This is the only photo I’ve taken over the past two weeks. My dad has been hospitalized with severe COVID for the past 7 days. Going through all the feelings.

Update October 12, 2021: It is with incredible sadness that I write about my father passing. It’s been 40 days since his physical body left this earth. There have been certain practices I’ve been taking part in to honor his life each day. Burning sweet grass from Nez Perce land. Searching his individually cut and polished rocks for the intricate landscapes within them - the ones that he saw and what inspired him to cut those particular pieces of stone. I’ve been writing to him. Speaking to him, and holding an open space in my heart for him to live. I see him in the birds that fill the sky, in owls of my dreams and in the wind that fills my soul.

I believe I will continue to learn from my Dad until the day I die. There was a closeness we shared. A connection and a sense of knowing that I never completely understood. In the weeks leading up to his death, I woke in the night and checked my phone for the time - it was 5:00am and I felt uneasy. I checked my phone again. This time it was 5:05am and my Dad had just texted, letting me know he was admitting himself to the hospital. I woke instantly and called him. The first of many long calls, spent virtually sitting with him in hospital rooms for the next two weeks. I turned off my life and dedicated myself to him. I read him Harry Potter, filled the silence with stories for hours each day, and sometimes slept with my phone on my chest. With him on the other line, the occasional beep of the oxygen machine waking us both intermittently. I flew to Bend on September 1 to hold his hand through death on the morning of September 2, 2021. It was the last gift I could give him. I am grateful the hospital permitted us to be physically with him in his last hours. This is not a gift given to those who died of Covid in 2020.

In reflection, this undeniable bond and closeness that we shared is still present. It’s as if our bodies are one, and none other. In the past my ailments were his. My uncommon aches and pains were first felt by him in his youth. Now grief fills me, and I wonder if it felt the same for him as it does for me.

In the shock of his loss I mourned him, and I mourned the unspoken lessons I had yet to learn from him. In the weeks since, I have discovered that his lessons have not stopped. Despite no longer occupying his physical body, he is still teaching me.

Previously I’d been closed off completely to any form of spirituality - no matter which religion or culture it came from. However in search of understanding, my grief seems to have cracked what felt like an impenetrable personal barrier. To my surprise, the depth of life has only begun to reveal itself. Both in my immense and unparalleled sadness, and in beauty and joy of happiness. His energy is in the wind that wisps around me me. It is in the smell of sweet grass that I burn for him each night. And it embodies the hawks diving through the pink, cotton candy sky above me.

I can’t help but feel like this is another lesson from him, among many more to come.

“I feel like belong with nature, I would say. Cuz when I went back to the rez, you know I had a pretty spiritual feeling just being amongst the land and the river and the people. Probably in that order really. The land was what first touched me and moved me. It’s kind of like I belong here. Like, I belong to that place. Where my tribe is from. “ - Dad, February 2021