Free Exit Laughing by Victoria Zackheim

he was unafraid and that his mother would be waiting for him.
    When he was forty-five, he was pronounced dead during surgery. He described the blinding white light and his deceased mother standing in front of it, her loving arms outstretched.
    I had to believe him.
    My father was the exhale to my inhale and taught me that anything,
anything
, was possible. So, before this disease stole his body and left his brilliant mind trapped in a paralyzed shell, he was going to move on. I had no say.
    For weeks after our breakfast date, he’d sit in his big black leather chair, eyes closed, emptying his mind. Whenever I’d blow into the room, hoping to regale him with stories of my children, he’d respond, “Shhh, silence is okay, too.” So I’d sit next to him, holding his hand, already feeling the loss of my father.
    “Tomorrow will be the big day,” he announced to me and my mother, exactly two weeks after revealing his plan.
    My mother was appalled and would have “none of this ridiculousness!” She stormed out of the room and called all three of his treating physicians (who’d become personal friends), asking them to come over, which they did that afternoon. When the cardiologist, internist, and neurologist completed their batteries of tests, including a mobile EKG, their joint conclusion was, “You’re not going anywhere anytime soon.” As he left the bedroom, one doctor said, “I’m going to see my sick patients now.” My mother walked them to the door, wearing her patented “I told you so” grin.
    My father winked at me.
    Late that evening, he told me to go to Tower Records right away and buy a Barbra Streisand CD containing the song “Memories.” I didn’t understand his urgency, but had faith he knew what he was doing. I gathered my purse and made for the door.
    “Stop! You are going nowhere of the sort!” my mother snapped. “Don’t you know the kind of people who go to Tower Records on the Sunset Strip at this hour?”
    I ignored her reproach. Apparently,
I
was the kind of person who did just that. My father’s body was about to give birth to his soul.
    When I returned with the CD, my mother was fuming in the other room, and my dad was still very much alive, serene and comfortable in bed, wearing his yellow flannel pajamas. Without speaking, we played and replayed the song “Memories” so many times we could hear it, whether it was playing or not.
    This was his exit music.
    He lay on his back with his eyes closed, me curled up next to him, hoping he’d both succeed and fail. When his breathing became almost imperceptible, after several dozen run-throughs of the song, I leaned over closer and whispered, “Are you dead yet, Daddy?” He opened one eye, looked around the room, and said, “No.”
    We exploded into hysterics, our laughter cutting through all things death and dying and returning us to the simplest form of one another. We held hands and laughed off and on for hours. At two in the morning, he pressed me to go home to my sleeping children. I didn’t want to but acquiesced, only after he promised not to stop his heart until I’d finished carpool.
    He started manifesting his plan the next morning, as I was dropping off my kids at school. I sensed the shift and sped to his bedside. While holding him in my arms, I felt a rush of energy sweep out of his body, and I knew we would never
ever
be separated. Death may have ended his life, but it didn’t end our relationship. For days, even weeks after his passing, I saw and felt miraculous life-affirming energy in all aspects of nature. My father had taken residency in the gentle breeze that rustled the pine trees, and in the pink and orange clouds that streaked across the sunset sky. He was nowhere and everywhere. He was home.
    My therapist suggested that such experiences of mystical wonderment, even ecstasy, were nothing more than dissociative denial that my father was actually gone. He said, “You haven’t grieved his death and are trying