“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning …” ~ from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Circles”

The day my father succumbed to sepsis and slipped into a coma, I was attending the commencement ceremony for students at my university. I was seated on the stage in my regalia for the first time as a tenure-track professor, and I had no idea that my father was dying miles away in Tennessee. He had called me three days prior to complain about a pain in his abdomen and told me that he had gone to the local ER where he was given a prescription for antibiotics and released. He was several days post-op from having a stent placed in his bile duct to address a gallstone, and I told him he should contact his family doctor and surgeon to discuss what his local ER physician had recommended. When he asked me if I would drive down to be with him, I told him I had to tie up some loose ends at work and attend the graduation ceremony in New York City. Then, I promised him I would be home with him for our annual visit in four days. When I hung up, I did not know that this would be our last conversation.

While attending the graduation ceremony, I turned my phone off and did not think to switch it on until I arrived at home later that evening. By that point, I had multiple messages from a doctor asking me to call him about my father who was in intensive care. When I returned his calls, he told me that my father had sepsis, that I should come to the hospital immediately, and he asked me if they should intubate him. In a state of disbelief, I explained that I was eight hours away and was supposed to drive down in the morning for a beach holiday with my family that included a week with my dad. The doctor explained that my dad “might not make it through the night.” In response, I told him to intubate my father if it would save his life and that I would leave for the hospital within the hour. My husband carried our sleeping seven-year-old out to the car, and we began our long drive to Knoxville just after midnight.

When I arrived at the hospital’s ICU the next morning, my father was not intubated. Instead, he had a breathing mask over his face. His steel-blue eyes were open, staring off ahead of him, but he never blinked. I did not know what to do when I saw, for myself, the reality of his condition. His large, six-foot frame looked sallow and frail in relief against the white of the hospital bed-linens and walls. The nurses said I should talk to him. I took his hand and told him that if he wanted to live a little longer and take a road trip with us, he would need to fight. I also told him that if he was ready to leave this world, he could go. I whispered in his ear that if heaven existed, his parents would bethere waiting for him and that we would be OK if he chose to visit with them. I wanted some sign that he had heard me, but I had a sense that if the soul exists, his had already left his unresponsive body.

My younger sister arrived later that afternoon and told me she would stay with him for a while. When she called me to tell me that he had died that same evening, I began to tackle my share of the responsibilities we had divided. I wrote his obituary, called his lawyer regarding estate matters, and contacted the minister to officiate the burial. My last obligation, writing the eulogy, proved to be the most difficult. As I drafted it, I carefully noted his success as a small business owner, highlighted his Christian beliefs and community service over the years, omitted references to both of his ex-wives (as he had previously instructed years prior), and praised him for being a loving father and son. But, my words were flat and generic. I was not able to extract meaning from my father’s life or death because I didn’t know how to process his death or my own survival of it.

Frustrated, I logged into my old AOL account to re-read old emails from my father, hoping I would find a way to memorialize him. When I opened my mailbox, I found an unopened email from him; and, in that email, I found my father’s last written words to me, dated May 21, 2014, a few weeks before his death. He had sent the following message prior to his surgery, and I, busy with work at the end of the semester, had not even bothered to read it:

“I wanted to write this … And I hope you accept it as from the heart. I love you … very much and I always have, no matter the circumstances that have come down through life. My dad used to tell me that my Heavenly father loved me no matter what I did because like my real father here on earth He loved me unconditionally and knew we could never be perfect. I know that I have not been a perfect father, but I have given it my best shot. Over the last 5 years since Dad passed away, I have come to realize how important and short life really is. But, I will keep making every day the best that I can by loving you till my time runs out here on earth. I have had a lot of hard luck, but I have learned a lot from it over the years. Try to live each day as your last, and treasure each day that you have.

My father’s words reflect on the death of his own father and his faith to gently remind me of a cliché he had often repeated to me, “Life is short, Trish. Remember to smell the roses.” When my father encourages me to “treasure each day,” he is telling me, the person always working towards her future goals, to live in the present moment, value important relationships, and allow myself to discover what is sacred in everyday life. He is reminding me to let myself experience awe, wonder, and gratitude.

I decided to share the above quote from his email in the eulogy, and I began to build a narrative that also referenced Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Circles” essay along with his poem, “Threnody,” to explain the significance of my father’s transcendental advice in the loving message I had found from him. I concluded the eulogy with a reference to lines from “Threnody” in which Emerson says we should not despair over loss but know “what rainbows teach, and sunsets show” (line 261). In particular, I referenced the imagery of rainbows and sunsets to illustrate my father’s final attempt to remind me to appreciate how beautiful, fleeting, and finite life is.

There was no viewing, no closure from seeing my father at a traditional Appalachian wake, peaceful, still, hands folded against a dark suit. Instead, I saw his coffin, grave-side, covered in a spray of white roses, and I watched as it was lowered into the ground after the funeral. When everyone had left the service and the gravedigger began to cover the casket with red clay, I left to drive to the Carolina coast to visit with my in-laws.

Several hours later, I arrived in Columbia at sunset, and a few sprinkles hit my windshield as a bright rainbow materialized, low on the horizon and right in front of me. Some people might respond to this phenomenon by saying that the appearance of the rainbow was merely a coincidence, but the moment I saw the rainbow, my sorrow mingled with tears of joy. I simply knew that this was my father’s way of affirming that he had heard the eulogy, that he was aware that I had found his last email. Suddenly, his death and my survival of it were bound by a bow-sign in the sky. It was as if the sign was repeating the image in the lines of the Emerson poem I had quoted so my father could say, “I’m here, but only for a moment. I heard your words.” Within the context of my driving away from my father’s burial service, the repetition of the bow as a sign was different; yet, it seemed even closer to Emerson’s poem, which references the fading natural beauty of rainbows and sunsets as the speaker promises that the love that bonds family members is eternal, though the body itself is finite.

As an agnostic, however, it is impossible for me to reconcile the sense of awe I felt when I saw the rainbow or the mystical epiphany that I am describing with my reasoned admission that I do not know and cannot presume to know that life exists after death or if communication between the living and the dead is even possible. My rational mind is hesitant to assert that the rainbow I perceived was more than a natural phenomenon. However, I perceived it as part of a pattern and experienced it as a connection with something beyond myself. I was profoundly moved the instant I saw the colors of the bow and had to pull my car over onto the shoulder of the interstate to let waves of emotions and tears flow for nearly an hour.

When I tried to explain what I had experienced to my husband, I used the word “synchronicity” to describe it.  The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung used this concept to describe the moment when an event that occurs in the material world also coincides with an idea or psychological state of mind in a meaningful way. In this sense, meaning is assigned to an actual event or phenomenon based on a person’s experience and interpretation of two seemingly unrelated or coincidental happenings that produce tangible effects. Yet, even with this useful concept at my disposal, I felt silly for finding causality in coincidence and interpreting a rainbow at sunset as a sign or message from my father. While the event comforted me on the day it occurred, I was unsettled by my response to it and continued to look for ways to explain the knowledge I had gleaned from a partially visible circle in the sky.  Once I began to reflect upon the meaning I had assigned the rainbow, my rational mind decided the event was unsettling because it required me to confront my own resistance to my father’s departure. The reality of his death and funeral in the past was juxtaposed to his (im)possible and (un)expected intrusion into my present thoughts and experiences in a way that seemed to alter space and time. Clearly, witnessing this phenomenon a few hours after I eulogized him using the same natural imagery caused me to perceive causality in coincidence. However, witnessing the rainbow materializing at sunset also forced me to re-engage life from a new perspective conjured by awe.

In my own analysis of the moment of synchronicity I experienced, I was working through the separation anxiety that results from the departure of a parent, but I was consoling myself with the magical return of a deceased parent that could not be sustained. I was attempting to symbolically fulfill a wish for my father’s return after his death by allocating meaning to a sign and hoping it could make my father, who was physically absent, present. Yet, the very sign of his perceived return, a rainbow, already ensured a subsequent and final departure with its dissipation. Further, my attempts at meaning-making in my subsequent narratives about the experience substituted the very pleasure of creation and storytelling for the pain of my loss. For this reason, my experience of synchronicity was an important catalyst for both working through and sublimating my grief. It allowed me to redirect my emotional ties from my father to the eulogy I wrote for him and the perceived “truth” of the bow-sign: “that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning” (Emerson “Circles”). However, I am not wholly willing to relinquish the idea that the rainbow was a message from my father. I prefer to hold onto both explanations and the consoling Emersonian notion that familial love is eternal.

We often postpone confrontations with mortality until we lose a loved one.  And, when we experience loss, we are overwhelmed with emotions ranging from sorrow to anxiety. We may even embrace magical thinking to cope with our grief. However, if mourning is successful, the act of giving voice to sorrow helps us reinvest in life. As we process our grief, we often use language to bear witness to loss and memorialize the dead. One thing that people who have experienced a loss have in common is shared testimony and pieces of distorted histories constructed from their memories and experiences. In this sense, we transform our wounds into stories. Thus, narratives about loss and grief offer the possibility for empathy to those who actively engage with them and healing for those who speak of sorrow because the possibility for a reinvestment in life springs from the very disjuncture between the death of a loved one and the life of the survivor. In this sense, the grieving survivor, much like a literary artist, accepts his or her survival and use of language as consolation for loss. As emotional ties are redirected from the lost loved one to a story or an object that recollects what is mourned, the creative act of giving words to sorrow allows the mourner the possibility of recovery by means of representation.

Works Cited

• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Threnody.” An American Anthology, 1787–1900. Edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman, Houghton Mifflin, 1900; Bartleby.com, 2001,
• www.bartleby.com/248/. Web. 15 Jan. 2018.
• “Circles.” Essays, First Series. 1847. E-book ed.
• Project Gutenberg, 2013,
• http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2944/2944-h/2944-h.htm. Web. 20 March 2018.

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