Sometimes I wonder what my Dad thought and felt as he lay dying. Before he was on morphine and before the pain necessitated it, what did he think about, sick in that bed?
What did he think about before he lay on the bed, when he was on the drive home from the doctor's, where the news had been pronounced? When he had to tell us that there were three measly months left to his life? How did my Mom watch her husband die?
How did I watch my father die??
What questions should I have asked him, if I had been able to? What did he want me to know? What life lessons had he hoped to pass on?
I think he'd be pleased with who I've become. I've grown steadily over the years, overcome challenges and climbed so many Everests. Am I as wise as he became in his 43 years? Am I wiser in some ways? I'm sure there are different lessons I've come to that he didn't, or hadn't, by the time he was 26, which is how old I turn tomorrow. It's a different world, I'm a different person. What have I learned that is the same? What does he still hope for me to discover?
Sometimes I feel close to him, and sometimes I feel his strength strengthening me. I sense his compassion for my trials and his warm hand as it would rest on my shoulder, if it could.
Sometimes I look at the mountains out my window, capped in snow, draped in sunlight, and wonder that I had as long as I did with him. That I'm alive and he's not, and my eyes are drinking in the beauty while his are made of something more ethereal now. And I think about what it must be like to have a Dad to talk to about silly things and serious things, to disagree with and value, and just to know.
It's been fifteen years, and a third, since his death. Where has the time fled to? When did I get used to Dadlessness? How did peace enter to fill in the ache? And how is it that I still miss someone I knew so little?
How does my heart still love him, across all these years?
I know you are just writing and I can't say that I know what he was thinking, whether he was scared, or whether he might have been afraid for us to have a future without him, or anything else, except that he did talk to me a few times about viewing dying and death as an experience. He was a little bit obsessed with gaining knowledge not just by study, but knowledge by experience. Not only did he talk to me about this -the experience of gaining knowledge about the experience of death by dying- more than once in my life (even when I was only 10 yrs old) but he also wrote journal entries and poetry about it. When I was 17 he talked to me more than once about the Terrible Questions: Who are we, Where did we come from, What is the human condition, What is it to die? He also talked to me about a book he read where a man described feeling jealous at the death bed of his brother, not because he wished death, but because he was gaining the true knowledge of it by experience. There were enough of these conversations so that when he did die I was sufficiently satisfied that his -what I realize now to be somewhat of an obsession to know what it is to die- was satisfied, and he never seemed to be preoccupied by concerns while he was still cognizant. On the last night that he could speak he told us that he had no regrets about his life. I hope that is helpful to you to know.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing that with me, Candice. I am glad that you not only had the knowledge, but that you are around to share it. Sometimes I forget that there are others I can ask about him. And the fact that he would look at death as an opportunity to gain knowledge by experience seems to be something very in keeping with his character, as far as I knew/know it. I didn't know he had said that he had no regrets about his life. It is comforting and peace-infusing to know that when he was getting down to his final messages, that was one he could share. I want to be able to say that, too.
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