If any of us needed anything, Patrick would be there, first in line with a screwdriver or a moving truck or whatever else, and probably a corny joke too. And Liza, now a critical care nurse, was full of fire—she loves music, sings like an angel, and floors us all with her acerbic wit.
Like my dad, Peter is a devout Catholic, and as a young man he too had considered the priesthood. (When my mom’s friend heard this, she asked Mom, “Does your mother know you’re boinking all these priests?”) When Peter and my mom got married, they had five priests standing at the altar. Two were friends, two were from their respective parishes, and I don’t know where they found that other guy. It was a beautiful service—very pious, as you might guess—and full of family. All six of us looked on, relieved to see our mom or dad finding love again, but also deeply saddened at the reality that life really does move on.
I don’t call Peter my father, because my father didn’t abandon us, and I want to honor his memory. But Peter is as much a father figure to me as any man could have been. He’s provided a shoulder to cry on more times than I can count. He’s given counsel in the dark times, and shared my joy in the highest moments, always with a thoughtful word. We tease him because he tends to see things in extremes—everything with him is either “magnificent” or “devastating.” There’s very little middle ground. Conversation with him is exciting.