How Can I Keep from Singing by Awara Fernandez

I sang my father Home last week.  

My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation

The last decade of his life was a journey through the Shadowlands of Alzheimer’s disease that left my heart broken a thousand times, and his abrupt departure left those broken pieces shattered. My father, who served as an epidemiologist for thirty years with the Centers for Disease Control, died during a triple-demic of Flu, RSV, and Covid that brought a surge of cases into area hospitals, so he spent his last hours in a noisy, crowded ER, eventually shunted off to the side into an examining room, where he was caught in a bewildering No Man’s Land.  Once he was discharged from the ER, medical personnel there could not attend to him while he waited for a hospital room to become available.  Yet, because there was no room for him in the hospital proper, he did not have access to a doctor from there either.  

So, I sang.

I catch the sweet, though far-off hymn that hails a new creation

The gift I gave my father that day was not the lyrical voice of my youth, rather it was a gasping, choking offering, fluttering forth from the tatters of my Covid-ravaged lungs and grief-ravaged heart. And, since it was Christmastime, it was fitting that the end of my father’s journey led me back to the road taken by a young, pregnant Jewish woman and her husband seeking shelter in Bethlehem amidst jostling travelers, to a baby shoe-horned into a stable because there was no room for Him at the neighborhood inn.  As I looked down the surging hallway of the hospital and out into the over-full waiting room, I recognized the pulsing throngs of long-ago, bumping up against each other, exhausted, exposed, seeking refuge.  Some things haven’t changed in two thousand years. 

There was no room for a baby to be born or for an old man to die. 

So, I sang. 

Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear that music ringing

I started with Christmas carols, moved on to familiar hymns, and ended with the Doxology. While my father finished his race, I remembered that Jesus, nearing the completion of His work here, told a noisy, crowded world that in His Father’s house there are many rooms.  This promise means that although His earthly parents were turned away because there was no room for them, our heavenly Father will never turn us away because there is no shortage of rooms in His house!  As my father breathed his last in a noisy, crowded hospital, he was welcomed into his Father’s house, where there are many rooms, where there is always a place for the children to come Home.  

So, I sang.

It finds an echo in my soul.  How can I keep from singing?

And now, my father, a newly minted Citizen of Heaven, joins the uncrowded heavenly throng as they rejoice, “Sing, all ye citizens of heaven above! Glory to God, all Glory in the highest. O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord!”

How can he keep from singing?

Awara and her husband Ernesto live in Georgia with their rescue dog, Gonzo.  They have 6 children and 7 grandchildren.  She looks forward to joining her father in the heavenly chorus one day.