COVID-19 took my dad, but it didn’t take his love
The last time I saw my father conscious was on the Tuesday before Inauguration Day as nurses placed him on a ventilator. I could see the fear in his face. While his arms swung in frustration and his head struggled with an oxygen mask, I desperately reached out to him through the FaceTime call. I tried to think of all the things I had left unsaid over my nearly 50 years as his son, but all I could blurt out in the seconds I had was that he was loved and for him not to worry because I would see him soon. Then the phone screen went dark. And so, the last words my father would hear me say, were likely untrue.
My father, Shabbir Mohsin Hamdani, was a 78-year-old former smoker with a weak heart and a body under attack from an especially pernicious COVID-19 infection. His already-damaged lungs opened several pathways for the infection to advance quickly, and without much warning, he went from body aches and shortness of breath to sedation, a ventilator and remdesivir dripping into his arms.
On the evening of my father’s sedation, as the sun set behind the Washington Monument, then President-elect Joe Biden paid tribute to the 400,000 Americans who by that point had died of COVID-19. He drew upon a deep well of empathy, deeper than most, filled by abject pain experienced for more than almost half a century over losing a young wife, a young daughter and an adult son. He instructed an anxious and grieving audience that included me, that “to heal, we must remember.”
I remembered my father’s story about how he left India with a new bride for England, and then how a decade or so later he brought me to Texas adding the “immigrant” label to my identity and twice to his.
Growing up, I didn't spend a lot of time with my dad. He was either working or sleeping, the plight of a working-class immigrant who struggled to pay the rent for a small roach-infested two-bedroom apartment in North Texas that his family of four called home.
I remembered that struggle; a struggle embodied in an immigrant spirit calloused by moving oceans to unfamiliar cultures,
driving cabs and working in convenience stores to provide and battling a surfeit of worry to stave off depression’s constant specter. A spirit that I was certain was his best hope for snatching his body from the jaws of a vicious virus. It was the second time I lied that day, this time to myself.
The next day the president-elect became the president, pledging that ending the pandemic would be his primary mission. But it was too late for my father. On Jan. 22 at 10:10 p.m., my father died. While wearing gloves, a medical gown and two masks, I held my father’s soft, sun-spotted hands as his heart rate ticked down to zero. He passed less than 15 minutes after we made it to his bedside. He waited for me, and it was then when I remembered the most important thing about him — not the struggle or immigrant spirit, but that he always waited for me, like only a father can.
He was always outside my primary school in Manchester, England, so he could walk a chatty cockney-accented kid home; outside my bedroom door so he could help calm my latest teenage angst; outside the airport so he could bring me home after too long away; by the phone because I hadn’t called in weeks; or at the door to hug his grandkids.
On the Friday after an inauguration, a pandemic’s curse stole my dad from this world, but the act of remembering that father’s love will guarantee the infection never steals him from me.