A Daughter’s Musings on Death

Dear Friends,

Once again, I vanished from this platform, but not from a lack of desire to write.  I have been immersed in family life since right after the Christmas holidays, from the early birth of a grandchild to being present as my father transitioned from this life to the next to recovering from double pneumonia to.  . . . It’s a long list, one that scorches my mind if I dwell on it.  You get it, because you have your own list.  Our lived records of trials and pains and frustrations and sorrows may not be exact matches on the surface but their roots – how they dig into and transform (for good or bad) the substrate of our hearts – are much the same.  

I have written notes and paragraphs and poems on any scrap of paper I could lay my hands on these past several weeks, hoping to find a few hours to shape them into readable thoughts; I find these everywhere as I now try to unearth after intense travel that included multiple doctor appointments and time spent with my father, long conversations with my siblings and fitful nights of sleeping.  There are bills to be paid, thank yous I want to write, and future logistics to arrange as my siblings and I undertake the big job of disassembling my parents’ full house, garage and barn.  

It is pleasing to think all earthly relationships end with kindness, love and forgiveness.  Isn’t that what happens in the movies?  Parents and spouses and children and friends and colleagues seek forgiveness and see in the clear, waning light how misunderstandings came to be, the point where everything went wrong, how harboring grudges damaged tender emotional ties.  The dying say they are sorry and the living say they are sorry and everything is reconciled.

Better yet, if death approaches without searing regret, we tell the dying how much they have meant to us, how much we cherish memories of being loved and cared for by them.  We hold their hand and they nod their heads and maybe mouth enough words in return that we know we have been heard.  Our love for the one slipping away is mirrored back to us.  It is not that we were loved perfectly or that we loved perfectly in return.  It’s more that we have somehow come to recognize our own imperfections, which helps us accept their imperfections.  We recognize what a gift love is – so very human, so flawed.  So essential.  

In reality, people often die quickly or in great pain, or heavily sedated, or in denial.  I have a dear friend whose mother left on a ship in Japan to receive treatment for cancer in the US when my friend was a young girl.  She never saw her mother again.  How do you reconcile that?  Or my close friend who died in a matter of minutes while watching her grade-school children in a spelling bee.  Her passing was so shocking – it uprooted us all so thoroughly – that it sucked our breath away for months and years afterward.  

We know intuitively there are few words worth offering those who grieve.  Trying to staunch the wound with excessive, flowery speech just doesn’t work.  But there is solidarity.  A quick call.  A card or text.  A memory.  Flowers.  A hug.  Food.  The simple words, “I am so sorry.”  Prayer.  Living with grief is like being wrapped in multiple strips of grave cloth.  It is hard to move, think or feel much of anything, but you still have to take the next step, still have to wade through the thick fog of funeral and financial details, family care and planning for the future.  Standing with someone immersed in loss can be a powerful beacon of hope.  

Dying is a process.  I don’t think I adequately understood this until recently, after losing both of my parents in 15 months.  I took my mother to the ER one morning because her back hurt.  She never returned home, words I still find painful to write.  It was traumatic and there was zero time to talk before she was sedated to keep her from experiencing what the doctors said would otherwise be a terrible death – terrible for her, terrible for the hospital staff, and terrible for her family.  (Their words.)  

The one thing she did say to me as we waited for a diagnosis – she lying there in great pain – was about Thanksgiving, which was only a few days away.  Mom was clearly thinking about the large number of family coming into town when she said, “Andrea, the turkey is in the freezer.  The sweet potatoes are by the door.  The collards are in the box (an outdoor garden box where they were still growing).”  That was the extent of our conversation.  We had no idea what lay ahead.

My father’s passing only a few months ago took a little longer, but still, a week before he died he was driving his old truck and cooking himself breakfast every morning.  Then he was hospitalized for a few days.  When it became clear he was not going to fully recover, we were told he would need several days of at-home physical therapy to regain better use of his muscles.  We understood he would eventually, maybe by the end of this summer, require at-home hospice care.  We brought Dad home.  He was tired, but happy to be back in his favorite spot on the couch.  My siblings and I sat down around the kitchen table and immediately started figuring out how one of us could almost always be with him, or nearby.  (Three of the four of us live far from our hometown.)   But Dad died within a few days, hours after a hospital bed was delivered.  Two of his grandchildren who work in health care drove in to help get him settled.  He met his new great-grandson.  And then he was gone.

More than ever, I have come to view death as the shedding of one life for another.  Being born is difficult.  It is hard on mothers who give birth and it is hard on the little ones who are struggling to emerge from a place of safety and familiarity into a totally unknown world.  The passage, even when all goes well, is exhausting for everyone concerned.  That includes fathers, hovering anxiously around the edges.  Dying is likewise difficult.  And singular.  As a friend whose father was dying once said to me, “Who knew death is so much work?”  

We have entered the post-Easter season – new life, new hope, new growth, new possibility.  But it has followed winter, Lent, loss.  I did not adequately consider that my mother, and now my father, had to die (in one way), had to leave this world and all of us whom they loved, in order to be born into the next life.  Just as a seed emerges from its shell and sprouts with its head above ground, all bent and crumpled with effort, my parents struggled to break through to the other side, to new life.  

I almost drowned when I was in the fourth grade.  I was body surfing in shallow water, my arms in front of my body in a V, when I suddenly realized I could not lift my head against a fierce undertow.  It was also impossible to stand up.  I didn’t know what it meant until years later, but my life slowly passed before my eyes until in desperation I gasped because my lungs could no longer hold out.  My head broke the surface at that exact moment. 

Similarly, one of my sisters and I sat with our father as he struggled on and off to catch his breath that last day.  And then, suddenly, the struggle was over.  His breathing slowed and eventually stopped.  He broke through the invisible surface. 

Only a few months ago I would have said death marks the end of any chance of reconciliation between the living and the dead.  I no longer believe that.  For just as my parents are being changed evermore into the likeness of Christ, into light and life, the possibility exists for me to be changed.  I can no longer talk with them, but they are not gone.  I can, through the graces of prayer, thought and memory, seek to know their continued love for me, to understand, to forgive, to be reconciled.  To appreciate them more than I ever did.  I don’t have to wait until I die and see them again. 

My mother made a sharp remark to me the day before she was sedated.  Though I knew she did not feel good, it brought me up short, was a painful sore I could not stop mentally picking at for months.  And then, out of nowhere, I heard someone a few weeks ago say something about her own life, something in no way at all connected to my mother; regardless, this woman’s words were a piercing light into what my mother was trying to say to me.  And I got it.  It was a gift that brought healing and understanding.  I was the one who had been insensitive.

I loved my parents dearly.  That has not ended.  I respected them, appreciated their friendship and totally enjoyed their company.  If my father is watching – one of the great cloud of witnesses the Bible talks about – I am sure he is as interested as ever in what I am doing, be it setting up new beehives or planting perennial flowers or exploring with my husband.  He was always interested in what I was doing.  He taught me to be mindful of my circumstances, not to live in fear, but to pay attention.

And my mother, who always asked detailed questions about all her grandchildren, who was so thrilled with her great-grandchildren, I think they all still bring a (strikingly beautiful) smile to her face.  She is urging me even now to enjoy my family.  To follow my kids, to build connections with my grandchildren, to be ready at a moment’s notice to help any of them in any way I can.  To treasure every stage.  

I guess what I have been learning is “It’s not over until it’s over,” in the words of baseball legend Yogi Berra.  My father passed late on a Tuesday night, but because it took the nurse a while to drive to us, he was not officially pronounced dead until very early the next calendar day.  It was not over until it was over.  And it is still not over.  Opportunities remain to show love and respect for my father and my mother, to learn new things (Dad was always learning something new), to consider their lives with understanding, to be instructed by so very much they did right.  To be thankful for how well I was loved.  To love in return.

In the meantime, my mind remains stuck.  My father was a gifted storyteller.  I currently can’t recall most of them, even the ones I knew backwards and forwards and loved to hear him tell.  They are frozen somewhere in the conduit between my mind and my heart and my soul.  But just as it is not over for my father or mother, it is not over for me.  I trust those stories will return. 

I hope to share some of them with you.

Yours,

Andrea