Someday I’ll Wish Upon a Star, Wake Up Where the Clouds are Far Behind Me
Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” has always brought me chills. There is something about the initial chord combination that is so soulful. Then, in that instant when his gentle, perfectly pitched voice joins the soulful strum of his ukulele, it feels like he captures everything that is so good and beautiful about this world. Babies, love, rainbows, graduations, images like that just fill my head whenever that song begins.
It’s no wonder that when my boyfriend, Ron, asked me to marry him in the Spring of 2012, we picked that song to play during the wedding procession when it was my turn to walk down the aisle.
But before I get to the wedding, I need to give some context about the year 2012.
At the beginning of 2012, I found myself feeling incredibly happy. So many of my friends were experiencing major life events. People were buying homes, getting married, and expecting babies. I felt so happy for everyone. I even wrote a status update on Facebook about how everyone’s happiness was contributing to my own. Within a matter of weeks after that Facebook post, I had a major life event myself. Ron and I took a trip to Kauai during Spring Break and he asked me to marry him. My cup had definitely runneth over.
Immediately, I began thinking about what my life was going to be like once Ron and I committed to building a life together. I imagined us as newlyweds hosting my parents for dinner and taking them out on double dates; I imagined setting up family traditions like Sunday Fun-days where we would have carne asada at our place and invite family over; I imagined our future home; I imagined Ron and my Dad working on repairs around the house together; I imagined our children; I imagined our children with their grandparents; I imagined roadtrips and vacations with our kids. The possibilities were so exciting.
When we returned to Los Angeles, we settled on Tulum, Mexico as our wedding location. Tulum was an easy choice. It is beyond beautiful. If you imagine heaven as a beach, this is the beach that you probably imagine. It is white sand, turquoise water, Mayan ruins on the beach, just pristine beauty everywhere you turn. Ron and I were so excited to have a wedding that doubled as a vacation for our guests and flowed straight into a honeymoon for us. Plus destination weddings are really easy to organize, which made the first few months of planning run pretty smoothly for us.
This gave me a lot of time to pause and think about life after the wedding. These bubbles of thought would accumulate in my consciousness at night. I would stay up teasing out each thought and inadvertently planning and planning and planning all these possibilities in my head.
One day in July, my Mom called me to ask for a favor. She had taken my Dad to the ER and needed someone to pick up his truck and take it back home. He had been complaining about discomfort along his right abdominal area for months. She finally convinced him to get it checked because it had become unbearably painful. We had no idea what it could be.
He was drowsy when I got there but only because his doctor had given him pain medication. Ron and I sat with him and my Mom for a while. We laughed and looked over wedding invitations. A few members of his church stopped by to give him a blessing. He repeatedly told everyone, “I’m fine. You don’t need to make a fuss about me.” He had been diabetic for years, so I think most of us believed it was just a diabetes complication. But when days turned into weeks of testing, our concerns grew. I think we all knew that we were headed toward that really scary word no one ever wants to hear.
About a month after that initial trip to the ER, my mom called me again. She asked that I stop by her house after work. She asked that Ron be there, too. It was August and I was already teaching. I knew it was bad news. Bad news is always delivered in person. I gripped the steering wheel tightly and breathed deeply the whole way. When I arrived, I sat on the couch next to my Dad while he confirmed my fears. He had Pancreatic Cancer.
Anyone who has been in my family’s position knows how devastating that news is, but I needed all of us to cling to some hope. So I made my Dad promise to try whatever the doctors recommended to beat this thing: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or medications.
As much as I cried the weeks following this news, I knew it was important to maintain our resolve as a family so that we could support my Dad spiritually and emotionally. It was working too. My resolve was relatively stable until I received that third phone call from my Mom.
Again she wanted both Ron and I to stop by her house after work. This time I got a phone call from my brother before I got to my parents’ house. He let me know my Dad’s prognosis. His cancer was at stage 4 and cancer only has 5 stages. His doctors gave him six months to live even with chemotherapy treatment.
I was crushed. Our whole family was crushed.
Immediately, all sorts of bubbles burst. The bubbles that contained visions of my life after the wedding almost all burst because my Dad was such a big part of all of those plans. The double dates, the carne asadas on Sundays, Ron and my Dad fixing stuff around our future house, my Dad laughing at all of my future children’s silliness. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
When I got to the front door, I had no resolve left. My Dad and I gave each other a long, tight hug at the door. My only resolve was to drink in every minute I could of the time that was left with him.
On the drive home, I’m pretty sure I screamed the entire way. That night, I called friends at odd hours of the night searching for any available comfort.
When I heard my Dad’s prognosis, everything in my mind, heart, and soul went dark for a while. I would close my eyes and find myself in an abyss wondering what was the point of it all. What was the point of life if in the end I was going to have to say goodbye to every person I love? I did not want to get out of bed. I took multiple days off work.
I don’t remember how long that feeling lasted, but one day in that abyss I found a tiny light, my first flicker of hope. It was my love for my Dad and his love for me. That was the most real thing I could grasp on to. Even if he left us, my love for him would still exist and be as real and present as ever. At that moment, I found a new understanding of what I believe is the purpose of life. Simply put, the purpose is to love. I understood that the point of it all is to experience love in all the forms that are available to me.
This insight arrived in large part because, like so many cancer patients, my Dad found an inner strength that spread to all of us around him.
I really needed his resilience on the days following his prognosis, especially when I tried to change my wedding plans. Ron and I didn’t think it was a good idea to have our wedding in March and in Tulum anymore. If my Dad only had six months left, then he would be leaving us by January or February. It would be too hard to be in such a beautiful place for such an important occasion without him. That walk down the aisle would be unbearable. And if he was still with us, he would be too weak to travel. Any way we looked at it just did not seem right.
My Dad immediately said no to that. He made us promise that we would continue the wedding exactly as planned. Exactly. He did not want his cancer to be the reason that I did not get my dream wedding. He even promised he would be there. So we agreed to keep the wedding as planned. The by-product of making these promises to each other was that they provided me with strength. They encouraged me to continue building this new and important stage in my life even though I felt immobilized by pain.
That entire fall semester, I visited my Dad several times a week after work. My Mom went into full caretaker mode. She researched every natural medicine or food that might help my Dad either get better or at least retain his strength. Every time I went over, he was holding a water bottle full of alkaline water or tea made from the leaves of the guanabana tree. She stuffed him with carrot juice smoothies, okra smoothies and chips, spinach omelettes, plus cactus and aloe vera to manage his diabetes.
Something was working because he handled chemotherapy like a champ that fall and winter.
By the end of winter 2013, I knew my Dad would be able to keep his promise. I was so glad he made me keep mine.
The days in Tulum leading up to my wedding were a dream. As cliche as that sounds, I cannot think of a better word to describe my wedding experience. My niece and nephews swam with dolphins at Xcaret. My dad and future husband traveled to Chichen Itza to see Kukulkan’s shadow descend upon the stairs of the pyramid. Ron and I went on an excursion with many of our family members and guests to see the Mayan ruins on the beach in Tulum. Every night, friends and family gathered at the resort bar or went dancing together.
Ron and I even got some heartfelt thank yous. My sister approached me a few days into the trip and said, “Sister, I want to thank you.”
“Why?”
“Because you chose this place for your wedding. It gave us an opportunity to all take a trip together with Mom and Dad before, you know…”
She didn’t have to finish that sentence. I knew it wasn’t just my wedding weekend. It was our family’s opportunity to form some last beautiful memories together.
The morning of my wedding day, my nervous energy was pretty much a happy buzz except for one nagging thought that had bothered me for months. The stupid walk down the aisle! I know. I know. Every little girl’s dream. And with my Dad’s condition, this is supposed to be a special moment for him and me. Except that I am pretty introverted. I get a lot of anxiety when all eyes are on me. All of a sudden, I become so aware of different parts of my body that I never even think about. Like, are my eyebrows doing what they regularly do on my face? Do I normally breathe through my mouth or through my nose? Oh God, I’m smiling too hard! But now there were going to be tons of pictures documenting my awkwardness. And I have to make awkward eye contact with my guests on the way to the altar! I was least looking forward to that walk down the aisle.
To top it off, during the wedding rehearsal the resort’s wedding coordinator advised my Dad and I not to rush down the aisle. My Dad took that direction way too literally. He placed one foot literally in front of the other so neither of us were taking our regular-sized steps. This walk was shaping up to be not only awkward, but unintentionally comical.
When the ceremony began that afternoon, the wedding coordinator sectioned my dad and I off so that we could not see or hear the wedding party walk down the designated path toward the canopy on the beach where Ron and our guests were waiting. All I could think about while waiting was how to get my Dad to walk a little faster so that the pace could seem leisurely and not like we were trying to walk over a tightrope.
When it was our turn, she walked us over to the start of the designated path. It was lined with bushes and small palm trees which blocked the view of the beach and the wedding set up. Then, Iz’s ukulele strumming began. Chills. I pulled my Dad so that we could walk a little faster. Within seconds, we reached the end of the tree-lined path and I caught sight of the wedding set up, all my loved ones, and Ron. Behind them, a cloudless sky and mesmerizing turquoise water connected at the horizon, with a bed of white sand laying underneath. And Iz’s voice all around us. I heard myself gasp.
Suddenly I realized, this is what it must be like to enter heaven, the one I learned about as a kid. Dad will greet me at a beautiful place like this and walk me toward all the people I love, all the people that are here today.
For the second time, I felt everything fall away and just felt love like I did that day when I first started to climb out of that void. With my entire being focused on that feeling, I walked the rest of the aisle with my eyes locked on Ron. But I soaked in all of the loving and supportive energy I was getting from the people that surrounded Ron and I as I made my way toward him.
That walk down the aisle, I can’t believe I almost rushed it. What I would have missed.
There are so many stories I can tell about what it was like when my Dad got sick. His illness and his death are a complex, multi-layered experience that changed me permanently and changed my relationship with all the people involved. This is the story as it pertains to this song.
People do their best to comfort you with well-meaning phrases. He is in a better place now. At least he is not suffering anymore. He is looking down on you from heaven. He is always with you.
It does not change the fact that I feel grief. It does not change the feeling that thirty-five years with my Dad was not enough time. I don’t want him to be in heaven looking down on me. I want him to be here laughing with my son, Joaquin. I want him to be here getting that half-humble, half-proud smile whenever someone says my daughter, Naima, looks just like him. I can’t think of a better place for him to be than here enjoying his grandkids.
But that song, it always recaptures a little bit of the magic of that walk down the aisle. At least I have that.
