Chapter 35
by Janine Jackson
I received my Purple Paper right before Thanksgiving 2013. The first thing I remember is the date on the paper because it was the day a friend had contacted me because he thought I needed to go see Roland.
To make a kind of long story short, my father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma on July 3, 2007. When I left for a business trip to Atlanta a week later, he was in great spirits and looking forward to summer.
Three days into my trip, he was admitted to the hospital with pneumococcal pneumonia and placed on a ventilator and into a medically induced coma so his lungs could recover. I rushed to get home but never again saw him conscious. For the next few weeks, his lungs, given a respite from working on their own, continued to recover. By July 29, he was breathing 95 percent on his own and was scheduled to come off the ventilator the next day. Unfortunately, sometime during the night, he had a massive nonrecoverable stroke. We made the gut-wrenching decision to remove him from life support.
The night I saw Roland, he gave me a message from my father. He said that he wanted me to know that he knows I did everything possible to get home, which gave me some closure about being away on the business trip. I also knew my father, a man who was the life of any party, would not have wanted to live with effects of a stroke or the restrictions of the disease he had been diagnosed with. My nephew had that disease as well and had to avoid being near crowds or children. A people person who loved everyone of every age, my father wouldn’t have been able to live like that. The paper confirmed that he would not have recovered from the stroke, that he had had enough. That Purple Paper gave me such peace.
It read, “Let’s face it; I never recovered from the stroke. I didn’t/couldn’t recover (no matter how hard we tried). I did walk peacefully to heaven. You know, I just had enough of this. I love you.”
Roland also mentioned that my father was with his brothers (he had four), and they had made peace with their father. My grandfather died when Dad was a preteen. Because he had passed so long ago, before I was even born, I was unaware of the estrangement between my grandfather and his sons. An older cousin since confirmed this for me.
I will admit I was a bit of a skeptic before seeing Roland, but that night made me a believer.