Seizing Fatherhood
Seizing Fatherhood
John Mark Guerra
On Bearing Illness & Being a Good Dad
I will never forget reading the doctor’s report after the night it happened: “Patient was rigid in the bed with arms extended overhead with fists clenched. Not shaking but certainly unresponsive. Blue in the face.”
Before it all happened, my wife Lisa and I had a night to ourselves. My sister-in-law, Raychel, had the girls at her house for a sleepover. We saved up for a fancy dinner, and I made reservations. We got dressed up, and took our time. We shared fried oyster sliders; she had the hazel dell petit rubans, which is a fresh made fettuccine and local hazel dell mushrooms. I had the duck breast with a chamomile and date reduction. After dinner we walked through Old Town and watched kids play in the splash park. We then went north on Linden St to get a couple drinks at the Union. I got a jalapeño margarita and Lisa got something with mint in it, I think. From there, we walked some more and got some fancy chocolates at a place called Nuance.
After a bit, we got home, watched a movie, ate some chocolate… and then went to bed just thrilled with our night away in town. The girls were doing great, Lisa was oh so happy, and I went to sleep.
The moments that followed would be best described medically and from the third person. Since my memory and placement of events are so far removed from any kind of objectivity, I’ve included the encounter notes from the ER at Poudre Valley Hospital:
07/2/2022: 3:40am (First seizure)
HPI – The patient is a 36-year-old male presenting with first-time seizure. History per patient EMS and spouse. Significant other states that they were laying in bed when he started convulsing and was unresponsive. States the convulsions lasted 10 seconds approximately. Another 10 minutes passed while she was on the phone with first responders and dispatch before the patient ultimately became responsive. He had a postictal period. There was evidence of tongue biting. Patient is amnestic to events. States he recalls watching a movie last night. He is never had a seizure before. He does have familial history, his mother has epilepsy. He apparently has been on amoxicillin and steroids for an ear infection and URI symptoms. He is awake alert and providing history appropriately but is confused and at times perseverative. There are no other modifying factors or associated symptoms.
7/2/2022 11:28 AM (second seizure)
HPI – The patient is a 36 y.o. male who denies past medical history, currently on medications for mild insomnia with occasional trazodone and Augmentin for an ear infection who presents for evaluation of seizures. Patient had a seizure last night at 2:30 in the morning. Woke him from sleep. Came to ED. Head CT negative. Labs reassuring. Went home, was not loaded on antiepileptics. Was napping today, wife heard a noise from the other room, she looked in and patient was rigid in the bed with arms extended overhead with fists clenched. Not shaking but certainly unresponsive. Blue in the face. She brought him here emergently for further care and assessment.
According to Lisa, the ambulance came and paramedics pulled me out of the house in a stretcher, unresponsive. She had torturous moments to herself and every saint surrounding her with prayers as she drove behind the ambulance not sure who or what she would meet at her arrival to the hospital. She met me, but she has her own stories to tell as she wants to.
Apparently my folks came up and spent the night once I was released. I’ve been told Pops helped me go to the bathroom once or twice. Also, my mom probably took the girls shopping. However they helped, despite the erasure of it, I appreciate it. Lisa says that just because of the physical trauma my body went through, getting up and going to the restroom was a fifteen step process.
*
In the blink of an eye, I went from a fully functioning man with agency and courage and resilience to one who was, without question, in need of near constant supervision and hands on care. I needed to be fed. In order to be fed, I needed someone to first sit me up. I wasn’t simply helpless, I was unaware of my helplessness for weeks. In the cheapest comparison, I was like a toddler who kept their parents up all night, but had nothing to say once morning came. I couldn’t even apologize for any of it.
Lisa had found me with both arms stretched in front of me in full extension with my body completely rigid, all while I was not breathing. She found me blue and in a kind of rigor non-mortis, and I remained in that position for about ten minutes. This trauma has procured for me a kind of pain that is both constant and swirling in its placement throughout my body. This pain has brought me to tears countless times. This pain has brought me to the end of myself and crying out for healing and mercy. This pain has marked me and will leave its mark on me for some time.
*
There was one night I remember when my dad took me to the pool house and brought with him a tiny portable keyboard. He sat in the only chair I remember ever being in there. I can’t remember him saying anything to me beforehand, only that I stood in front of him as he played this keyboard and sang with his eyes closed. Nothing else, just him singing to me.
"My heart is hungry
My soul is pure
I want to worship
Like David did"
I can’t recall a single moment before or after my dad sang to me like that. I must’ve been twelve or thirteen, and I probably said something small and not profound, but I don’t remember him having a problem with how I responded to him. I wasn’t a part of the conversation prior to the invitation and I didn’t help him write the song. He passed away when I was 17, and it has marked me as it’s supposed to. There was something about that moment and others like it that have become a kind of iconography for the man he was.
I’ve written about my dad before, countless times. I’ve probably shared this story of him taking me to the pool house and singing a song at least a dozen times. And yet, when pain and suffering arises or when loss and trauma find their way inside my house, I remember that moment. I need to remember that moment, because after what I have gone through as of late, I need every father I can find to come and quiet me, tell me they’re proud of me, and that I’m a good dad.
I need my father to remind me that everything is going to be okay. The girls will be okay. Lisa will be okay. Even if I am in incredible and constant pain that will not relent despite my most sincere efforts, everything will be okay.
"So I lift my hands in worship
And praise You with my lips
Declare Your power and glory
And bow
Before Your throne..."
*
Children shouldn’t have to choose their fathers. No infant knows themselves to any degree that would allow them to make any kind of decision. But more fathers today choose their children.
While some of us millennials just don’t want to deal with children and commitment, there are many men who make the choice to come into someone else’s house, put their stuff in another family’s closets, eat their food, and give themselves in love and affection to fill the place of absence. They have no idea what kind of chaos and weirdness will come their way.
An absentee father is a plague on our children. It’s more than a disruption of a random event, it has lifelong and significant outcomes. According to a 2022 US Census Bureau and a 2013 study by Sarah McLanahan, when a child is raised in a father-absent home:
There is a 4x greater risk of poverty; they are more likely to have significant behavioral problems; they are more likely to go to prison and more likely to commit crime; there is a 7x higher rates of teen pregnancy; there are higher rates of abuse and neglect; they are 2x more likely to drop out of school.
And yet, George Henderson (I call him Pops) decided to say “yes” to decide what he would allow himself to get into with us. He texted me many times during this period, with simple messages such as “Proud of you” and “Stay with it, Amigo.”
He came into my life without knowing what he was getting into. Who doesn’t like my mom? I get that, that’s easy. But with that tiny woman came a family made of strong-willed, trauma-hardened teenagers who didn’t know who they were outside of the absence of their father who left all too soon. But there he was, all of the sudden, making himself available to whatever kind of relationships we could handle together.
Pops doesn’t get the romance and memorializing words like my dad, but that’s because he’s still here. He’ll get all of that when we have to deal with it, but that’s not today. Today he gets the award for loyalty, dedication, “sticktoitiveness,” and quiet unwavering support for my best self. He wants me to be the man I want to be. He wants that more than I do, but that’s what fathers do.
*
I want to be a good dad; everyone wants me to be a good dad. When I woke up from the second seizure, I remember being incredibly disoriented. In fact, my recall of this moment was only possible three weeks later simply due to the degree of the trauma. As best as I can, I remember a nurse with long grey hair and glasses. I remember all the lights being on in the room, and I remember Lisa crying as she greeted me.
“Hi babe.”
There was already an IV in my arm, I was dressed in a hospital gown, and I remember my mouth being swollen shut. I looked around the room and realized where I was and I began asking questions. “Am I in the hospital?” “Are the girls okay?”
I may be romanticizing myself here for the sake of the narrative, but that is precisely because I so want it to be true. I want to be the father who, after undergoing life-threatening trauma and pain, first asks about his girls.
There is just so much of my life that is wrapped up in how I love and lead my family. When I was single, I would have months of chaotic sleeping, addiction, and joblessness. After marriage and kids, my heart opened up in way it never could before. Just the practice of being present in loving someone else procured in me a kind of steadiness I didn’t know I needed.
Lisa once asked me if I could go back in time and talk to 20 year old me, how surprised who he be to learn that he would one day be a houseplant guy? What would he say when I showed him my watering schedule for my succulents? I said he would be amazed to know that I would have a bed of my own.
*
There is this cultural shift occurring right now in millennial fathers like me, embracing a new kind of relationally driven parenthood that was just not expected from our parents. Pew Research found that dads like me have tripled the time spent caring for our kids and doubled housework, compared to 50 years ago. While we may take longer to establish our households than our fathers and grandfathers, even if it’s fewer of us doing so, when we do, it’s everything we do. Dads see parenting as central to their identity. Even we’re spending more time with our kids, many of us still feel that we’re not doing enough.
Having gone through all the loss and growth and work to become the man I am, I know that my truest self is someone who can love his family well. All the other stuff I could be about and whatever excites me, honestly falls away from my attention and devotion in comparison to how I feel about taking the girls to Trader Joe’s for flowers and snacks. I have a solid spaghetti and meatball recipe. I know how Lisa likes her tea. I spent months researching couches for our living room. I’m a dad; that’s the bulk of my lived-out identity, sandwich crust removal services and all.
And yet, there is this lurking fear deep within me that I won’t be able to be the kind of dad I want to be. Not just because my ideals are unrealistic, but because I know what it’s like to see a future hoped for become relegated to matters of grief.
As I was laying in bed working through all of the events and consequences of the seizures, Lisa gave her best to speak truth and hope with all that I was saying. All until I said, “You don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a sick dad.”
Thomas Merton says, “Everything that exists and everything that happens bears witness to the will of God.” I didn’t want, and I still do not want my girls to have a life where their experience of fatherhood is based in a primary point of reference of my sickness or incapacitation. I don’t want them having memories of me in the hospital. I don’t want them to have flashes of seeing me with IV’s coming out of my arm. I don’t want Haven giving random people diagnoses of her father’s ailments and treatments as I did. I don’t want Mary to get excited about having a sleepover in the hospital with her dad like I did. I don’t want them to try and have fun with sneaking into the little rooms where they keep the ice machine and apple juices. I don’t want their lives marked by my absence as countless other children do.
My father died without saying he loved me and without the kind of goodbye I know he wanted to give. He didn’t think he had to that day in May, but that was it. We got a little walk down the hospital hallway while I was still wearing my school uniform, and then I left for the night. That was it.
Fathers want to know for themselves that their family will be okay. In the same way I check the locks at night, fathers want some kind of assurance that what they do will keep their family safe and cared for. I think that’s why Home Depot and all its counterparts exist: dads want to build their houses to keep their family safe with their own hands, tools and constructions. If they can’t build the house, they’ll buy all the supplies and make sure all the smoke alarms have batteries and their daughter’s car oil is changed every 3,000 miles. They just want to make sure their family is taken care of.
What if I can’t be the one who builds the house for my family as I would want? What if I have only so much time with these girls and what if my place in their life will be subsumed under memories, where they have a hard time picturing my face? Let’s say the worst did indeed occur, and my Lisa was left to lock the doors herself every night?
This mysterious will of my heavenly father must be embraced in my dependence, and not in my mastery of what I believe to be sole responsibility. I won’t be judged by whether or not I scored perfectly in meeting my goals of matching his standard for fatherhood, it will be whether I trusted him and whether I loved those he gave me to love.
Merton continues:
It is all very well to declare that I exist in order to save my soul and give glory to God by doing so. And it is all very well to say that in order to do this I obey certain commandments and keep certain counsels. Yet know this much, and indeed knowing all moral theology and ethics and canon law, I might still go through life conforming myself to certain indications of God’s will without ever fully giving myself to God. For that in the last analysis, is the real meaning of His will. He does not need our sacrifice, He asks for our selves.
If it were up to me, I’d build them a fortress where no harm could befall them and they could sleep without fear and discomfort. Lisa would have her gardens and chickens and honey bees. Haven would have an art studio. Mary would have a workshop with saws and hammers and little places where she could store her screwdrivers without having to explain herself to anyone else. I would build it with stone, so people could see my love for my family for generations. I would become immovable in my permanence as their father and they would be absolute in their trust for my presence to be at their side at the smallest moment of need. But what if this house isn’t mine to build in the first place?
*
The seizures happened. Without my permission or allowance, they happened and completely disallowed my once stalwart stance as the person most dependable. In a few hours, I was reduced to the point of complete dependency. The pain of that night proved that permanence is just not something to be grasped and held onto. This life cannot guarantee any kind of eternity to who I am and how I love my family. No matter how much I wish it would.
Jesus says something that moves me right where I thought I want to be immovable.
In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.
(John 14:1-4)
When Jesus said this to his dearest friends, he did so right when they believed he was going to establish himself (and them) as king. He was going to bring peace and restore everything that had gone wrong. He would put the rulers in their places (beneath them) and he would remove every imperial edifice around their houses. Rome would be gone, all their pain would be gone, and he would now show them all that they had been working on had come to fruition.
But then instead of all their work being satisfied as they saw it, he spoke to them with a kind of goodbye that they didn’t understand.
He washed their feet, because he knew they would wash his body. He fed them one last time, because that’s what we do with the people we love before they go; we want to make sure they don’t leave hungry. Everything they thought they were building was about to fall through the floor of their hearts. Everything they thought they were to be about and all that they believed to be their responsibility simply came apart like torn fabric.
It wasn’t until they saw him again did they understand that everything their lives were to be about was all his responsibility. There was nothing they could do without him. They couldn’t even breathe correctly, as he saw it, until he breathed on them. The only thing they could do was believe in and worship him; everything else was dependent upon Him.
*
As I recovered, my dear friend Anne was praying for me. As she prayed, she told me, “I just keep seeing Jesus singing to you. Nothing else, just Him singing to you.”
“So I'll say
Jesus I love You
I'll say Jesus I love You
Jesus I love You
And my heart will follow
Wholly after You”
As terrified as I was to come face to face with loss, from it, I can now confidently say that I know beyond a shadow of doubt that he will care for me. But this confidence has only come by accepting my place in him as completely safe in his care for me. He orders our life in his will, not because he enjoys every moment, but because in a mystery, all of it gives glory to him. What kind of house is he building around you?
John Mark Guerra
Writer & Father
John Mark lives in Fort Collins, Colorado and serves the community of Trinity Fellowship. He writes about life and faith as a Christian, and spends the majority of his time with his wife, Lisa and daughters, Haven and Mary. His latest book, “I Want to Open My Heart” navigates his journey within himself to understand vulnerability with Christ.
Photography by Chandan Suman