Five years ago, my dad’s heart stopped.

I was cooking dinner. It was 8 or 9 p.m. in Los Angeles, which was too late for my mom to be calling from Alabama. I answered the phone quickly.

“Hey Bear, do you have a second?” She asked, her voice a pitch higher than usual.

I did what I knew to do: I sat down. My body readied itself to receive news that someone I love is gone or almost gone. This has become a reflex.

I have been expectant of death since I was a young teenager. In high school, friends began dying and never stopped. Mostly, we lost friends to overdoses and suicide, but we also lost friends to car crashes and home invasions and cancer. We carpooled to funerals in our used cars with Taylor Swift’s Speak Now turned down low. We waited in lines to hug grieving parents who stood, shaking, in rooms filled with sixteen year olds who weren’t theirs. Death hovered like a cloud over our heads, binding the living together in a way both special and terrible. In a way that felt unbreakable, though it was not. It was not unbreakable at all.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Daddy’s okay, but he’s in the hospital.”

“Whose dad? Mine or yours?” My grandad had stage IV lung cancer at the time. We would lose him to the cancer only 45 days later, but we didn’t know this yet.

“Yours.”

First, there was relief that no one I love was lost. Then came guilt and anger. Guilt for living across the country. For going to work on a television set and chopping vegetables for dinner while my mother ran circles around the cardiac unit trying to find my father. Then the anger, which was at myself but also my mother. Anger that I wasn’t told right away. That they waited hours before calling me—hours that I could have spent at the airport or on a plane. Hours that could have been my dad’s last. This is the same anger that I would feel again, months later, when my parents would wait for months of test results before telling me what they suspected all along: that my mother had breast cancer.

But the anger didn’t stay. It wasn’t real. I was angry because I was scared.

—

It was March 3rd, 2019, the day of the mile-wide Beauregard tornado that killed 23 people and injured 97 others. It was a Sunday. That morning, a weather alert went out to the first responders across Lee County, Alabama. My dad, a trauma doctor who volunteers as a responder, received the alert on his radio. He canceled my parents’ plans for the night.

At 2 o’clock, the tornado touched down. Minutes later, winds blew at 170 miles an hour. Trees snapped at their bases. Homes were rolled and ripped, their walls open like mouths. The tornado warning became a tornado emergency. Eleven miles away, my dad packed his truck for triage. He packed tourniquets and bandages. He packed an AED and an oxygen tank.

My mom was a few hours away that Sunday, helping care for her father. She talked on the phone with my dad as he packed and remembers hearing his radio in the background. She heard policemen and paramedics panicking—people who were not trained to medically care for a hundred broken and buried bodies.

My dad was no stranger to warzones. He had done surgery in canvas tents in Romania and treated burn victims on dirt floors in Cambodia. He had airlifted people from the front lines in Afghanistan, tightening tourniquets around their frayed limbs on helicopter floors. As a child, I watched my dad rush to save victims of fatal car crashes before ambulances arrived. As a teenager, I followed his instructions when a man seized on the side of the road, helping him steady his head and turn him on his side.

With an uneasy feeling, my mom noticed my dad was short of breath on the other line, but she knew there was no world where he stayed behind. His very blood pumped for this, and there were voices on the radio yelling that three children were trapped in a house.

My dad drove towards the destruction. Minutes into the drive, he felt his chest tighten. He chalked it up to indigestion and kept driving, but the tightness got worse and painful. He knew then what was happening, but he needed to be wrong. He asked God that, if it was a heart attack, to please just wait a few hours.

When his vision blurred and he felt faint, he pulled over. He opened the door for air and reached into the backseat for his Trauma Kit. Scrambling, he opened the kit upside down, and the contents fell out of reach. He put his head down, knowing that he might die there on the side of the road, and then he saw that one pack of baby aspirin had fallen onto his chest.

He chewed the aspirin, put on the oxygen mask in his passenger seat, and turned towards the hospital.

He doesn’t remember much after this. What we know are the facts we were given and the stories we were told.

—

What we know is that my dad entered through the hospital’s ambulance entrance alone and on foot. What we know is that he fell into the arms of the security guard at the hospital’s sliding doors and said, “I need help.” What we know is that every doctor and staff member at the hospital had been called in for tornado relief, and the cardiologists were already there, standing by for patients.

I’m told that there were hundreds of people screaming and crying in the trauma room. That the sounds of grief and pain were impenetrable, coming from every direction and all at once. There were people with bloodied bodies and limbs missing. A child was being resuscitated there on the floor. Parents were separated from their kids, crying out to nurses who couldn’t understand them through their wails.

The security guard dragged my dad around the corner, where a paramedic, Lance, recognized him. Lance rushed him to the nearest open room, an eye exam room with only a chair, and grabbed a nurse on the way. He sat my dad down. My dad remembers taking off his shirt for a nurse to stick on the EKG leads. He remembers Lance saying, “I’m going to get an IV.” And then my dad’s heart arrested, and he was gone.

Later, he’ll tell me that, as his ribs cracked under the weight of the chest compressions, he felt peaceful. People ask him if he saw a light, but he says no. He saw only blackness, like a blank television screen. He felt weightless. Calm. Happy.

He coded for six minutes before his heart started again and he was sick. The world came back to him as if through a curtain. He saw eyes first, and then the nurse attached to them. She bent close to his face, her big eyes watching his for signs of life. Then he threw up on her.

—

Minutes after arriving back in town, my mom got a text from a friend whose husband is a doctor at the hospital. It said only, “Praying.”

My mom called her.

“What happened to Jimbo?”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“He’s going to be okay, but he’s in the cath lab right now.”

“Did he have a heart attack?” my mom asked.

“Yes.”

—

My mom met her friend and her husband at the hospital, and they led her to the ER.

She found my dad in the hallway, exiting the cath lab where he’d just gotten his first stent. She tells me that he looked like a star—lying there flat on the gurney, an entourage of people trailing behind him with his heart pump and IVs. He was awake and smiling. As my mom walked up to them, she heard the nurse say, “Yeah, but you’re the only person who’s ever tried to run your own code.”

—

That was the first story, one that has since been corroborated by everyone in the room at the time. My dad had flatlined, but that didn’t stop him from working.

The doctor tried to intubate him, but my dad grabbed his hand. My father, a dead man, said, “I can breathe fine,” and the doctor listened. When the nurses called out my dad’s rhythm to the doctor, my dad responded with, “Prepare to shock, 200 joules.” My dad remembers only blackness, but the nurse had kept enough oxygen pumping to my dad’s brain that his subconscious stayed active while his heart had stopped. This is a true story, and the same reason that the cardiologists would find zero brain damage in my dad’s brain scans, something almost unheard for a six-minute-long code.

The next day, that nurse came to see my dad. He was large and strong. He told my dad that he was sorry for breaking his ribs.

My dad replied, “You saved my life.”

The second story came from my cousin Mike, who was also at the hospital that day. His mother, the most vivacious Georgia-southern woman you’d have ever met, had just been admitted after a stroke. By the end of the month, we would say goodbye to our beloved Katharine.

Mike came downstairs to visit my parents in my dad’s room. He said what a blessing it was that my dad’s ambulance had a police escort to the hospital, that that’s the only way he’d made it in time. My parents looked at each other, confused. My mom said, “Jimbo drove himself to the hospital. His car is in the parking lot.”

There were a lot of stories like this.

Some nurses said they heard that my dad had shocked himself with the defibrillator in his truck. That he had brought himself back to life, alone in his car, and then drove to the hospital.

Others said that my dad had saved someone in the hospital parking lot as he was walking in, as if he’d resuscitated a stray victim while clutching his own chest.

For days, my dad lay in his hospital bed, hearing urban legends about himself, laughing against his bruised ribs at the unbelievability of it all, and trying to set people straight. I remember my mom calling to say that between friends and his new hospital fan club, it was impossible to get my dad to rest. She laughed, saying, “How do you make friends when you’re dead?”

—

A few weeks later, my dad started training to hike the Appalachian Trail. My mom began monitoring his diet with the rigor of a Navy commander, and I flew home for the first time of many that year. Over the next few months, my brother would check back into rehab, my aunt would pass away after two consecutive strokes, my grandfather would lose a grueling fight with lung cancer, and my mom would undergo a double mastectomy to remove the octopus-like tumors stretching out across her chest.

But through everything, my dad remained. His story brought us hope and laughter, the same way it had with the hospital staff. My dad has always had a way of making things lighter. It’s no surprise that even his heart attack would serve as the eye of a storm.

It’s not lost on me that it’s because of privilege and prayer that my dad survived a fatal heart attack that day and that others lost their lives around him. It’s not lost on him, either. But one thing I know is that my dad will rush to the next emergency just like he has so many times before. He will continue living his life to save others. It’s the only way he knows how.