On this day three years ago, I sat in a corner of my father’s hospital room by the window, doing all I could to greatly reduce my own human footprint within his dying space.

I carried an awareness on that autumn day, which would prove to be his last, that this act of emptying the container was, in and of itself, an act of creation in mimicry to his own self-emptying, as his body, his organs, and his earthly spirit were in an active state of dying. I was treading softly by limiting sound, smells, touch, and all sensory stimulation – essentially limiting my presence in the room and becoming a kind of hollow reed as a space-holder for his dying.

The trees outside his window were doing a marvelous job of showing us how it’s all done. They were busy carpeting the ground with an array of colors to rival any master carpet weaver.

Christian mystics name this spiritual process kenosis and the Kabbalists refer to this in cosmological terms as Tzimtzum; clearing out, disappearing, and creating a kind of vacuum as a way to make space for the new, which in his case, was his birthing into death and whatever lies beyond that.

I can’t lie and say I was feeling peaceful. There was nothing peaceful about how I was feeling during that season of Dad’s dying. There was family tension and lots of it, and there was my own inner angst and trauma that I courageously worked hard at de-centering so I could be a Rumian “ladder, lifeboat, lantern” and soulsmith to him in those last weeks.

A couple of weeks prior, when he was still coherent, I shared blessings and conscious dying meditations with him to help guide and ease his soul along its journey. Dad was not literary, to say the least, so I’m sure he must have thought this was some kind of fresh hell/purgatory state to have soulful poetry read to him in these last days and weeks. Yet he was moved to tears the day I held a small mirror to his face so he could glimpse his own self-reflection for the last time, as I softly recited Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment” poem to him, in which Carver asks,

 

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved,
to feel myself
beloved on this earth.”

 

Making peace with our own sense of belovedness is not easy work, even for the most cherished among us but I imagine, in retrospect, that Dad may have been chewing on that deathbed question a longer while than some do.

He had big messy spiritual work to do. This I knew and so did he. When others insisted that he must be waiting to see my brother Tim or this, that or the other person as a way to explain his long dying process, I ever-so-slightly shook my head. I sensed he was doing all he could to walk home undetected and without fanfare, but in that final gauntlet section called Life Review, I suspect he may’ve had a few remedial learning stops to make. Just as there’s labor in the hours prior to birth, so too is there labor in our dying time.

By that last day, I intuited that his breath count was down to its last will and testament. I remember tandem-breathing and cohering my heart with his own for a time earlier that day, and wondering if my out-breath might be extra fuel to help him get where he was going, even as I knew that nitrogen was not the wind needed to power the sails on his soul’s journey.

Dad was preparing to meet his maker; something he, like most of us, had spent his entire life avoiding.

Mom went home mid-afternoon and I wistfully recall the sacred quietude of that last evening, the amazing care of the night nurse, and how I finally saw fit to stretch out on the recliner chair in the small space next to his bed and catch some uneasy sleep as I lightly held his hand that last night.

He died in the wee small hours before dawn. I awoke with a sense that something was different. His hand was not yet cold in mine but neither was it warm. I could no longer hear the sound of his oxygen tank doing all the heavy lifting for him. Sometime between when the nurse had come in 45 minutes prior and this o’dark 4:30 am-ish moment, he had left the room. With all his station stops accounted for, he was finally able to tiptoe away. And I had walked him home as far as I could go to that threshold door. I was the lone human hand on this end that morning, but alas, there were many who awaited his arrival on the other side of that thinly-veiled doorway. I’ve come to think of that team of Ancestors, Allies & Angels (AAA) as our roadside assistance crew.

Dad was a lapsed Irish Catholic – he chose not to have last rites (even as he got an extra dose of John O’Donohue Celtic blessings from me and his last request of a sip of whiskey in the days prior to his death – arguably, two very auspicious last rites), but I bore witness to his lucid dreams, his mumblings, and his Lazarus-like arm reaching to the someone or someones just beyond me. That unseen AAA team perhaps? If I was his death doula, then they were assuredly his birthing coaches during those final weeks and days co-equally laboring with him and beckoning him to make the transition.

And so today, three years later, I am aware of breath and the miraculous machinations of the body, and how each organ, limb, and system work together as if to form a chamber benefit concert – a series of orchestral maneuvers if ever there were such things.

And, as always, I am in awe of the trees who are the adjunct instructors each fall here to teach us what it means to die; thereby, how we might then truly dare to live. As in, this very day, today. Blessed be.

Coming to Terms } by Jeanne Lohmann
Nothing can predict how we end,
not reference books or laboratories,
brain charts, years of analysis.
We have to do this alone and without
a game plan. If we think we have one,
it’s of no use when push comes to shove,
and we find ourselves at death’s
very real and actual door. Those who
expect to be brave turn craven,
the fearful show surprising strength,
and the wise scholar,
giving up on books at last,
reaches for a human hand to hold.*
_{*In tribute to Martin Buber.}