2007-01-28 - 4:21 p.m.
Dad died Wednesday, January 24, 2007, a little before 10:00 P.M. I got a call from Carol, Dave�s (my brother�s) wife, letting me know as soon as it happened. Dave had called her, told her, and then asked her to call everybody else. He still had to call hospice and then wait around while the coroner or the Neptune Society or whoever else had to come and do their things. Carol also called hospice and asked them to make sure that Dave stayed in the bedroom he was using while they did all their stuff--she did not want the sight of their ministrations and then Dad being carried out in a body bag to be indelibly blazened on Dave�s brain. I don�t think hospice had to work very hard to keep Dave away...that was pretty much what he wanted to do, anyway.
I think Carol was afraid to make these phone calls to us, but she did what had to be done and we all took the news in various ways. She said to me, �Well, what we all have been dreading has now happened.� Actually, I wasn�t dreading it any more; I had already made peace with the fact that Dad was going to die, and it had gotten to the point of �the sooner, the better�. One thing that Dad really fought was that descent into incapacity, and I don�t particularly think that �incapacity� was a lesson he needed to learn. He wanted out, he just didn�t want to hurt too much while it was happening. Fortunately, I think he pretty much got what he wanted in that regard, and for that, I am extremely thankful.
It�s kind of funny when I think about it...while Mom died in her sleep, Dad died before going to sleep! For the past several weeks, Dave had been giving Dad a small oral dose of morphine to help him sleep. Because of all the intense swelling that Dad suffered from the waist down (about which we never got an explanation--were his kidneys shutting down, or what?), he felt enough pain in his legs when he lay down in bed that he was reluctant to lie down (something about that stretched-out position coupled with an electrolytic imbalance lead to severe cramping). This was why he was constantly falling asleep in a sitting-up position with his legs bent and down, such as in his chair in the breakfast nook, or while taking a rest on the seat of his walker. One would think that at least going to bed would provide some comfort for a dying man, but due to the pain of the swelling, he was denied that until the lead hospice nurse told Dave to administer the small doses of morphine every night. Then Dad could get some bedrest.
So it was now around bedtime and Dad had gotten into bed. Dave told him was going to get him the medicine, which he had in another room, but when he came right back with the morphine, he immediately saw that Dad had died in the very brief interim. After all these months of checking for breathing and desperately waking Dad up whenever he was found slumped over, the actual view of death didn�t require any determination at all...it was clearly obvious. And not really a pretty sight, according to Dave. �You have never seen a dead body,� he told me. �What you see in the funeral home,� (such as when we had the viewing of Mom�s body) �is a body that is made up and the insides of the face are stuffed and propped up into a semblance of a living expression. This, instead, was a horror movie. There was no blood in Dad�s face at all, he was totally white, and his face was left in a frightening, non-Dad expression. Now I can really understand how very terrible it was for him to wake up and find Mom dead the way he did.� Yes, indeed. Dave also said, �I will be forever thankful for these three weeks� (in which he had temporarily moved into the house so he could take care of Dad), �but I could have done without that last sight. I am glad you all didn�t have to see it.�
Now that Dad is dead, these past months (one day short of exactly ten months after Mom died) don�t seem so painful (for us) after all. They were a very precious ten months and I surprisingly find myself thinking fondly of the memory of him shuffling down the hall with his walker wearing his ratty blue bathroom and deerskin slippers. That shuffling down the hall was a sign of him still in there kicking and in retrospect, it seems that he lived that long exclusively for us, as if he understood that losing him when we lost Mom would be just too much to bear. And that does seem so much like him, too--to �sacrifice� ten months of his life just so that things would be easier on us--in this case, �sacrifice� means holding off on his flight to a fully-deserved better world.
I took Carol�s news with a prayer of gratefulness that Dad was now finally free. People at work expect me to express a great deal more intense grief than I have expressed, but the way I explain it is that if grief were a reservoir of water, Mom�s sudden death came like a tidal wave, whereas Dad�s slow, drawn-out decline was like a slow leak, and now that he is gone, it�s an evaporation. I suspect I will feel this mist in my eyes for a long, long time. And, as I have also said, this loss is a double-wammy, because now we not only have to add the grief of the loss of Dad to the earlier grief of the loss of Mom, but also the grief of the loss of �Mom and Dad,� a third entity that is the combination of the two of them, now gone from our lives.
I went to work the next day, but at the end of the working day when I turned off my computer, I suddenly had the feeling that I couldn�t stand �going home alone to an empty apartment.� But then I wondered about that, I�ve been alone in this apartment for decades, so what am I talking about? I told my friend Patty the next day, and she explained, �No matter how old you are, once both parents are gone, you are now an orphan.� I heard that same �orphan� concept two more times in the past couple of days--my sister Ginger was getting her laptop repaired and the technician said �You need to put in a new password.� She had to think of one in a hurry, and found herself typing in the word �orphan�. And then my friend Jim in a long phone conversation we had yesterday said, �Now you are like me, an orphan.� One thing that is now bonding together members of the baby boomer generation is sharing the deaths of our parents. And then Jim said, �Now we�re next.�
Yeah, but not so fast...although in a phone conversation I had with my sister Ree in thinking of who all might be �waiting at the station on the other side to welcome Dad,� there were so many names that we could mention, so many who had died--Ma and Pa and Nana and Da (paternal and maternal grandparents), Aunt Mary, Uncle Ham, Aunt Barbara, and tons and tons of Mom and Dad�s friends--and then I said, �oh, and cousin Meredith,� and suddenly we saw that death had even sent tendrils down into our generation, too.
But still, not so fast. One combination �depressing/motivating� thought I had the other day was this. I discovered to my surprise that I have amazingly good credit, a FICO score that puts me in the highest category, which means that I could get the lowest interest rate that is offered at any given time, and also could snap up a loan quite easily, as in my category, only 2% of the loans ever cause any trouble. So that made me want to do some calculations to �see what kind of a house I could buy� (ahem, nothing in L.A. not even a condo) and the figures I used were based on the typical 30-year loan.
Wait a minute...30-year-loan? I will be 59 on February 6, and if right now I actually GOT one of those loans, by the time I paid it off, I would be 89 years old, essentially my dying father�s age (90). Which means that it would take the whole rest of my life to pay it off, which could mean that it is now too late, I had wasted too much time. You mean that I will never, ever buy a house? I will have been a renter my whole life? Super depressing.
(Although yesterday my friend Jim said, �You could get a 15-year loan, the payments aren�t all that much greater.� Ah, good, Jim thank you, I�ll look into that!)
But the motivating part was that I began to determine that if I had 30 years left to my life, how much time IS that in real-time? I mean, what if I subtract back 30 years to �see where I was and what I was doing� thirty years ago? 2007 minus 30 equals 1977. Gee, well, that was only seven years after I graduated from college and had had a couple of false starts in getting my adult life going (actually, I think my entire adult life has been nothing but a series of false starts) and when I scan through all the stuff I have done in 30 years, I realize that that is HUGE! Suddenly, 30 years seemed like an immensely long time in which to do so much (after all, so far, this has been the entire full long length of my adult life), so what am I (and everybody else) belly-aching about? But let�s make this final 30 years really count, okay?
I guess this is the perfect time to embark on the final third of my life, because during these past months with Dad, I have felt so much like Prince Siddhartha. Isolated and protected in the palace and sheltered from the fundamental miseries of life. My mother used to say, �You weren�t born with a silver spoon in your mouth, it was gold.� And she was right. The �gold� wasn�t �money� so much, but something that came out of Mom and Dad like silk out of a silkworm. I simply cannot express enough how privileged we children were in the things that really matter.
Like any dynamic and curious young man, Siddhartha finally had to break out of the beautiful palace and explore the surrounding city. Three things he saw shocked him to the very core--a leper, an old person, and a dead body. He had never known that there were such things as sickness, aging, and death. The existence of those things caused such a question about life and its meaning that he no longer could tolerate life back in the palace, so he left his princely heritage and went on a search for enlightenment to explain it all (this is probably metaphorical of choosing to leave the spiritual dimension and incarnate into a physical life). Which he found, and thus became the Buddha (�the awakened one�).
Okay, I think I understand sickness. This is a world of predators, after all, whether those predators be wild animals, human animals, toxins, or microscopic bacterial, fungal, and viral predators. Maybe in some other universe beings may live fruitful, healthy lives without having to eat some other living thing, no sucking blood or rooting around in internal organs or butchering meat. Maybe that�s how it really is in the majority of God�s vast creation, that we, for some reason, were sentenced to some punitive prison planet where the rule among the inmates is rapine, treachery, and �eat or be eaten�.
I also think I understand death, if only in the simplified concept that there is no other way to finally get rid of all the debillitating �baggage� that collects on one throughout a lifetime like so many leeches, barnacles, soot, or emotional epiphytes. A fresh, clean start, a pressing of the reset button, a throwing out of the corrupted hard drive and a loading of a newer one with upgraded software would, after a while, be such a blessing. �One more crash and it�s the last straw for THIS life!� (Like for me right this minute, it is finally �Bye bye Windows 98, hello XP!�)
But I�ve never really clearly witnessed aging like I did watching my father, where it seemed so unfair and meaningless. I mean, why, why, why? Maybe, just maybe, I need to head toward my own Buddha-hood. At any rate, with 30 years left of my life, I think the time has come to leave the palace and find my own meaningful road--fulfill the dream that brought me here in the first place.
As a being, I am proud to be part of Mom and Dad, a portion of their flesh still manifest on the Earth. I think in my previous 30 years, I probably did a pretty good job of carrying forth the torch that was lit by my mother--the emotional loving people skills. But maybe now in the next 30 years, I need to work more on the torch lit by my father--the industrial mechanical nuclear structural skills --we have for sure incarnated in a PHYSICAL dimension and maybe �measuring the Earth� is an important requirement. I think so highly of Dad who so thoroughly understood things like stress, span, tension, bracing, combustion, fission, power, motion, velocity, pressure, momentum, and vaccuum...and many more. Think back to some significant historical heroes--George Washington was a SURVEYOR, Thomas Jefferson was an ARCHITECT (and both were FARMERS), Jesus (as Dad was always so fond of saying) was a CARPENTER. Let�s not forget that Benjamin Franklin was an INVENTOR. Even the concept of Adam and Eve, their job was to TEND THE GARDEN. Who was it who said, �Castles in the air are fine, now just build a foundation underneath them�? I know I�ve been far better in imagining those castles in the air than in building those foundations on the ground. Maybe the time has come to build those foundations on the surface of the earth, before I find myself buried beneath it.
This was meant to be a tribute to Dad, and instead became about me. But maybe it is that the accomplishments of my life will be the only fitting tribute I can give to him. And that lies ahead of me. Meanwhile, though, I can only say that in the final analysis of thinking, beyond happiness and success for their children, what a parent could possibly want from their children, the only thing I could think of was �to know that their children loved them.� I think if your parents for sure knew that you loved them, then they could die easy and satisfied and you, yourself, can freely function in the remaining years of your life without them.
Despite her sudden death, Mom, for sure, knew up to that moment that her kids loved her. If Dad hadn�t known that he was loved before, he sure learned it in the past ten months. I know that all of us treasure all our intimate interactions with Dad--Dave, particularly, for the past three-weeks of caregiving, Ginger for her ten months of twice-weekly visits and cooking dinner for Dad, me with my monthly three-day-weekend visits, and Ree, who although couldn�t as easily come to see him from Idaho, nevertheless came for his 90th birthday and also called him regularly. And we all sure got the chance to say all the things we ever wanted to say to him! Nothing, and I mean nothing of gratitude and full-loving-appreciation was left out. If all this love added feathers to Dad�s already ample wings, he made it across the aerial threshhold like an angel.
Here on earth, we (and many, many others) will carry him in our hearts forever.
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