Regarding my father's death bed discourse that used the language of recurrence, I've now remembered that I introduced him to the ideas of recurrence sometime in the mid-nineties. It's interesting that he never mentioned it after that, but it nevertheless seemed to have become something he adopted in his thinking about life and death in the last twelve years or so. It is evidence that a short talk or small remark can stay inside a person. One evening where I discourse on time in the language of recurrence to my dad and it comes out in a dramatic lucid discourse from him just before he dies. It is also evidence that evangelising the faith to a person may have more impact in them than you can know. Even just a remark.
I also realized I was the one "by the fireplace." This was a mysterious thing my father was saying in his last days. The person "by the fireplace."
When I was deeply into my initial Work stage (which is the main stage for all practical purposes when you connect with the Work in a real way) I would come in from long walks, filled with higher energy, and I'd stand on the bricks of the fireplace (sometimes; enough times to remember it) and talk to my mother and father whose chairs sort of faced the fireplace. (I was conscious at the time of feeling - and looking - like a prophet.) I remember, in a way geared for their understanding, talking about religion and time and death. This was when my father heard of the ideas he was repeating on his death bed. But that it came out of him then, is rather remarkable. It may be just that the ideas are universal truth, he'd come into contact with them, and so he could express them because he had a language to express them.
The Bible has room for recurrence since the Bible doesn't say what happens to people who are not believers at death. They don't go to hell (that is reserved for people who are judged to go there at the Last Judgment at the end of the world). People of faith go to be with God in heaven. People who die and who currently have no faith in their Creator and Saviour...the Bible is silent on them. Where they go at death, anyway. It says they go to Hades. Plato's Myth of Er describes a kind of recurrence in and out of Hades (it though seems, though only seems, to describe reincarnation, but not really, if you know what recurrence is). There is room for recurrence in an orthodox biblical belief.
I regret greatly now I didn't evangelize the Gospel, such as I would do it, to him at any time. I admit I am still "ashamed" of the name Christ and the Gospel (embarassed might be a more accurate word, but that would correlate with being ashamed some too). Actually, too, I am a bit impatient with all the explanation required and people mechanically assuming you're something that you're not, some common stereotype associated with Christianity and so on. Yet for the Spirit to do its work you just have to say Jesus saves. Or give some actual Scriptural truth, bold and directly. Don't worry about explaining yourself. It does the work. In time. I failed my father in this area. Though my father did see me with a Bible always, which is a kind of evangelizing. He did start to use language of faith some as well. "I'll see your mother in heaven." He said that several times. He also began to use the phrase "the good Lord." This from a man who my brother says told him long ago that when you die there is nothing afterwards.
ps: Thank you, missionaha, for your note on Parthenon_Agora.
pps: And thank you, Paul, for your note as well...
6/2/07
I lost my father yesterday - a sweetheart (a second part)
In the aftermath of it all I just have to say: "I'm a mess."
Remorse at not being more 'present' when I was with my father, spending more hours with him at a visit (that's a big remorse). Remorse at not foreseeing his inevitable death and acting on that by doing 'now' what I would regret not doing once he's gone.
Alot of utter stupidity. Denseness.
Remorse at berating him to be more "motivated" and have a better "attitude" regarding the physical therapy sessions, when it was all like emptying the ocean with a tea cup ("Oh, he stood up easier that time." Or, hey, he walked a little farther than last week. From 10 feet to 15 feet. Before his heart and breathing wouldn't let him go any further.) Meanwhile my father has lived this full life all over the world walking up mountains and flying over them, and was really no longer interested in doing that. I've done that, his "attitude" seemed to be saying. Now I can see he knew he was in the process of dying way back on December 19th of last year when he asked me to take him to the emergency room for the first time. He then went into a new state. Passive. (I'd said to the initial nurse who interviewed him and couldn't get a take on what exactly was mostly wrong: "He basically feels like something big is coming down on him, and he doesn't know what it is.")
A big Russian CNA (Certified Nurse Assistant), Peter (or Petra, or something like that) came into my father's room a few days ago and told me about his own father who had a similar condition as my father's, and he said, in a thick, thick, thick Russian accent, a big, stout, peasant-like Russian bear, gentle bear, said "Even I who am a CNA, I too saw my father like this in this kind of place, and I want him to GET UP! GET STRONG! I'm CNA and still I do this, and my sister say: "NO!" (and here Peter slammed his fist into his palm). She say: "He not feel well." So? If say they don't feel well, you can't force. (Smiling, Peter says this. Implying, "You love him, but you can't force.") (And he prefaced this first by telling me a story of a daughter who pushed her father to do physical therapy when her father said he wasn't feeling like it, and he died of a heart attack in the physical therapy room.)
I have remorse that my imploring of my father had gotten so aggressive on two occasions that all the staff could hear me (thus they sent Peter in to give me this talk). Looking back my father became intensely upset at this and had a very bad night after I'd left. I was berating an innocent dying man who was now without his outer shell to protect his essence. Like berating a child who didn't understand and just saw meanness (I want to stab myself in the heart as I write that). In my defense my whole motivation was to get my father to a level of physical independence to where he could just basically live at home and not spend the rest of his days on his back in bed in some ward. And we didn't know how long he had to live. It could have been three or five years, who could know? So he was in a critical period where he either made the effort to do it or he slid backwards to a permanent state of not being able to move. Hence my motivation in what I was doing.
Now, in hindsight, it seems so dense. I had my father there, with his essence fully manifesting before me. Once he no longer was in his daily life routine his mind was set free and his old 'roles' and personalities fell away and he was a new and different person. This is what I mean when I say he broke your heart just looking at him. I saw him as he was. Like seeing a child. So I had that. For four plus months. Five months and eleven days counting from Dec. 19th of last year. And I have intense remorse that I didn't see it fully. I have intense remorse that I didn't stay with him every minute that I could and do things that I could have done for him. Learn things. Listen more. Hug him. Kiss him. Hold his hand. Not worry about hospital and nursing home 'germs' so damn much.
Not leave him to spend difficult nights alone when he would get (I know now) his most disoriented and not know where he was or where his family was and not know how to get in touch with us. This is what inevitably brought on the morphine shot that should never have been given. Then again, the morphine shot triggered a very orchestrated leaving that was inevitable.
I didn't play my part well. But I have to say it's good that one can't screw things up orchestrated by God too much. What happened happened. The Work angle still puzzles me. My father was not just 'sort of' speaking in the language, using the terms, of recurrence: he was BLATANTLY speaking the language and imparting wisdom with that language and those terms IN THE CONTEXT of Work understanding. And this was in a manifestly INSPIRED STATE on his DEATH BED. (OK, no more caps.) This, by the way, may be validation not only of Work knowledge being real, but it may have been an epic intended shock to my system to get out of my lethargy regarding Work and what I know and have to be. (And if I were the person I was in the past frankly I would have used all the these last five months for Work itself, and I'd been doing all and more that I have remorse for not doing now. I mean, the strange me of my Work period before getting on the internet. I'd have been in his room at three in the morning so full of accumulated energy he'd have seen my higher bodies, we'd have communicated at higher levels. I'd have killed, so to speak, to have such an opportunity during my intense Work times during the 1990s. I'd have given my father all I had to offer, and now what a wasted thing.
I'm too hard on myself, I know. I still was who I am, and in my father's company it's not like I ceased to be who I am. But still.
Regarding, by the way, the recurrence language used by my father I can't get my family interested in this angle. He was even using house metaphors, so common in Work language. At one point he said, elliptically: "The house has been built." I responded: "Once the house has been built then you can see areas where you could have done it differently, but the house has to be built before you can see that." He said, pointedly: "Yes." He'd used the "house has been built" metaphor referring to his own life and his influence on, and efforts with, all of us, his children.
I have remorse I didn't stay for his entire death bed talk (can you believe that?) No, I was worried about his 'belongings' back at the nursing home and wanted to get over there to gather them and bring them home because his room, they'd told me, couldn't be held. Wow, so important that I do that, huh? right in the midst of my father given an inspired, strange discourse in what was so obviously his last lucid moment in his last dying hours.
What I learned from my sister regarding what my father did when I was away was after I left, and they all stayed and he talked some more, then they all began to shuffle away for the night, my father then looked around and said, "Everybody is leaving. Good." As if: "It's finished, and what needed to be done has been done." Then he slipped back into the state where he was involved with talking to someone we couldn't see, preparing, literally, for a take off like a pilot in an aircraft. In other words, his lucid state gave way to the state where he was in between worlds and preparing for the inevitable, which eventually came less than four hours later.
I did come back at 1:20 that night, as I wrote in the previous post.
God bless my father. What a strange string of events.
I'd prayed about it all. I didn't pray that he wouldn't die (knowing that all go the way of all flesh), but I did pray that he'd get better. Then I also, during it all, prayed to God that He would make it a gradual transition for me. For ME. So I could deal with it all in stages. And that is exactly what happened. Even to the detail that on the morning he was taken to the emergency room for the last time I'd arrived at the nursing home to see him in a half dead state; dead eyes, unresponsive, looking at and holding my dying father then. Yet he wasn't dead and he revived to do all the above, yet seeing that prepared me for seeing his deceased body 21 or so hours later.
The real blessing or grace from God regarding that though was getting through the initial stages of knowing my father was departing and having him no longer at home and feeling his absense and, though not getting 'use' to it, being forced to experience it while I could still go and be with him where he was.
I'm not involved in the burial arrangements or things like figuring out insurance this and that. I've been going to the hospital and giving my respects to my father's body. It's still at the hospital in the hospital morgue. As long as it is still there I'll be there for him. I went today and tried to stand under a big oak tree in the middle of the parking lot, but they had it fenced off, so I found a place near it where I could see the entire hospital in my view, and I opened my Bible to Psalms and said I will read whatever psalm I open to and it will have meaning. I opened to Psalm 69. It was hard to find meaning in it relevant to my father and the situation. I though read it, and I read it, as I went along, as if I was saying the psalm in my father's behalf to God. It was not what I expected (read it and see). It was like my father was surrounded by enemies and darkness and he, through me, was asking God for deliverence. I paused at verse 29: But I am poor and sorrowful: let thy salvation, O God, set me up on high. I said this for my father.
Remorse at not being more 'present' when I was with my father, spending more hours with him at a visit (that's a big remorse). Remorse at not foreseeing his inevitable death and acting on that by doing 'now' what I would regret not doing once he's gone.
Alot of utter stupidity. Denseness.
Remorse at berating him to be more "motivated" and have a better "attitude" regarding the physical therapy sessions, when it was all like emptying the ocean with a tea cup ("Oh, he stood up easier that time." Or, hey, he walked a little farther than last week. From 10 feet to 15 feet. Before his heart and breathing wouldn't let him go any further.) Meanwhile my father has lived this full life all over the world walking up mountains and flying over them, and was really no longer interested in doing that. I've done that, his "attitude" seemed to be saying. Now I can see he knew he was in the process of dying way back on December 19th of last year when he asked me to take him to the emergency room for the first time. He then went into a new state. Passive. (I'd said to the initial nurse who interviewed him and couldn't get a take on what exactly was mostly wrong: "He basically feels like something big is coming down on him, and he doesn't know what it is.")
A big Russian CNA (Certified Nurse Assistant), Peter (or Petra, or something like that) came into my father's room a few days ago and told me about his own father who had a similar condition as my father's, and he said, in a thick, thick, thick Russian accent, a big, stout, peasant-like Russian bear, gentle bear, said "Even I who am a CNA, I too saw my father like this in this kind of place, and I want him to GET UP! GET STRONG! I'm CNA and still I do this, and my sister say: "NO!" (and here Peter slammed his fist into his palm). She say: "He not feel well." So? If say they don't feel well, you can't force. (Smiling, Peter says this. Implying, "You love him, but you can't force.") (And he prefaced this first by telling me a story of a daughter who pushed her father to do physical therapy when her father said he wasn't feeling like it, and he died of a heart attack in the physical therapy room.)
I have remorse that my imploring of my father had gotten so aggressive on two occasions that all the staff could hear me (thus they sent Peter in to give me this talk). Looking back my father became intensely upset at this and had a very bad night after I'd left. I was berating an innocent dying man who was now without his outer shell to protect his essence. Like berating a child who didn't understand and just saw meanness (I want to stab myself in the heart as I write that). In my defense my whole motivation was to get my father to a level of physical independence to where he could just basically live at home and not spend the rest of his days on his back in bed in some ward. And we didn't know how long he had to live. It could have been three or five years, who could know? So he was in a critical period where he either made the effort to do it or he slid backwards to a permanent state of not being able to move. Hence my motivation in what I was doing.
Now, in hindsight, it seems so dense. I had my father there, with his essence fully manifesting before me. Once he no longer was in his daily life routine his mind was set free and his old 'roles' and personalities fell away and he was a new and different person. This is what I mean when I say he broke your heart just looking at him. I saw him as he was. Like seeing a child. So I had that. For four plus months. Five months and eleven days counting from Dec. 19th of last year. And I have intense remorse that I didn't see it fully. I have intense remorse that I didn't stay with him every minute that I could and do things that I could have done for him. Learn things. Listen more. Hug him. Kiss him. Hold his hand. Not worry about hospital and nursing home 'germs' so damn much.
Not leave him to spend difficult nights alone when he would get (I know now) his most disoriented and not know where he was or where his family was and not know how to get in touch with us. This is what inevitably brought on the morphine shot that should never have been given. Then again, the morphine shot triggered a very orchestrated leaving that was inevitable.
I didn't play my part well. But I have to say it's good that one can't screw things up orchestrated by God too much. What happened happened. The Work angle still puzzles me. My father was not just 'sort of' speaking in the language, using the terms, of recurrence: he was BLATANTLY speaking the language and imparting wisdom with that language and those terms IN THE CONTEXT of Work understanding. And this was in a manifestly INSPIRED STATE on his DEATH BED. (OK, no more caps.) This, by the way, may be validation not only of Work knowledge being real, but it may have been an epic intended shock to my system to get out of my lethargy regarding Work and what I know and have to be. (And if I were the person I was in the past frankly I would have used all the these last five months for Work itself, and I'd been doing all and more that I have remorse for not doing now. I mean, the strange me of my Work period before getting on the internet. I'd have been in his room at three in the morning so full of accumulated energy he'd have seen my higher bodies, we'd have communicated at higher levels. I'd have killed, so to speak, to have such an opportunity during my intense Work times during the 1990s. I'd have given my father all I had to offer, and now what a wasted thing.
I'm too hard on myself, I know. I still was who I am, and in my father's company it's not like I ceased to be who I am. But still.
Regarding, by the way, the recurrence language used by my father I can't get my family interested in this angle. He was even using house metaphors, so common in Work language. At one point he said, elliptically: "The house has been built." I responded: "Once the house has been built then you can see areas where you could have done it differently, but the house has to be built before you can see that." He said, pointedly: "Yes." He'd used the "house has been built" metaphor referring to his own life and his influence on, and efforts with, all of us, his children.
I have remorse I didn't stay for his entire death bed talk (can you believe that?) No, I was worried about his 'belongings' back at the nursing home and wanted to get over there to gather them and bring them home because his room, they'd told me, couldn't be held. Wow, so important that I do that, huh? right in the midst of my father given an inspired, strange discourse in what was so obviously his last lucid moment in his last dying hours.
What I learned from my sister regarding what my father did when I was away was after I left, and they all stayed and he talked some more, then they all began to shuffle away for the night, my father then looked around and said, "Everybody is leaving. Good." As if: "It's finished, and what needed to be done has been done." Then he slipped back into the state where he was involved with talking to someone we couldn't see, preparing, literally, for a take off like a pilot in an aircraft. In other words, his lucid state gave way to the state where he was in between worlds and preparing for the inevitable, which eventually came less than four hours later.
I did come back at 1:20 that night, as I wrote in the previous post.
God bless my father. What a strange string of events.
I'd prayed about it all. I didn't pray that he wouldn't die (knowing that all go the way of all flesh), but I did pray that he'd get better. Then I also, during it all, prayed to God that He would make it a gradual transition for me. For ME. So I could deal with it all in stages. And that is exactly what happened. Even to the detail that on the morning he was taken to the emergency room for the last time I'd arrived at the nursing home to see him in a half dead state; dead eyes, unresponsive, looking at and holding my dying father then. Yet he wasn't dead and he revived to do all the above, yet seeing that prepared me for seeing his deceased body 21 or so hours later.
The real blessing or grace from God regarding that though was getting through the initial stages of knowing my father was departing and having him no longer at home and feeling his absense and, though not getting 'use' to it, being forced to experience it while I could still go and be with him where he was.
I'm not involved in the burial arrangements or things like figuring out insurance this and that. I've been going to the hospital and giving my respects to my father's body. It's still at the hospital in the hospital morgue. As long as it is still there I'll be there for him. I went today and tried to stand under a big oak tree in the middle of the parking lot, but they had it fenced off, so I found a place near it where I could see the entire hospital in my view, and I opened my Bible to Psalms and said I will read whatever psalm I open to and it will have meaning. I opened to Psalm 69. It was hard to find meaning in it relevant to my father and the situation. I though read it, and I read it, as I went along, as if I was saying the psalm in my father's behalf to God. It was not what I expected (read it and see). It was like my father was surrounded by enemies and darkness and he, through me, was asking God for deliverence. I paused at verse 29: But I am poor and sorrowful: let thy salvation, O God, set me up on high. I said this for my father.
6/1/07
I lost my father yesterday - a sweetheart
My father was an artist with real talent that got sidetracked by war and a military career. He had interests in times of his life that I didn't know about.
I started to write a long post which turned into tedious narrative. I couldn't carry it through. My father died basically from a failing heart yesterday. His heart could no longer pump fluids through his body and it effected his lungs and so on. He passed at about 3:30 in the morning on May 31st. I arrived to the Intensive Care Unit where he was three minutes after he'd taken his last breath. My oldest brother had been there when it happened. My oldest sister arrived just as he took his last breath. When I entered she just glanced up at the monitor which was all flat-lined.
There's a long four-month story leading up to that. I was his principal company and companion while he lived in hospital rooms, nursing homes and rehab centers.
We didn't expect him to die. He'd been mistakenly given a shot of morphine in his care center where he was staying. The on-call doctor thought he was a terminal patient in hospice care. He wasn't. (I'm not law suit happy, but there may be one there.) It caused him to go into a half coma state. I was the first to reach him when they called the family the following morning. I thought I was holding my dying father. He couldn't close his eyes or blink or talk. He could just gently squeeze my hand. It turned out he heard every word I was saying.
The medics arrived and gave him some unique kind of oxygen and he began to revive. Then once in the emergency room (about the fifth time for him in the last four months) it all began to unfold. He knew he would die.
Once they knew he'd been given morphine they gave him a quick antidote and determined he was OK.
He refused my request that he try to sleep because he said if he did he wouldn't come back. He deliberately had two bites of some food and stated (we could see in the aftermath) that that was that, he was now finished with food. (His last bite of food was a piece of cantelope.) Then he went into a personality I'd never seen. A rather unpleasant one I must say. Like a mafia don interrogating family and demanding answers. Ending his sentences unusually with "That's all I'm asking", like 140 times. Or, "That's all I wanna know." One of the two, I can't remember. I felt impatience with him.
The doctor said he was well enough to be transferred back to his nursing care home, so I left to sleep some. When I awoke I, without calling anyone, went to his nursing care home to see him, but he wasn't there. I called my brother and found out he'd not been transferred yet. Something was happening, too, at that moment. He said call back in ten minutes. Ten minutes later I was told my father was "passing."
I jumped in my car and got to the hospital. Several family members were around him crying. I said I'd go get his wife, my mother. I left. When I came back my father revived at the voice of my mother and proceeded to hold court for several hours.
Like an Old Testament patriarch he gave words of wisdom, blessings, and prophecy for each of his children in order. Unselfconsciously (not knowing about such scenes in classical and biblical literature) just falling into it naturally. Very much out of character as well.
In the discourse I swear on God's Word he began to speak to all there the language of recurrence as it's found in Ouspensky's books. "Each one here has to look back on their lives and see where they could make a change. Some things you can change, some you can't. Some things are fateful."
"Did you say 'fateful'?," I inquired.
"Yes."
Then he mentioned 'accident.' "Fortunately none of you has suffered anything that didn't have to happen to you. No accidents."
He also stressed that it was good that nobody had harmed anybody.
He could see his life from a perspective of seeing where changes could have been made.
[I'm getting tedious here...]
Suffice to say just to look at my father these last several months was enough to break your heart. He broke your heart just looking at him. He tried so hard to get his strength back in physical therapy, but he couldn't. His heart was too weak to let him. And he couldn't breathe because of the fluid in his lungs. But he tried. In goofy machines, with several therapists and assistants helping and encouraging him.
I berated him when he developed pneumonia for the second time by being supine in bed too long and refusing to sit up in a chair. I berated him when he didn't show enough effort in his physical therapy. I missed much of his sweet and unusual presence.
I do cherish though now when, after physical therapy, I would take him for walks (push him in his wheelchair) outside to get some sun and fresh air. We could only go within a radius of the nursing care home, so I found myself pushing my father through generic parking lots, passing the backs of restaurants, going through pleasantly landscaped office building complexes, going to a local strip mall that had a drugstore. Just walking up and down the streets the care center was on.
Sometimes I would push him with my hands on his now frail shoulders.
Now I think, me and my dad, walking behind rows of restaurants. What are we doing here? Though I secretly loved it.
I would find quiet spots and have him call family from a cell phone. These were the only things to do.
Then I wheel him back to his room, transfer him to bed, and he would go to sleep until dinner. I'd leave. Then I'd come back about six and stay no later than eight. He'd be alone from eight until noon the next day. Looking back, after he's gone, I wonder how I could have ever left his side. Left him alone there.
You kick yourself. The context is changed when you know the outcome (that he'd be gone at a certain near date), but you still are hard on yourself.
I found out sometimes he'd have bad nights. Now I knew why he was always saying, "I can't get in touch with you!" The phone situation for him was complicated. He was stuck in a bed with little reach for even turning on a light. He couldn't figure out a cell phone at that point anyway. But in those long nights he was calling out for me. I had no idea. Looking back, knowing the ending, I am hard on myself.
When I'd arrive the next day the nurses would say: "Your father's been calling for you!"
My father had a sweet face. Handsome. All the nurses fell in love with him. An Air Force pilot, but now like an innocent child. My mother was the only woman he'd known. He was alone in life at a young age. Made his way. A very innocent man.
I had no idea he ever even thought about such things as recurrence, let alone knew the language. It may have been strange inspiration. He discoursed on all his children, but was mostly silent about me. The "wheel" he spoke of, I thought, was now no longer something I was a part of. Keep in mind this was a dying man speaking. Speaking robustly. In an agitated, "I must say this", mode. Language that had to be interpreted. Everybody cringing waiting for their turn. Brutally honest.
Nobody thought he would die several hours later though. I felt moved to come back to him at 1:20 a.m. He was talking just as rapidly and loudly but now only to himself. He was literally speaking of taking off for a flight. My brother was in a chair trying to sleep, next to him. I sat down and tried to talk to my dad. He was in his own world. He directed words to me, but I couldn't follow them or make them out. At one point I stood up directly over him, looking at him, and said: "I love you, Dad." He said, in a normal voice: "I love you, honey." I said: "You're the best dad in the world." And he went back to his talk about his flight he was about to take.
I left, thinking my presence is making him not fall asleep (see what the context makes you do?) I just left him, as he talked strangely and robustly to himself and to another imaginary person as I left the room. One hour and fifty minutes later his heart stopped racing, and his breathing stopped, and he died.
I had been trying to sleep back at home, but couldn't and had gotten up, and my sister came down the hall and told me our brother had called and said he was dying now. She left immediately, I had to dress and was three minutes behind her. I wasn't there for his final breath, but my brother said he'd been not very conscious once his heart had started to go down.
I was hard on my self for leaving him earlier. Leaving him to talk to himself. The context rules. I didn't know he was on the verge of death. I thought he needed to rest his mind and sleep. I didn't want to be a catalyst for him to keep talking.
When I saw him, I fell on his chest and kissed him and the tears flowed. My sweetheart father, my companion, my handsome dad who I had just begun to truly just look at and touch and help, was gone.
* * *
Today, I awoke at about one in the afternoon and took a drive. I went to the nursing care center. I parked and walked all the paths I would take pushing my father in his wheel chair, feeling him with me, and crying. I then went to the hospital, where his body still was, and just stood in the parking lot, crying, saying: "Dad, I know your body is still here, and I'm here. I miss you, dad."
I started to write a long post which turned into tedious narrative. I couldn't carry it through. My father died basically from a failing heart yesterday. His heart could no longer pump fluids through his body and it effected his lungs and so on. He passed at about 3:30 in the morning on May 31st. I arrived to the Intensive Care Unit where he was three minutes after he'd taken his last breath. My oldest brother had been there when it happened. My oldest sister arrived just as he took his last breath. When I entered she just glanced up at the monitor which was all flat-lined.
There's a long four-month story leading up to that. I was his principal company and companion while he lived in hospital rooms, nursing homes and rehab centers.
We didn't expect him to die. He'd been mistakenly given a shot of morphine in his care center where he was staying. The on-call doctor thought he was a terminal patient in hospice care. He wasn't. (I'm not law suit happy, but there may be one there.) It caused him to go into a half coma state. I was the first to reach him when they called the family the following morning. I thought I was holding my dying father. He couldn't close his eyes or blink or talk. He could just gently squeeze my hand. It turned out he heard every word I was saying.
The medics arrived and gave him some unique kind of oxygen and he began to revive. Then once in the emergency room (about the fifth time for him in the last four months) it all began to unfold. He knew he would die.
Once they knew he'd been given morphine they gave him a quick antidote and determined he was OK.
He refused my request that he try to sleep because he said if he did he wouldn't come back. He deliberately had two bites of some food and stated (we could see in the aftermath) that that was that, he was now finished with food. (His last bite of food was a piece of cantelope.) Then he went into a personality I'd never seen. A rather unpleasant one I must say. Like a mafia don interrogating family and demanding answers. Ending his sentences unusually with "That's all I'm asking", like 140 times. Or, "That's all I wanna know." One of the two, I can't remember. I felt impatience with him.
The doctor said he was well enough to be transferred back to his nursing care home, so I left to sleep some. When I awoke I, without calling anyone, went to his nursing care home to see him, but he wasn't there. I called my brother and found out he'd not been transferred yet. Something was happening, too, at that moment. He said call back in ten minutes. Ten minutes later I was told my father was "passing."
I jumped in my car and got to the hospital. Several family members were around him crying. I said I'd go get his wife, my mother. I left. When I came back my father revived at the voice of my mother and proceeded to hold court for several hours.
Like an Old Testament patriarch he gave words of wisdom, blessings, and prophecy for each of his children in order. Unselfconsciously (not knowing about such scenes in classical and biblical literature) just falling into it naturally. Very much out of character as well.
In the discourse I swear on God's Word he began to speak to all there the language of recurrence as it's found in Ouspensky's books. "Each one here has to look back on their lives and see where they could make a change. Some things you can change, some you can't. Some things are fateful."
"Did you say 'fateful'?," I inquired.
"Yes."
Then he mentioned 'accident.' "Fortunately none of you has suffered anything that didn't have to happen to you. No accidents."
He also stressed that it was good that nobody had harmed anybody.
He could see his life from a perspective of seeing where changes could have been made.
[I'm getting tedious here...]
Suffice to say just to look at my father these last several months was enough to break your heart. He broke your heart just looking at him. He tried so hard to get his strength back in physical therapy, but he couldn't. His heart was too weak to let him. And he couldn't breathe because of the fluid in his lungs. But he tried. In goofy machines, with several therapists and assistants helping and encouraging him.
I berated him when he developed pneumonia for the second time by being supine in bed too long and refusing to sit up in a chair. I berated him when he didn't show enough effort in his physical therapy. I missed much of his sweet and unusual presence.
I do cherish though now when, after physical therapy, I would take him for walks (push him in his wheelchair) outside to get some sun and fresh air. We could only go within a radius of the nursing care home, so I found myself pushing my father through generic parking lots, passing the backs of restaurants, going through pleasantly landscaped office building complexes, going to a local strip mall that had a drugstore. Just walking up and down the streets the care center was on.
Sometimes I would push him with my hands on his now frail shoulders.
Now I think, me and my dad, walking behind rows of restaurants. What are we doing here? Though I secretly loved it.
I would find quiet spots and have him call family from a cell phone. These were the only things to do.
Then I wheel him back to his room, transfer him to bed, and he would go to sleep until dinner. I'd leave. Then I'd come back about six and stay no later than eight. He'd be alone from eight until noon the next day. Looking back, after he's gone, I wonder how I could have ever left his side. Left him alone there.
You kick yourself. The context is changed when you know the outcome (that he'd be gone at a certain near date), but you still are hard on yourself.
I found out sometimes he'd have bad nights. Now I knew why he was always saying, "I can't get in touch with you!" The phone situation for him was complicated. He was stuck in a bed with little reach for even turning on a light. He couldn't figure out a cell phone at that point anyway. But in those long nights he was calling out for me. I had no idea. Looking back, knowing the ending, I am hard on myself.
When I'd arrive the next day the nurses would say: "Your father's been calling for you!"
My father had a sweet face. Handsome. All the nurses fell in love with him. An Air Force pilot, but now like an innocent child. My mother was the only woman he'd known. He was alone in life at a young age. Made his way. A very innocent man.
I had no idea he ever even thought about such things as recurrence, let alone knew the language. It may have been strange inspiration. He discoursed on all his children, but was mostly silent about me. The "wheel" he spoke of, I thought, was now no longer something I was a part of. Keep in mind this was a dying man speaking. Speaking robustly. In an agitated, "I must say this", mode. Language that had to be interpreted. Everybody cringing waiting for their turn. Brutally honest.
Nobody thought he would die several hours later though. I felt moved to come back to him at 1:20 a.m. He was talking just as rapidly and loudly but now only to himself. He was literally speaking of taking off for a flight. My brother was in a chair trying to sleep, next to him. I sat down and tried to talk to my dad. He was in his own world. He directed words to me, but I couldn't follow them or make them out. At one point I stood up directly over him, looking at him, and said: "I love you, Dad." He said, in a normal voice: "I love you, honey." I said: "You're the best dad in the world." And he went back to his talk about his flight he was about to take.
I left, thinking my presence is making him not fall asleep (see what the context makes you do?) I just left him, as he talked strangely and robustly to himself and to another imaginary person as I left the room. One hour and fifty minutes later his heart stopped racing, and his breathing stopped, and he died.
I had been trying to sleep back at home, but couldn't and had gotten up, and my sister came down the hall and told me our brother had called and said he was dying now. She left immediately, I had to dress and was three minutes behind her. I wasn't there for his final breath, but my brother said he'd been not very conscious once his heart had started to go down.
I was hard on my self for leaving him earlier. Leaving him to talk to himself. The context rules. I didn't know he was on the verge of death. I thought he needed to rest his mind and sleep. I didn't want to be a catalyst for him to keep talking.
When I saw him, I fell on his chest and kissed him and the tears flowed. My sweetheart father, my companion, my handsome dad who I had just begun to truly just look at and touch and help, was gone.
* * *
Today, I awoke at about one in the afternoon and took a drive. I went to the nursing care center. I parked and walked all the paths I would take pushing my father in his wheel chair, feeling him with me, and crying. I then went to the hospital, where his body still was, and just stood in the parking lot, crying, saying: "Dad, I know your body is still here, and I'm here. I miss you, dad."
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