As the jet carved a final turn before landing at the airport in Papeete, tiny lights bounced off the still-black waters of the Pacific Ocean.  It was 4 a.m. local time; the air was a warm, humid embrace—the kind you want to feel when you’re sipping a tropical drink while on vacation. At the airport’s palm-thatched entrance, Polynesian women hung fragrant leis around our necks, and a trio of large men plucked melodies out of their wee ukuleles.

All things considered, hell had a very nice lobby.

Of course, this wasn’t hell for most people.

I spotted a bride in her wedding dress and another with her gown wrapped in a garment bag. How excited they must have felt! This was it—the biggest day of their lives, or so every bride thinks when her wedding day approaches.

It’s only later that you learn life’s truly big days are almost never something you can plan, cater and photograph. They are the days our children are born; they are the days the people we love die. Everything else that happens in between is pretty much filler. Sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, but always followed by another day.

As we waited in a long line to be photographed for entry and show our passports, I kept checking my watch. The hospital wouldn’t be open to visitors for another three hours. Still, I was hopeful. We all were. The tour guide who’d been looking out for my dad had given us several positive reports. He was able to walk around a bit. He could talk. He was eating.

She met us outside customs holding a sign with our last name, and I recalled how I used to pick up my brothers and sisters at the airport when they’d come home for college. I liked to dress up in an ape suit or a pig mask and make a special sign that said something like BOOGER or IVANA TINKLE. I can say one thing about airport security: My siblings are relieved I can’t embarrass them like this anymore.

In the shuttle to the hotel, the guide told us my dad had looked great when she’d seen him around dinnertime the previous night. It was such a relief—we’d be able to focus on figuring out how to get him home swiftly and comfortably.

How wrong we were.

When we finally saw my dad, the first things I noticed were his bruises. They were huge, running the length and width of his back and they’d turned his skin a dusky eggplant. He also had some nasty cuts. As bad as this was, though, that wasn’t the worst of it.

He was pale, sweaty, agitated and unaware that he was in Tahiti. In fact, he thought he was on a train, and he thought the people around him were preventing him from seeing us, somehow holding us hostage outside. His oxygen tube had been yanked out, as had his IV and catheter. His bare feet were spattered with blood, and as my mom leaned in to kiss his forehead, it was all I could do to keep myself from bursting into tears.

“He wasn’t like this before,” the guide told us. “This is different.”

It was quite the understatement. My dad is never loses his cool. He’s always informed, rational and articulate, sometimes vexingly so when we’re debating politics. 

At the sight of our father in this state, my brother leapt into action, much to the annoyance of the doctor who shrugged his shoulders at my dad’s decline and said, repeatedly, “He is old man.”

That may be true. But we weren’t ready to give up, not by a long shot.

After some intense haggling, hampered by our inability to speak French, my brother reviewed my dad’s X-rays and CT scans. He saw to it that my dad was hooked back up onto oxygen and fluids. He reviewed my dad’s blood tests, consulting with my brother, and learned that dad’s kidneys were failing and his hemoglobin was critically low.

Within a few long hours, Dad was moved into intensive care. He’d received two pints of blood. He was back on oxygen and IV fluids, along with quite a bit of morphine. Thanks to my brother’s intervention, our dad was soon headed back to normal, at least mentally—to such an extent that it seriously irritated him to hear John describe his earlier delirium.

“I didn’t have delirium,” he said.

“Yes, you did,” John said.

“No, I didn’t,” Dad said.

“Shut up, John,” I kept on saying, proving how swiftly brothers and sisters return to normal once a crisis has passed.  John may have saved our dad’s life, but I didn’t want him to give the poor guy a heart attack finding out how bad things had gotten.

I’m compressing quite a bit of the tale, of course.  There are some things in situations like this that don’t need a public retelling.

Let’s just say, though, that the image of my dad’s chest X-ray, the sight of his broken ribs floating in the black space of his chest, the sight of his lungs full of fluid that could turn into a deadly case of pneumonia, and the sight of my mom bravely stroking my dad’s forehead with a dampened washcloth are things I will carry with me for the rest of my days.

We’re fragile beings, all of us. We are collections of slim, breakable bones surrounded by soft envelopes of flesh. There isn’t much separating us from our nightmares, so we gird ourselves with our best armor: my brother with his medical knowledge, my mom with her washcloth, and me with my attention to the details…the traveler’s insurance policy, the regular meals for my mom, the reports back home to the family. (The best question from the insurance company: “Was your father engaged in a contest of speed when he had his accident?” My reply: “Um, no. He is a 78-year-old man and well past his drag-racing days.”)

This time, the armor was enough. After a few more days in the hospital, during which my dad held on despite the pain of ten broken ribs and the looming threat of infection, he was loaded onto a stretcher in the back of a commercial jet to LA for a long, overnight flight.

We watched his vital signs flash through a small, black box on the floor, and a doctor and nurse stood at the ready to insert a chest tube should my dad’s collapsed lung reassert itself during the flight. It didn’t happen. And when the plane landed and Dad woke up, he said with surprise and relief, “I made it through the night.”

He did. We all did, with our armor battered but more or less intact.

The one thing I’ve found that will penetrate my armor without fail, though, is the kindness of friends, the ones who picked me up at the airport, the ones who called and e-mailed and brought food. Their kindness pierces me like an arrow. I think that’s why so many wise people remind us that kindness and love are the two things in life that actually matter. All the rest of this—how we look, how much money we have, how much we achieve—the rest of this is filler.

To all my friends: I do apologize for all this embarrassing weeping! I will be past this soon, I promise.

Meanwhile, I’m doing much better, and so is my dad. Two days after he got home from the hospital, he was walking around with a cane, bugging my mom to go on a road trip. His birthday is Friday. He turns 79, which makes his a long life. But not long enough for any of us. Not by a long shot.

--Martha Brockenbrough