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.