Albert Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

The time stamp on my phone reads February 22, 2019, 10:44 pm. In the photograph, my daughter, my dear longtime friend, and I are sticking out our tongues and vamping for the camera. We’re high—on the creative buzz of our first Listen To Your Mother rehearsal. As the producer and director, I had planned and waited a year to launch this project. The cast has left and my mother and brother, Jamie, both of whom had been at our first read-through and dinner, have departed to be with my ill father.

Dad came home from the hospital the day before. The nurses hid their hospice name badges and we didn’t ask Dad if he knew the end was coming. There would be time for that later.

“Six months or so,” the doctors had told us. His passing was months in the future. There was plenty of time to say our goodbyes. My intention was to sit with him and to read a draft of my second novel. He was always the first reader of my writing. And I was going to tell him how much I loved him, to make sure he knew what a good father he had been and how lucky I felt to have been his daughter . . . next week when everything settled down.

Thursday evening—his first night home—my mother made the buttery lamb chops he had been asking for in the hospital. He ate and then relaxed, reading his Kindle. In our nightly phone call, Mom said Dad was happy and comfortable. We planned for our upcoming Sunday dinner. My siblings and their kids would come to my parents’ house, instead of my home where we usually ate, so Dad wouldn’t have to travel. A pizza party. Our plan was to gather as a family every Sunday until he was gone.

That Friday morning, I dashed over to my parents’ house to pickup tablecloths I had forgotten to take home with me the night before when I had visited. I needed them for the Listen To Your Mother rehearsal dinner. It was going to a crazy day of last-minute preparations. Still, I paused for a moment.

In the soft morning light, my father slept in the newly rented hospital bed. A gentle king laid out in the living room. He faced the big picture window—it was only right that he should have a room with a view. My mother, ever the event planner, decorated the space with fresh orchids and she had found an antique hand bell that Dad was instructed to ring should he need her. His outlaw country music played softly—David Allen Coe’s Jody Like A Melody. The oil paintings—dark landscapes and moody sea scenes—he had collected with my mother hung on the warm yellow walls. His bookshelf was to his right and his Kindle to the table on his left. Wrapped in cozy flannel sheets and comfortable sweat suit, he slept, his head tilted back, his mouth open. His terribly behaved cocker spaniel, Andy, snuggled at his feet.

We told my brother, Jamie, he didn’t need to rush from his home in New York City. Dad was fine. He was rallying. My sister, Tara, and other brother, Rich, and I had visited Dad in the hospital and for the first time in a while he seemed like his former healthy self. And Friday, Jamie was coming home for Listen To Your Mother anyway. (He is an actor and I’d talked him into giving the cast lessons on how to breathe when reading on stage.) And then he planned to spend the week at home, helping Mom get Dad situated. Arriving at 4pm, Jamie was only able to share a few minutes with Dad before rushing to my house with our mother.

Four hours later, when Jamie and my mother returned home, they found Dad wide-awake and a little irritated, listening to David Allen Coe. Andy was curled at the foot of the bed.

“What took so long?” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you guys.”

“Remember? We had the rehearsal dinner at Heather’s house?” Jamie said.

“Oh, that’s right. When are we going to that show?” Dad said.

“It’s in May. You didn’t forget, did you?” Jamie pulled a chair closer and sat. “Let us spoil you. You’ve had a rough week.” He reached for the back scratcher and gently ran it across my father’s shoulders. My mother stroked Dad’s hair and rubbed his back and they settled into gentle conversation.

“I’ll never forget the day you pulled me out of school to go see The Electric Horseman.” Jamie laughed.

“Yup,” Dad said, relaxing into the memory. “That was fun.”

“And how about that time it was so hot down at the bay that we cancelled vacation and came home?”

Dad smiled again. “Yup, I remember that, too.”

“Of all the houses we remodeled, which one did you like the best?” My mother asked.

“They were all good in their own way.” He looked at our mother lovingly.

Then my father said he needed to use the restroom.

“Are you okay?” my mother asked repeatedly through the closed door.

“I’m fine,” he finally answered and stepped into the hallway.

The CD player stopped and in the quiet, Jamie and my mother helped my father shuffle back to the hospital bed. Jamie, my strapping 6’1” brother lifted my father, both his arms under Dad, and gently placed him on the mattress. In that moment, in the arms of his eldest son—the child he had waited for to return home—my father gurgled and took a final breath.

David James Christie left. Just like that—before any of us were ready.

Two days later at Sunday dinner, I set my Dad’s table setting. The family gathered and laughed and cried and argued about how the funeral should be. It would be the best funeral, so good that maybe we’d open a funeral event service. (My family is perpetually convinced we are one great idea away from fame and fortune).

My mother gave me my father’s Kindle and when I plugged it in and it powered up, I wept. My father had been reading my book, What The Valley Knows, on the final day of his life (for what was probably the twelfth time).

When I replay the night in my head, I think 10:44 pm might have been the last minute my father spent on earth. And I’m glad I have a photo frozen in that moment. I’m smiling and laughing, feeling better than I have in a long time. I suppose that’s what a parent would want—for his child to be engaged in her life and not worrying about him.

But.

Something big is gone. It’s empty. That I’ll see my father again seems like a fairytale. We don’t know which cards we’re going to draw. So much of life is luck. I drew a good card in the parent department. And it was pure chance.

It’s funny how the universe works. I am a skeptic by nature. But if I wasn’t producing Listen To Your Mother, and if I hadn’t insisted Jamie help with rehearsal, there is the huge possibility Jamie would not have been at my father’s bedside in his final hour—that my father would not have died in the comfort of my brother’s arms.

So as I step onto the stage and present the inaugural cast of Listen To My Mother Greater Berks, I do so believing the production is a miracle—even if only for my family. But I suspect there are other marvels brewing. I trust there will be people in the audience who need to hear what will be said that night—that the power of authentic storytelling will inspire and change folks. We plan to make a little magic Saturday, May 11, 2019 at the Wilson High School auditorium.

My father is gone now, but in his wake I am counting miracles. I hope he is watching and I hope I am making him proud.

***

***Post Script***
April 1, 2023 I will make my Off Off Broadway debut in Manhattan as the director and producer of Listen To Your Mother NYC at Theatre71. I still hope my dad, Dr. David James Christie, watches our days. And that we are making him proud. ‘Cause most of the family is in on this one :-).

My mother will be in attendance, and the fabulous NYC cast includes my brother son James Christie, daughter Cali Christie Snyder,
and sister-in-law Nicole Christie, as well as these incredible storytellers:
Helen Firestone, Melissa Rozetar, Jack Mahoney, Lisa Lucca, Anna Sandler, Sarah Glubish, Bridey Thelen-Heidel, Holly Rutchik, Jessica Messier,
Sammie King, and Mindy Matijasevic

Find tickets HERE.

Below is a  LTYM Greater Berks cast photo taken the night of our first Listen To Your Mother rehearsal two hours before my father passed (February 22, 2019). Photo Credit: Katie Ballantine Photography

Seated (left to right): Amy Impellizzeri, Emily L. Hershey, Rebecca Thatcher Murcia, DJ Plante, Maria McDonnell, Joey Flamm-Costello, and Stephanie Andersen
Standing (left to right): Oduwa Ogbebor, Kristie Piacine, Holly Stuckert-Davis, Heather Christie, Marsha Wight Wise, Jennifer Graney, and Samantha Wharton

My Dad and me, sometime in the mid 90s, Rock Hall, MD, which was his favorite place on Earth, and where we scattered his ashes.