Published in the 2012 edition of The Chrysalis Reader, ‘Lift Off’ won the
prestigious Bailey Prize for non-fiction, offered by the Swedenborg Foundation Press.

Lift Off
Byron Edgington

In May 2006 I left my home on the island of Kauai to return to Ohio. It was not a trip I made with ease, or without consideration. I left a career I loved, a life in the sky immersed in beauty beyond description and a job that rewarded me with a lot of money.
I left because my father was dying. I’d been the prodigal son for twenty-five years, but dad needed me there to care for him as he prepared for his final journey.
In Hawaii, I flew helicopter tours on Kauai, showing tourists the island’s stunning beauty. Shaped like an artist’s palette, Kauai drips with color as lush jungle glistens after brash, tropic squalls; riotous reds and pinks of ginger plant crowd every berm; perfumed plumeria air their pungent aroma. But, Earthly Eden or not, Kauai was far from homely Ohio where Dad needed my help.
As the big 757 thundered down the runway at Lihue, lifted and clambered for altitude, my last sight of Kauai was of flickering runway lights fading, then a glimmer of surf spilling onto the beach below. Then dark, featureless ocean. I had hoped for one last look at my little island home, the place I’d come to cherish for its beauty, and for the serenity that island people refer to as maná, or spirit. I’d felt this power on my tours, like seeing rainbows exactly where I knew they would appear. I’d watch for a curtain of rain ahead, with sunshine behind it, then angle into
position just as the rainbow emerged.
Taking off from Kauai that night I’d hoped for one last view of the island, and to feel her maná once more. As the airplane grappled higher, punching into cloud cover at three thousand feet, I realized the truth of it: I was glad the view of the island had been denied; seeing its idyllic
beauty may have eroded my resolve to go to Ohio. Darkness cloaked any view of the island, thus steeling my decision to continue. Now, years later, what I remember of Kauai is not a last glimpse through a tiny cabin window, but the expansive vision I carry in my mind.
Soon I was over Ohio and landing preparations began. Shortly the big Boeing was all flaps, undercarriage and wing adjustments. Then the wheels scuffed the runway at Port Columbus, the plane shuddered to taxi speed, and stopped at the gate.
My sister, Patti met me at baggage claim, where she gave me an update on the therapy my siblings had elected for Dad, and on his condition.
“How is he, sis?”
“He’s in pretty good spirits,” she said. “We’ve tried everything. He doesn’t have a lot of strength left, so we struggle with that.”
“How’s Madalyn?” My step-mother worshipped dad. The two had met in grade school. Time and real life intervened. My mother died in 1981, and Madalyn’s husband in ’83. Mutual friends brought Dad and Madalyn together, and they married in 1984.
Patti shook her head. “Maddie’s not handling it well,” she said. “She’s looking for every possible way to keep him alive. We’re all doing that. Joe looks for new treatments on-line, Molly wants to come from Colorado. It’s a team effort.”
“What’s dad say about all the experimental stuff?”
“Hocus-pocus,” Patti said. “But he says if it will help someone else...”
“Does he want to keep going?” It seemed an obvious question to me.
Patti was unsure how to answer. “He wants to please everybody.”
“I wonder if we should just ask him what he wants?”
Patti sighed in frustration. “When we’re about to give up, he rallies again.”
On the way to my father’s house Patti described a confusing array of drugs, doctor’s appointments, interruptions in his routine, and a lack of serenity that dad was entitled to that late in his life. Listening to the series of interventions, I sensed that Dad was hanging on just for us.
He’d had made important decisions all his life. Now his world was circumscribed, as if he was a child, as my siblings made him defer to their judgement, as if he had several parents.
As I entered his house, my first view of my father filled me with emotion and pain. Dad struggled to stand. He hobbled over and reached for me. “Hello, son,” he whispered.
I dropped my carry-on bag and embraced him, shocked at how frail he’d become. “Hi, pop.” We hugged for long seconds. I felt his ribs. His baggy shirt. The frail arc of his shoulders.
Bent at the waist, he shuffled back toward his chair. Dad’s every labored step broke my heart all over again. Just a few years before he’d built a sturdy cabin with his bare hands. Now he could barely walk.
Then the phone rang and I got a taste of the loving interventions that were vexing him. Dad picked it up. “Hi, Peg,” he said. It was another of my sisters. “Yes, he just got here. What’s that? I don’t remember if I took it or not. I’ll ask By to figure it out, it’s confusing.” He handed me the phone. Huffing from exertion, Dad collapsed into his recliner.
I assured my sister that I’d look over dad’s drugs, treatment schedule, his chemo, random experimental protocols, long hours at the cancer hospital with IVs in both arms, and monitors scouring every change in his condition. Listening in, dad closed his eyes and his head fell back
against the chair. I put the phone in its cradle, and studied my father. Twin tides of emotion welled in me: I knew we would soon lose him; and I knew I’d made a good decision to come home. It had been years since I’d spent time with my dad, and he’d always been reluctant to talk about himself in any case. He’d grown up on a farm in Northwest Ohio. Entering the Navy
in 1943, he served on a minesweeper. Post-War, he’d married my mother, took a job as a carpenter, toiling at the thankless task of feeding ten kids. Despite having crafted an admirable life, Dad seemed almost ashamed of his lack of worldly accomplishments, always deferring to those of his children. But he opened up to me, his second-born and namesake. It soon became apparent that if my trip from Hawaii to Ohio had been difficult for me, Dad’s trip from independent, responsible
adult to dependent old man was more so.
I volunteered my second day back to take him to his cancer specialist. “I’ll drive,” I said. “You can navigate.”
I helped him into his little Chevy. “Fine,” he said. “They told me not to drive anyway.”
Madalyn piped up. “Goodness no,” she said. “... last week he pulled right in front of someone, nearly scared me to death.”
Dad’s head sagged, and he sighed like an errant child. I rubbed his shoulder, and entered the highway. Becoming his driver and caretaker I vowed to catch up on our years apart. During a lull in the hectic regimen we talked in his living room. “Remember the fellow who rented our garage?” I asked. For ten dollars a month, important extra cash for us in 1958, a college student had rented our rickety garage to protect his
new Thunderbird, a gift from his doctor father. “Remember he pulled that door down after the rain?”
Dad smiled at the memory. “Took a soaking, didn’t he?”
The fellow had parked his T-Bird in the garage after a heavy rain, when the overhead door had been left up. The roof of the garage leaked, so water had pooled atop the door.
“I still see him closing that door,” I said. “...and water gushing...”
“Soaked from head to foot.”
“He still paid his rent, though,” I said. “Mom probably sent the money right back to some doctor, who was probably soaking us.”
Dad looked away. “Probably so,” he said.
Mentioning our precarious financial status all those years ago, I sensed the gap between us again. Despite his heroic efforts to care for us, money and its scarcity was a sore spot with dad. We’d never even ridden in a Thunderbird.
I asked about his life filled with toil. “You must have been discouraged at times.”
“There were a few times,” he agreed. “Like when Theresa was born, with all her hospital bills, and when I wrecked the Pontiac and it was our only car. I did what I had to do.”
I waited for him to continue, but his face was almost featureless, a mystery to me still, after all the years I’d known him.
As useless as the question was I had to ask it. “Would you do it again?”
With more vigor than he’d shown since my arrival he nodded yes, and then yes again. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.
I sensed much more behind the resignation in his eyes, something Dad couldn’t bring himself to say. Changing the topic, dad spoke of still older times, of his youth, and during the War. He shared with me his dream of a life beyond the farm. He’d wanted to sing, he said, to be on stage in front of people moving them to depths of emotion. But, despite an offer of
professional sponsorship when he was thirteen, (Dad had a satin-clear, tenor voice all his life), his stolid father would not let him leave the farm. He’d wanted to travel, but the burden of raising us curtailed that fantasy. Then a surprising secret, a part of my father I never would have guessed. He’d always wanted to fly, he said. He’d enlisted in ’43, hoping for Navy flight school. After mundane postings here and there, earth-bound assignments and bureaucratic shuffling, the war ended and his dream to fly died as well. Then real life came to him--in earnest.

Listening to him reminisce I recalled an incident years ago. I was ten, and oblivious, as kids are, to adult responsibilities. Dad had come home covered in grime, and the pungent leavings of another day of heavy, dusty work. His mouth slack with exhaustion, he scaled the steps of our back porch and plodded inside. Tide lines of sweat stained his shirt, and sawdust flecked his arms. My mother greeted him with news that the toilet was clogged once again. Dad’s knees nearly buckled under the strain of her words, as yet another task demanded his attention. Dad’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Then, his head shaking in resignation, he returned to the truck for his toolbox. In that instant I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want the life my father had chosen. In my young mind it seemed that Dad never had any fun, never got to do what
he wanted. In his living room that day, listening to him itemize his lost dreams my chest ached with guilty recognition that by taking everything he could give and more, I’d caused him to lose a part of those dreams.
And I realized that his hard work had allowed me to pursue my dreams.
“I was so proud of you,” he said, unbidden. “Flying all that time, and doing it so well.” It was obvious that he’d known what I didn’t want, and that I’d gotten what I did. It turned out that we’d shared a fantasy. I’d gone to Army flight school, seen war up close and personal and had been highly decorated for my efforts. I’d launched a commercial aviation career spanning 35 years. On stage in my cockpit I’d flown people over an island paradise, eliciting their depths of emotion. I’d traveled the world doing what I loved. Not once had I come home covered in sawdust. Now I’d come home to care for my father. Or so I thought.

Dreams are funny things; they change shape, and blend into each other till we’re never quite sure of their details or duration. Often, as vivid as they are, we can’t conjure dreams on waking, try as we might. Their ephemeral details dissipate faster than rain on the ocean. Dad had forsaken his dreams to see that the ten of us had a shot at ours. For some reason, call it inspiration, or maná, whichever you like, I heard something else in Dad’s reverie with me that afternoon. I heard gratitude, not at my return per se, but for listening to him and really hearing what he said. He’d told me in plain language, saying “I wouldn’t change a thing.” He was ready;
it was time. His request of me came in the form of an interruption by him for a change, a break in our easy conversation. “They tell me I need to keep doing this,” he said.
“Who does?” I asked.
“Everyone. Patti, Peg, Joe, Madalyn. Clance told me I should keep going. Molly told me about a new drug I had to take. Susan saw how much weight I’ve lost and she demanded the doctor give me a feeding tube. I don’t want a damned feeding tube.”
The phone rang. It was Peggy again, asking about dad’s pending visit to the cancer specialist. I punched up the speakerphone, and my sister’s voice filled the room: who would take him to the doctor? Was he getting enough to eat? Did he keep his medicine down?
The chorus of interventions and questions made my head swim. I heard what dad had been subjected to for months, and how his wishes were drowned out in the cacophony. The frantic calls and demands that he do this or that, go here and there sounded like a Greek chorus
bedeviling the hero. The vision of him coming home that night bent and worn reappeared. In that moment I understood that my trip to care for Dad was more than comfort. It was permission. I’d come home to give him something he wanted, something that others were, once again, denying
him.
I took his hand. “You look tired, dad.” He closed his eyes and nodded. He wanted to let go, to quit the heroics and to be allowed to die. Dad couldn’t let go, and he couldn’t ask permission to do so. It never occurred to him to ask, until I accepted the burden, until I stared onto a dark, featureless ocean and saw the sea of difficulty he’d faced so I could play among
rainbows. In the constant tide of responsibility he’d felt all those years, and still felt, I heard something besides complaining, which he never did and never would. My arrival was his chance to escape a life he’d come to disdain, to take the final trip his way.
I asked him, possibly for the first time in my life, what I could do for him. “Dad, what do you want?”
His head came up, and his eyes met mine. “Make them stop,” he said. “Just make them stop.” He wanted me, his pilot son, to rescue him from the burden that was finally too heavy even for him. He wanted permission to let go. Feeling our roles change, parent passing to son, a
sudden shower drifted across my vision with the light of understanding behind. I told him that I would see to it. Against the wishes of my siblings and others, I ordered Dad’s treatment stopped. They ended. We waited.
 

Rainbows result from the separation of light into its various wavelengths. As sunlight enters a water droplet it bends. Light then contacts the opposite surface of each drop, reflects back as if from a mirror, and then glimmers out the other side, separating into the colors we see.
For a double rainbow to form the light bounces around yet again, creating a second bow. One detail of a double rainbow is that the secondary bow’s colors are a mirror image of the primary’s. Red, yellow, green blue doubles back as blue, green yellow red. Rainbow creation includes
arcane mathematical formulas, and an understanding of the physical properties of light. I don’t pretend to understand it. Playing among rainbows I never cared about their physics or formulas, nor did I mention such arcane details to my passengers. Like me, tourists wanted to see only the ephemeral nature of things.
One of the benefits of living on Kauai was seeing rainbows every day. They appeared everywhere on the island. Indeed, it was an odd day that produced no rainbows. Like the support
of the wind or my father’s sturdy presence, I took rainbows for granted, not bothering to stop and
consider their freely-given enrichment of my life. Back in Ohio there were redbuds, violets and assorted midwestern greenery. In the four months I’d been back I saw no rainbows, and I missed them. But the absence of rainbows was just reality; I didn’t dwell on it.
The afternoon of September 30th 2006, as I prepared to go to dad’s house my sister Patti called my cell phone. Her sobbing told me that my father was gone. “I was holding his hand,” she said. “and he just slipped away.”
My father died in peace at three in the afternoon, in his own bed, in his own home, in his own way. Unburdened. His was a good death, made more so I like to believe by my presence, the prodigal son back on solid ground after many years traversing the sky. I’d come back to care for
Dad. But even after his death I knew that he’d once again cared for me. His passing uncovered new possibilities, a time to rediscover family, to return to school to finish a long-deferred college degree, and the chance to look back at a long career in the sky without incident or mishap.
The morning after Dad died I awoke to a day of meeting with friends and family, making funeral arrangements, and consoling each other. It was seven a.m. and the cresting sun limned the bedroom window after a morning shower. I threw on my robe and ran the curtain fully open.
Light spilled into the room. And there it was: a double rainbow draped across the horizon, its rich tendrils of color like the drippings of an artist’s palette.