Colors of Goodbye

by September Vaudrey

  Once Katie is settled into her ICU room, Scott, Sam, Tember, and I go in. Though our girl looks the same as she did downstairs—wires, monitors, the breathing tube, her tongue resting on her lower lip, her eyes at half-mast, the cotton turban, the neck collar—she seems more gravely ill here, and more absent. But her physical beauty is unchanged. Her graceful arms and hands lie at her side. She looks like a vacant angel.

  The organ donation lady enters. “Everything is moving ahead nicely for Katherine’s donation,” she says. “Her surgery will be sometime around midnight tomorrow. Dr. Vaudrey, can I have some time with you to go over the paperwork and get some signatures?”

  An ICU nurse adds, “We’ve set aside two adjoining rooms where your family can spend the night. I’ll take you there.” I haven’t even thought about sleeping plans. The kids are exhausted in every way. I hug each one, and they kiss Katie goodnight. I will stay here while Katie’s friends say their goodbyes.

  “Come wake us up as soon as the big kids get here in the morning,” Tember says. “Don’t let them go see Katie without us! Promise!”

  “I promise,” I tell her.

  They follow the organ donation lady, Scott, and the nurse to those rooms, and I return to Katie’s friends and my girlfriends in the waiting room.

  “Katie is all tucked in,” I say. “You guys can begin your goodbyes now, if you’d like.”

  For the next three hours, Gail, Leanne, Susan, and I keep vigil in the ICU lobby as Katie’s friends make their goodbye treks. The group of junior high girls Katie mentored when she was in high school are here, along with Sarah and Hannah—the high school seniors to whom Katie entrusted her girls when she left for college. Katie’s girlfriends sit on the carpet, talking, crying, and telling stories, along with Casey, who has her shepherding eye on the whole group. How Katie adored this young woman who poured herself into these girls, modeling adulthood, marriage, and motherhood so beautifully. This is a memory of Casey I will never forget.

  In groups of two or three, the girls disappear into Katie’s room to say farewell to their friend. For many, this is their first brush with death. What are they saying to Katie as she lies there hovering between this world and the next? What prayers is heaven receiving from their young hearts? Father, comfort them. May these moments mark the trajectory of their lives in a way that leads to healing and depth and life.

  They exit her room, eyes red, but to a person, everyone leaves with an aura of peace.

  Casey and Melissa are the last to say goodbye to my daughter. They stay in Katie’s room quite awhile. Afterward Casey hugs me and says, “Melissa and I were both struck by the sense of . . . holiness we sensed in that room. There’s no other way to describe it. We could feel God’s presence. We knew we were not in there alone.”

  2:30 A.M., SUNDAY, JUNE 1

  When the last of Katie’s friends and mine have said their goodbyes and headed for home, I find myself alone in the lobby. The hallway lights are dimmed for nighttime, and a solitary nurse sits at her station, filling out charts. I walk to my daughter’s room—the last room on the left—and push back the blue curtain doorway.

  There she lies. All is quiet, save for the beeping of monitors and the rhythmic whoosh of the breathing machine. I lift her right hand and place it in mine, just as I often did nineteen years ago, when she was a sleeping newborn. Is this real? Or is it a parent’s worst nightmare? It is both. Less than twelve hours ago, this very girl raced through the kitchen and bounded out the door to head to work, full of life and joy—a sparkling future before her. Now she hovers between death and death, her only movement the rhythmic rising and falling of her chest as a machine forces air in and out of her lungs. How could this be? How can this be?

  We have become one of “those” families—whose living room wall will someday boast up-to-date pictures of their grown children and grandchildren, but with a photo of one child frozen in time. I remember seeing such a picture years ago at a friend’s parents’ house: Their handsome son—my friend’s brother, dead for fifteen years—wore a 1970s letterman’s jacket, a mullet haircut, wide collars on his silk shirt, and a puka-shell necklace. Surrounding his stale senior portrait were recent photos of his younger siblings—now years older than he would ever become—with their spouses beside them and kids on their laps. This will be our family someday, with Katie’s senior portrait increasingly outdated among the current pictures of Matt, Bethany, Sam, and Tember. No college graduation portrait for her. No wedding photo, no husband, no children on her lap. The unthinkable has happened. My child has died.

  I lift Katie’s hand and kiss it. Oh, the artistic skill that has oozed its way through these delicate fingers onto canvas or paper with paintbrush or charcoal or pen. I stroke her cheek. Her skin is smooth, warm. I notice that the breathing tube is pinching her lower lip, and I step to the other side of the bed to adjust it. As I do so, I spot something tucked into Katie’s left hand—a key chain made of plastic lettered beads that read “Lil Sis”—and I recognize it immediately as the counterpart to the “Big Sis” key chain Tember gave Katie for Christmas a couple of years ago. Tember must have slipped it into her big sister’s hand when she said good night. After Scott and I left the house this afternoon, she must have found her half of the key chain set and brought it to Katie. I love the purposeful boldness of this youngest child of mine.

  I push Katie’s tongue back into her mouth yet again, wet my thumb, and rub the iodine stains from her forehead using the universal spit-wash method protested by children everywhere—the one moms use anyway to rub peanut butter smudges or ice cream drips from their kids’ faces. My daughter does not protest.

  Katie’s lips look uncomfortably dry. I pull a lip gloss from my pocket—the C.O. Bigelow mint-flavored gloss she talked me into buying for myself over Christmas vacation—and coat her parched lips. Her unblinking eyes are now moist with some type of ointment, likely intended to keep her corneas lubricated for transplant. The ointment makes her eyes look more comfortable. She is no longer able to experience discomfort, I realize, but I feel better knowing my daughter’s eyes and lips are moist.

  A sacred aura fills the room. Despite the chaos and sheer horror of this day, I feel none of that now. The tranquility and peace here defy logic. I am not alone. Perhaps this is the presence and holiness Casey described.

  Katie rests peacefully in her bed, machines breathing rhythmically for her. There is nothing for me to do. I know that I need sleep and that the night-shift nurse will keep her ear tuned to Katie’s monitors, but it’s hard to leave my daughter’s side. Her body is just a shell at this point, I tell myself. Katie is already home.

  Tomorrow is my last day with this daughter of mine, and then I’ll have no more days after that. I want to spend the next twenty-four hours carefully. I don’t want to look back and think, If only . . . I am terrified of regrets. But what difference can I make, really? What can I do for her as these hours tick by? What else but sit here?

  Life is so filled with doing. Tomorrow will be about being. I simply will be with my daughter. I will sit by her side. I will hold her hand. I will spend every minute just being near her.

  “Goodnight, Katiebug.” I kiss her hand, her forehead, each eyelid, her lips. I turn, and with automated steps, walk out of the room.

  When things fall apart,

  the broken places

  allow all sorts of things to enter,

  and one of them

  is the presence of God.

  SHAUNA NIEQUIST, BITTERSWEET

  13

  AUTUMN 1994

  Katie, age five, sat perched on a barstool at the kitchen counter, legs swinging. A childlike but accurate drawing of a coffee cup, complete with cartoon lines of steam rising from its rim, graced the white paper in front of her. A loosely stacked harvest of completed drawings was piled at her side.

  “Done!” she said, holding up the paper for my approval.

  “Nice, Katie! Can I have a sip?” I reached for the paper and took
a pretend taste.

  “Mom, it’s not a real coffee . . .”

  “But it looks real,” I said, winking.

  Giggling, she retrieved her drawing and asked, “What should I draw next?”

  It was a typical school morning at our house, and the big kids had just left for the bus. Our rural school district offered full-day kindergarten every other day, and today was a home day for Katie. Little brother Sam, two, sat in his high chair, patiently nudging scrambled eggs onto his spoon with a jam-sticky finger. Baby Tember was still asleep.

  Katie loved this oasis of “just us” time. Some mornings it was “What should we read next?” or “What should we play next?” But today it was “What should I draw next?” She almost always chose some form of art—watercolors, Sculpey clay, colored pencils—to occupy our time together, which was a pleasure for the artist in me as well. I often drew story illustrations for the children’s program at our church—and Katie was a quick study of my drawings. Her cartooning style was beginning to mirror my own. But this morning, Katie was working freehand with crayons and a stack of printer paper.

  “Draw these,” I said, placing a bunch of bananas before her and moving a cereal box out of the way. I took my coffee cup and the last of the breakfast dishes to the sink. Bananas were not Katie’s favorite subject. But nor were coffee cups, cereal boxes, teapots, or loaves of bread. For her, the subject matter wasn’t the point; it was the challenge of matching eye to hand to paper that captured her interest.

  I turned off the kitchen faucet and set down my sponge to watch as she began her sketch. She flipped her coffee cup drawing over, revealing a fresh canvas ripe with possibilities. She stared at the bananas for a moment. I could almost hear her wheels spinning as she planned her attack. She pulled a yellow crayon from the box, then reconsidered and swapped it for a brown.

  Katie’s face was a curious mixture of intensity and levity whenever she drew. Her piercing brown eyes, her furrowed brow, and the tip of her tongue—which she unconsciously flicked back and forth against her lip in rhythm with each stroke of her crayon—all these reflected a focused delight. I watched as the stubby crayon in her five-year-old hand transferred the bananas to paper with striking precision.

  She set down the brown and reached for the yellow. Soon the outline of each banana was filled in, with a few brown bruises added for accuracy. She held her drawing up, comparing it to the real thing and grinning at me. I nodded my approval and gave her another wink. She wriggled in her seat and added this drawing to the growing stack of papers beside her. She looked up again, eyes sparkling.

  “Okay, Mama, what should I draw next?”

  JUNE 2002

  When the kids were ages eight to seventeen, we moved from Washington State to a neighborhood in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, where Scott entered seminary and began an internship at Willow Creek Community Church. Though he loved being an ER doc—and he was good at it—he also loved the work he did as a volunteer at our church in Spokane, helping people explore faith at deeper levels and investing in our church’s volunteer leaders. He had felt an increasing pull toward full-time ministry, and we finally took the plunge.

  “This family could use a little adventure!” Bethany declared at the family meeting when we announced that, yes, we would be moving. The kids were champs about the move to a new state, new schools, and a new church—though we felt sad leaving the school and church friends we loved. Scott and I were especially proud of Matt, our oldest, who kept a positive attitude despite facing his senior year of high school without knowing a soul.

  At the end of that first year in Illinois, Katie graduated from middle school and was excited about becoming a freshman at Jacobs High School in the fall. She attended church camp with Bethany and Matt that summer and came back motivated to live her life with more purpose.

  “I made a vow,” she told me one morning after camp.

  “Really?” I asked. “What vow?”

  “No boys during my freshman year. No dating.”

  I smiled.

  “I’m serious, Mom. I want to focus solely on my friends, on reflecting God’s love to them. Twenty-three kids, Mom. I feel like God will help me make a difference in the lives of twenty-three kids.”

  Why twenty-three? I have no idea. But I loved that her goal had specificity.

  Later that month, she wrote these words in a journal: “I want to love more purely than I ever have before. Blessed is each situation in our lives! For it is the perfect preparation for a future only He can see.” A little melodramatic, perhaps, but it reflected her heart for people.

  Katie wasn’t a sidelines kind of kid, and she admired people who took action. One night at dinner, she announced, “If I have a daughter someday, I want to name her Jael.”

  “Why Jael?” Matt asked.

  “She was a strong woman in the Bible who defended her people by killing off one of their enemies.[1] She drove a tent stake through the bad guy’s head! Jael didn’t just wait around for the men to come to her rescue. She took matters into her own hands. That’s how I want my daughters to be.”

  “It’s a great name,” Bethany said. “If you don’t use it, I will!”

  14

  SEPTEMBER 2003

  Katie’s interest in art gained momentum throughout junior high, and she was champing at the bit to continue developing her craft in high school. Her art teacher at Jacobs High School, Ms. Ellis, brought the perfect blend of high standards, foundational skills, and heavy dollops of encouragement. Katie thrived.

  When she brought home her first finished project—an eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch drawing of a beautiful young woman done in ebony pencil—Scott and I were speechless. The drawing looked like a photograph.

  “Here’s the image I used as a reference,” she said, handing us a perfume advertisement torn from a magazine. The likeness between the perfume model and the woman smiling up at us from Katie’s drawing was almost indiscernible.

  “Holy moly, Katie!” Scott said. “We knew you had talent, but this . . . we had no idea.”

  She grinned. She was finding her sweet spot.

  “Her art is fearless,” Ms. Ellis told me when I bumped into her at school one day. “She tries every medium I throw at her. Her work is large and bold and beautiful. She is accurate—and fast. We call her ‘The Machine.’”

  Like a runner knocking large blocks of time off her personal best with each race, Katie was gaining ground with each piece of art she completed. Her drawings of people especially amazed me. She could capture moist eyes, wrinkles in skin, strands of hair—even delicate lace in gloves—with photographic realism. When she was sixteen, she entered one such drawing, Masquerade, in the art fair for her school district, and it took first place. “Masquerade is representative of how even grown-ups play hide-and-seek,” she said. “Everyone hides behind something. People even hide behind beauty—but there is still a child inside all of us.” The district framed and hung the piece in the lobby of its headquarters.

  By the end of her sophomore year, Katie had taken all the art classes offered at Jacobs. When we moved to a new neighborhood closer to work and church, Katie began as a junior at nationally recognized Fremd High School, whose robust art program offered a wealth of opportunity for her to stretch her wings. Katie was ravenous, taking every art class she could squeeze into her schedule and tackling every art medium Fremd offered. Delicate watercolors, multitextured oils, bold acrylics, sculptures, pottery, and metalwork—she threw herself into each new medium. She entered shows and brought home prizes.

  She said yes to every opportunity to push herself as an artist—including tackling two performance-art pieces: During Fremd’s music performance week, she painted a thirty-six-by-thirty-six-inch abstract oil on canvas in the school’s hallway as her friend Mindy played a stunning cello solo. And she said yes to painting a watercolor floral during the prelude to the wedding of our friends Eric and Sue. The week before the wedding, I dropped Katie a helpful hint: “Maybe you sh
ould time yourself by doing a few practice runs, honey. You only have twenty minutes on stage, start to finish . . .”

  “Mom,” she said. “Practicing would ruin the artistry of the moment! I’ll be fine.” Clearly I was unenlightened as an artist. She taped a giant piece of watercolor paper to some plywood, gave it a light tea wash, roughed in a few pencil lines, and called it good.

  On the day of the wedding, she took the stage, her eyes afire with focus. Energized by the tight time frame and the high stakes, she set her brushes flying and finished the thirty-by-forty-eight-inch painting—a soft floral in peaches and greens—just as the ceremony began.

  Katie loved creating beauty in all its varied forms—and she herself was growing into a lovely young woman. But it didn’t bother her if someone saw her when she didn’t look her best. Even at the peak of teen self-consciousness, she would readily take out her upper retainer—and the fake front tooth it held as a placeholder for an adult tooth she was missing (dental implant to come later). She would flash a goofy, gap-toothed grin and talk with a thick hillbilly accent, just to get a laugh. If she accidentally got hit in the face playing volleyball or basketball, she’d discreetly slip out her retainer and cry out in “pain,” pretending the offender had knocked out her tooth. She regularly met friends for coffee wearing sweats and no makeup, went a couple of days between showers on the weekend, or dared a girlfriend to feel the bristly stubble on the one hairy leg she forgot to shave.